xhxhxhx said: I’m delighted to see you subtweeting Stalinists
I’m going to start posting videos of happy Americans dancing, solid evidence that they are content with their government and have not been brainwashed by the finance capital that oppresses them.
Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.
Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.
Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.
Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.
There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.
There’s a few points I could make, but one of the great things about giving people time off is that it doesn’t affect the value of time off, and it’s not something that can just cause a decrease in employer contribution leaving people no better off. Giving money, that’s not as straightforward.
Considering it hasn’t seemed to perform well in other countries, I’d rather make simpler overtime rules, then crack down hard on those that don’t follow them.
Anyhow, as part of how I’d sell this, I’d set the starting wage with subsidies higher than the current minimum wage, and since it would make labor relatively cheaper, there’s not much reason to expect a decrease in hours at the low end.
In addition to the risks involved with yanking 20% of the work hours out of the economy, killing Monday also incentivizes workers to work under the table in violation of the employment law in order to get enough money, since the employers can actually cut their salaries to compensate, either directly or through attrition.
With state-backed wage subsidies, there’s no incentive to work under the table, because if the income isn’t reported, you don’t get the subsidy. Though, it is key for this plan that subsidies taper off more slowly than employer wages increase, but that’s how it should be to prevent a new Welfare Trap.
Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.
Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.
Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.
Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.
There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.
But, if we leave race out of it… the fact that nearly all land has been taken by violence undermines the idea of “well this was violently transferred” in principle, I don’t think it makes the case that the Japanese government cannot opt to restrict immigration, since all land ownership is effectively created by force of arms anyway. Even by the basis of “well some specific Japanese might object,” there is almost never going to be complete unity of opinion in government, so their objection does not necessarily invalidate the entire project, especially if emigration is permitted and there are states to emigrate to.
In fact, there is a thriving market in governance already, with hundreds of options to choose from. As criticisms of “but the market doesn’t have what I want” can be shut down as the market not being obligated to supply it, so too, here.
There is an idea, in some circles, that parents effectively own their children. This risks leading to various abuses, and also doesn’t line up with all moral intuitions. On the other hand, most children do not have the capabilities, including executive function, to adequately evaluate and act on long-term preferences that will become important when they become adults.
I propose a rather simple-but-vague model that has no doubt been proposed before. The child is effectively held in a trust owned by their future self. The duty of the parents, therefore, is to safely deliver a well-developed adult to be inherited at the point of hand-off. They are the trust’s operators, not the trust’s owners, and thus they have a variety of duties, abilities, and limitations.
A parent can have vaccines administered. They can’t remove a significant portion of the child’s body, or demand a tattoo of their choice. They can enact ordinary disciplinary measures, but not abusive ones. They can require that the child attend school and do well at it, but they are not allowed to engage in pure ideological indoctrination. And, if they fail to meet the terms, they can be removed from administration of the metaphorical trust.
The exact details might vary. In many ways this is what people are acting on already - thus why Child Protective Services exists in the first place - but it isn’t explicitly specified. I outline it here mostly so that it can be brought up as a counter-model when people suggest either ownership of children, or treating children as atomistic adults with fully-formed executive functioning and experience.
btw what is the Official Counterpoint to Japan not taking immigrants?
is it that their circumstances are different, or that they’re just super racist and not an example to emulate?
Japan is super racist.
I honestly did not think this point was up to any debate at all.
I deal with this problem by not trying to move to Japan, they can be as racist on their own island as they want.
Yeah, but that hits a wall under the modern moral climate, where it’s implicitly argued that foreigners have a right to immigrate to, essentially, anywhere, but particularly to developed nations. The idea of “the Japanese on their own island” has the audacity to suggest collective ownership of a nation-state for the benefit of an exclusive group - the old Nationalist model.
A model that I actually approve of, minus the racism, but one that now would mark me as right-wing, even though I don’t consider myself right-wing.
Yes, this is my view.
The Japanese don’t have the “right” to “be racist on their own island”, if that means excluding immigrants. All this amounts to is placing the whims of the collective (the alleged ownership of the islands by the Japanese race as a whole) over the rights of the individual: i.e. the right of individual Japanese to invite immigrants to work for them and to sell or rent property to them.
Suppose a group of Japanese racists get together and start a corporation. That corporation buys a small island, and and allows its owners to live on the island, so long as they are Japanese. Land is portioned out based on stake in the corporation.
This is not a covenant, because owners of the corporation can sell to whoever they want. Similarly, the corporation could, by majority vote, sell the island, or allow non-Japanese owners to live there. There is no condition that restricts the use of the land in perpetuity ( @theunitofcaring raised this objection the last time this came up).
However, so long as a majority of the owners of the corporation don’t want non-Japanese living on the island, they can’t. And practically, the rule won’t change unless the owners become less racist over time and generations, or wealthy anti-racist activists buy them out, fairly compensating the racists for being prevented from satisfying their preference. Or somewhat fairly, anyway; I’m not quite sure how only needing a majority stake affect the cost of buying them out. That’s a question for someone in murders and executions.
Do the Japanese racists have the right to do that? If not, why not? And what is the minimum change to the scheme that would make it within their rights, in your opinion?
Conversely, if your do think that would be within their rights, I suppose your objection to the current restriction on immigration to Japan is that it’s not the Japanese’s island?
That would be fine, if they acquired the land voluntarily.
What’s not fine with the Japanese government doing that is that it didn’t acquire the land that way.
And a big difference is that if they are restricted to acquiring the land voluntarily, that would greatly limit the amount of it that they could practically obtain. But supposing hypothetically that this weren’t true and that freedom of contract led to one private “government” owning all the land, then that would be a strong point of having a “public” government to limit their ability to do that.
By that logic nearly all land on Earth in private hands could not be considered “voluntarily acquired”.
Surely the benefit to high-skilled wages and loss to low-skilled wages is an artifact of the legal regime under which high-skilled workers are the only ones allowed to come in most cases?
… emigration, which entails the loss
of talent and brains in much larger proportion than the loss of unskilled workers, is the
real threat for unskilled workers left behind, even in some OECD countries. Less educated
workers in Cyprus, Malta, Ireland, New Zealand, and Portugal all lost between 1 and 6%
of their wages because of the flight of highly educated emigrants. While net emigration,
especially of college educated individuals, may be a symptom of economic malaise and not
its cause, it certainly directly contributes to lower productivity and wages of the remaining
workers.
As I understand it, Ireland and Portugal had freedom of movement within the EU, and most of their emigrants went to the EU, so the effect shouldn’t be an artifact of a legally-discriminatory regime.
And the same effect appeared in simulations across 2000 and 2007, across a host of EU countries, including Luxembourg, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and the Netherlands, in addition to the countries of the eastern and southern European periphery.
I think the hypothesized mechanism here is plausible: high-skilled workers have positive externalities, which helps raise the wages of complementary low-skilled workers. If you drain a country of its high-skilled workers, it should hurt the wages of native low-skilled workers.
And because high-skilled workers are inherently more mobile and employable than low-skilled workers, they have a higher propensity to emigrate even when the target country’s legal regime is non-discriminatory.
This table is pre-accession for nearly every country but Ireland, but the table shows the same disparity for Greece, Portugal, and Spain – Greece had a 0.3% emigration rate during the 1990s, but a 4.6% emigration rate for college graduates – and I suspect it would show the same disparity in post-communist Europe post-EU accession.
Interesting.
But there are other legal barriers to the employment of low-skilled workers which would discourage them from moving, even within the EU; e.g. the minimum wage.
Also money, it costs money to move, to temporarily live in new places while finding a job, to find new insurance, to survive while learning new rules or a new language…
There is an awful lot of friction that isn’t just government interference. And of course, there are ways to reconcile lowering the minimum wage with employment of low-skill workers, but not with perfect freedom of movement.
no offense but “family is the people you choose to surround yourself with and love you dearly” will literally ALWAYS be a better theme and a better concept than “love the family you were arbitrarily stuck with because they’re related to you”
because there are some obvious inequalities and injustices in how the traditional family is structured, it’s prone to some well-known abuses, AND even without those, the former model is a lot more appealing in a lot of ways, for the obvious reason that elective affinities are usually going to be a lot more rewarding than accidental, arbitarry ones
BUT
i think a huge amount of the appeal of the latter, and something that would be dangerous to lose, is that it’s a guarantee of warm relations, or at least warm relations of a certain type, that can’t exist in a frame where everything is entirely voluntary.
the idea that EVERYBODY, at least in principle, gets a few people who will be socially pressured to be loyal to them (whether or not they like each other, etc) is an emotional safety net. and, just as there are people who are especially vulnerable to abuses of the family-as-involuntary-loyalty model, there are people who would be especially vulnerable to a world that was more atomistic in terms of emotional and social relations (even assuming there was a decent welfare state, which of course in most historical circumstances there haven’t been.)
as history keeps on going (assuming we don’t kill ourselves) hopefully we’ll develop institutions that balance all these concerns, but i think it’s worth considering what the appeals of all the various models are
Reading various politicians talk about consumer power in healthcare makes me really want to take all of them and make them shadow and then try to do the work of some medical social workers. Like I just feel all these plans really underestimate how little executive function sick people and their families have at the time they need to get health care.
Just for the record, regarding immigration issues: I feel that the current rate of roughly 1,000,000 immigrants per year is roughly acceptable for the United States. (My statements elsewhere might have implied that I thought this was too high.) I’m not particularly worried about most of the categories of immigrants currently arriving in the US. I could be convinced for a higher number under certain conditions I won’t elaborate on now, partially because I don’t think they can credibly be offered due to political conditions in the United States, including ideological pre-commitments.
I predict at 80% that Trump will not lower the yearly immigration level below 800,000 by the year 2020.
I cannot accurately forecast the numbers on refugees. The Trump administration originally planned to be more selective about refugee groups (particularly persecuted religious groups that are religious minorities in their country of origin), so we may see them make a grab for Christian refugees from ISIS, supposing some sort of support infrastructure (such as American churches) were set up to take them. Alternatively, they may not, and the number of refugee admissions may crash. I predict at 60% that average annual refugee admissions from 2017-2020 will be lower than under the Obama administration.
I predict at 80% that there will not be a new American Middle Eastern war by 2020, so long as Trump remains President and there is no major attack on US soil, defined as an ideologically-motivated terrorist attack with a death count exceeding 100. (For the purposes of this prediction, American forces returning to Iraq and Afghanistan does not count as a new war.)
I predict at 80% that at least one more Sikh is going to get killed by some moron in America for ideological reasons before 2020.
I predict at 70% that one person will die from either Antifa violence, or violence by Antifa rivals by 2020, and this will make the national news. I predict at 90% that this will not be intentional.
@xhxhxhx You are known for your longposts. Do you have any evidence that emigration from countries addresses the conditions that caused people to emigrate in the first place, particularly near to our modern era? For instance, does it appear to lower fertility or improve institutions (possibly measurable by corruption perceptions or ease of doing business, maybe GDP/cap)?
If there’s good evidence for it, that would favor increased immigration, but if there’s good evidence against it… well, that’s pretty damn tough, as it would probably favor some kind of weird semi-colonialism, but I have some thoughts about ecological tariffs paid to developing countries that could be more developed…
admittedly even if Japan took a ton of immigrants there would still be plenty left over, so it’s kind of just being used as a debate trump card, like right of return for Palestinians to Israel.
At this point I’m inclined to agree with proposals to just split the Palestinian territory between neighboring countries other than Israel.
For the record, my conception of Nationalism is multiracial, rooted in a group identity based on culture, ideology, and reciprocal loyalty rather than race.
Each nation has a different immigration policy best suited to it. I don’t consider the racism in various nations good, even if I think restrictive immigration policy is suitable for that country.
btw what is the Official Counterpoint to Japan not taking immigrants?
is it that their circumstances are different, or that they’re just super racist and not an example to emulate?
Japan is super racist.
I honestly did not think this point was up to any debate at all.
I deal with this problem by not trying to move to Japan, they can be as racist on their own island as they want.
Yeah, but that hits a wall under the modern moral climate, where it’s implicitly argued that foreigners have a right to immigrate to, essentially, anywhere, but particularly to developed nations. The idea of “the Japanese on their own island” has the audacity to suggest collective ownership of a nation-state for the benefit of an exclusive group - the old Nationalist model.
A model that I actually approve of, minus the racism, but one that now would mark me as right-wing, even though I don’t consider myself right-wing.
btw what is the Official Counterpoint to Japan not taking immigrants?
is it that their circumstances are different, or that they’re just super racist and not an example to emulate?
I’ll have you know that the Japanese are proud People of Color™, and it isn’t the standing of White Imperialists such as yourself to question the wisdom of the Might Japanese Emp–
**coughing**
No, they’re considered racist but either you’re not supposed to talk about it as much because they’re Asian, or it just isn’t considered as important because they aren’t Western. The plan of the Japanese government itself is to just send large amounts of money instead.
However, since the country is so safe that their children can routinely commute to school on their own, I can’t really say that I disapprove (edit: of the nationalism and low immigration, not the racism). Not every place in Asia needs to be Singapore.
I personally believe that doing…that…will itself lead to a counter-reaction, because it’s becoming clear that most rational people are otherwise disgusted by the actions of populists, and perhaps there will emerge a figure capable of realigning interests towards a saner future, all other ideas having been exhausted. That person would know exactly how to play to people’s self-interest or even selfishness while directing it to the goals they want to achieve.
The current situation is itself a reaction to the fact that multiculturalism as practiced and often preached is, well, contradictory. Either culture matters, in which case immigration rates and assimilation are important, or it doesn’t, in which case there is no actual point to “diversity”. The situation held with previous immigrant groups because differing conditions prevailed at the time, but now it’s being stretched to the breaking point. While you might see “the most rational people” being otherwise disgusted, from what I’ve seen, a lot of people are shifting to the Right and the Left has ideologically blocked itself from actually addressing any of the problems because anyone who actually starts talking about it will be shouted down as one of the “deplorables.”
I mean honestly, they’re cheering on demographic destiny and population atrophy. They’re getting the backlash of people realizing that the plan is to replace them, and well, they don’t want to be replaced.
I don’t see that changing soon, unless Neoliberalism implodes and the Left starts taking seriously Islam and some associated cultures to task for all of its problems. They killed Melting Pot for being evil and “racist.” Why would they bring it back?
rocketverliden:
And why the appeal to political power? Your worst enemy will likely gain power after you’re gone. Sometimes the problem with politics doesn’t necessarily seem to be structural inertia, but down to the intelligence of actors within the structure.
The utility of plans must be considered based on their probability of actually being implemented, and the Left intends to use mass immigration to secure a permanent majority. I didn’t used to believe this, but it’s far too consistent with their behavior. We’re already playing with political power.
Also? I don’t see any way of increasing the intelligence of actors in the system in my country. At least not one that would actually go through. The necessary structural reforms are either not sexy enough, or would be overruled because people are apparently legally too stupid to rank candidates in order or something along those lines.
rocketverliden:
If anything, I think this roundaboutism could contribute to the problems it’s trying to avoid. For all we know, school vouchers don’t actually solve the problem of the job market selecting for collegiate prestige over quality of education, nor the problem of college costing exorbitant amounts of money.
That’s not what the school vouchers are for. They’re for the kinds of K-12 systems where performing well in school is criticized as “acting white” by peers.
rocketverliden:
Reducing immigration doesn’t stop rich fat cats sending jobs overseas to places where they can pay less for the same labor,
It tightens the labor market at home, though, and they’re about to cut down on the indentured labor of H-1Bs. An ACTUAL solution to that is not on the table and you know it.
Edit: Oh, and also, they’re actually on the verge of doing something about the trade deficit, which would have an effect on that. The rival Globalists are against doing anything like that, because who needs nations anyway right?
rocketverliden:
or solve the problem of why we keep sending troops to die in pointless wars.
Again, actual solution not on the table. If the Orange Man avoids getting us into another war, however, I will consider it a success that saves us $1 trillion.
Stupid Danes just don’t understand how all that rape helps their economicses. Everyone needs to have lots of economicses. Rape isn’t very quantifiable (because that would be offensive) and therefore doesn’t exist. But economicses exist. There are courses in school about them. Have you raised all your boat sails with my Keynesian theories of human trafficking? If you sell one child per family you can fund AI research. People aren’t real. When do I get my hedonium implants? Why are people so mad about rape when we will all soon get hedonium implants?
How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?
This is a mindset that I’m finding very frustrating, in that I’m having difficulty categorizing it. Is it a reasonable, rational understanding of actual conditions? Is it xenophobic dog whistles, predictable playing on the existing memes of “furiners gonna rape our women”/miscegenation threat?
What are the underlying issues here? Increased pressure from refugees/migrants from the Middle East (not all of whom are Muslim)? The impending population decline? A sudden rise in giving a shit about rape?
WTF is actually going on? Because everyone seems to be going around with blinkers on, cherry picking and building echo chambers and rubbing themselves with factually incorrect memes.
Memes about how everyone is biologically identical and culture is arbitrary reached peak signalling potential and then the same portable media tech that motivates opportunist migrants also made it impossible to cover up the horrifying consequences of importing them (we used to be able to nip those stories in the bud, or obfuscate perp details).
Rotherham also hit the news in 2014, so that didn’t help.
Okay.
Okay.
Look, I get you have this whole…complex about the migrant question in Europe. I get it. You think the truth’s been buried all this time and now people are getting their comeuppance for the folly of trying to be humane to others.
But I also see you like to conflate rationalist/transhumanist language with memes about “liberals,” and at this point, I think it’s clear that you’ve become so jaded that you might as well be a full-fledged member of the alt-right, because only alt-right people do shit like that.
“How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?“ I dunno, but it costs $0.00 to not be an asshole, so there’s that
I’d rather be an asshole than enable a bunch of violent child rape through ironic detachment. Stop defending the priesthood in the 80s. You’re a religious zealot…
I’d also recognize that if I became a wonk about Catholic priests molesting children, I’d probably look like one of those asshole atheists, and to be quite honest, that’s not a look I’d like.
You fall into the trap of believing that stopping one piece of the problem will backsolve and fix everything, when, no, actually, the solution might be to instead to remind migrants that Westerners are strange people with strange customs and to enforce the same laws you’d enforce on a white man (or enforce on the white man the same laws you’d enforce on a non-white non-male).
The political will for your proposed solution does not appear to exist, and multiculturalism seems as though it will actively fight to stop your solution from being implemented. How will you create the political will for this? If it fails, what is your backup plan?
School vouchers have political momentum in the US now because it’s cheaper politically to use them to route around the fact that schools can neither effectively punish problem students, nor exclude them, preventing the other students from getting a good education. It probably isn’t the best solution, but it may actually be politically feasible. It seems some kind of intelligent immigration and law enforcement policy isn’t actually on the table, so using right-wing populists to slow immigration to levels more in line with rates of assimilation and undermine the cultural left, Globalism, and multiculturalism itself seems more feasible.
Remember: capitalism and white male supremacy go hand in hand.
I don’t know why I feel compelled to push back on this statement every time I see it, but I guess maybe because it’s irritatingly wrong?
Presumably capitalism has been in steady decline since the emancipation of women and the civil rights act and the end of apartheid and
Capitalism is nothing but a tool of the Chinese to suppress ethnic Malaysians! It is absolutely inherent that it happens to favor that racial group specifically! There can never be such a thing as Capitalism that doesn’t favor the Chinese!
Stupid Danes just don’t understand how all that rape helps their economicses. Everyone needs to have lots of economicses. Rape isn’t very quantifiable (because that would be offensive) and therefore doesn’t exist. But economicses exist. There are courses in school about them. Have you raised all your boat sails with my Keynesian theories of human trafficking? If you sell one child per family you can fund AI research. People aren’t real. When do I get my hedonium implants? Why are people so mad about rape when we will all soon get hedonium implants?
How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?
This is a mindset that I’m finding very frustrating, in that I’m having difficulty categorizing it. Is it a reasonable, rational understanding of actual conditions? Is it xenophobic dog whistles, predictable playing on the existing memes of “furiners gonna rape our women”/miscegenation threat?
What are the underlying issues here? Increased pressure from refugees/migrants from the Middle East (not all of whom are Muslim)? The impending population decline? A sudden rise in giving a shit about rape?
WTF is actually going on? Because everyone seems to be going around with blinkers on, cherry picking and building echo chambers and rubbing themselves with factually incorrect memes.
Memes about how everyone is biologically identical and culture is arbitrary reached peak signalling potential and then the same portable media tech that motivates opportunist migrants also made it impossible to cover up the horrifying consequences of importing them (we used to be able to nip those stories in the bud, or obfuscate perp details).
Rotherham also hit the news in 2014, so that didn’t help.
Additionally, while conservative types may not want to pay the price of shifting the burden of evidence on rape cases, lowering the number of immigrants from high risk populations for it is a very cheap price to pay for them. After all, they don’t need to bring in huge populations while ignoring cultural differences just to show how fiercely not-racist they are.
And, while Marxists may use the language of ideological contradictions, they aren’t the only ones who can notice them. Setting aside the whole issue of genetics, as I think culture is sufficient and I’m committed to a multiracialist civic nationalism anyway: Liberals/Leftists have been treating culture as not mattering at all (when they import foreigners) yet mattering a lot when they fight to change it locally (eg, quit oppressing the gays)! This is accomplished in part by pretending the host nation’s majority culture isn’t actually a culture (“white ppl don’t have a culture”) including the meta-culture use to assimilate immigrants into American-style Food Court Ethnicity! …and then they attack the engine of assimilation, insisting that it’s unfair to demand people give up parts of their culture. But if culture doesn’t actually matter, as the earlier positions imply, then there is no reason to seek “diversity” in the first place. It’s incoherent.
…but people were socially prohibited from noticing it was incoherent, until the weight of the contradictions was enough under the mass migration in the EU that people couldn’t stand to pretend that all cultures are equal anymore. It’s perhaps a close enough fit for Western Europe, but it sure isn’t one globally. And since noticing it was suppressed before, and they’re still trying to suppress it now, there is a backlash.
the weirdness of people buying tons of vitamins and other health supplements to take back to China is something I still can’t get over; talk about market failure!
both state interference and a lack of state interference (states create markets!)
for example without enforcement of various consumer protection laws, IP laws (trademarks), and product safety regulations, you end up with a market for lemons where premium products cannot easily gain consumer trust, and people would rather fly to another country and raid the supermarkets there.
Plot Summary: After finishing his fight against Mega Ultimate Frieza and achieving the state of Super Saiyan 25, Goku stares out into the ruins of a dying universe and realizes that his final enemy is entropy itself. He travels back to the very origin of Time in order to make one last sacrifice.
2007: Your robotic catgirl girlfriend will satisfy your every whim in her adorable cuteness.
2017: Your robotic genderqueer trap catgirl waifu will harvest information in order to target advertisements deep into your soul, sponsored by Woke Brands such as Target, Starbucks and refreshing Coca-Cola™, as well as providing information to the loyal, pro-diversity, freedom-loving patriots of the Deep State.
Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.
Not sure. I’ve seen people joke about it at least. Maybe because it’s the only way protesters practically interfere with the daily functioning of their lives? At least one ambulance has been blocked, though the use of lethal force to disrupt traffic-blocking protests would almost certainly increase net casualties.
I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.
What’s soft authoritarian? Singapore? Hongkong?
Something along those lines, yes. Caning for vandalism, death penalty for smuggling drugs, dominant party since the nation’s founding with a habit of suing its opponents into submission, that sort of thing.
I can be pretty freakin’ Statist. People get offended over banning chewing gum. Me? When I looked up the reason why they did it, I might well ban it too. And that’s just a ‘silly’ example. There are some much more extreme policies I might go along with if I trusted the government enough.
…which I don’t, especially not the American government, which is rife with incentivization problems, lobbying, and shear incompetence at every level. For example, Illinois had to amend their state constitution to get their politicians to actually spend the state transportation funds on transportation.
Singapore has the kind of government that freaks out when they go from 70% of the vote to 60% of the vote, which in any other country would be considered a landslide victory, then managed to get back up to 70% of the vote.
America has the kind of government that needs the occasional large-scale protest because the guys in charge are either dishonest, stupid, or both.
And quite frankly, there is no path to the formation of an American Action Party which then obsoletes one or both of the existing parties and rules America with a studious technocratic fist.
Edit: China, of course, also an authoritarian country in Asia, but they flat-out don’t deserve it.
Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.
Not sure. I’ve seen people joke about it at least. Maybe because it’s the only way protesters practically interfere with the daily functioning of their lives? At least one ambulance has been blocked, though the use of lethal force to disrupt traffic-blocking protests would almost certainly increase net casualties.
I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.
“it does seem uncharacteristic that the Americans specifically chose to forgo unnecessary power in exchange for a lower risk of accidental death.”—@discoursedrome, on 110V (via argumate)
There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or
that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all
otherwise-declawed religions, though.
Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history
What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?
Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.
How do you prevent reversion to non-secular society when you constantly import (and don’t police) extremely conservative people that have been cousin-marrying since classical antiquity? Do you know about clannishness vs. W.E.I.R.D.ness?
The allure of sexy secular people, particularly young women, is an extremely well established method of getting the second generation immigrants to defect from their culture.
Well, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with monkhood and marriage return, I guess.
I doubt that’s a long term solution. Eventually the sex and apostasy gets boring and then memory and hopes of marriage call one back, maybe to a better place than one was in at first. It happened to me.
#plz no declaw
You’re Christian. Your religion’s central idea of martyrdom, as popularly understood, and brutally oversimplified, involves the government nailing some guy to a stick.
And in this sense, “declawed” refers primarily to religiously-motivated violence, though I suppose it also refers to virality, which is also a (longer-term) risk factor.
So as you might gather, it isn’t Christianity with its “render unto Caesar” and liberal democratic governments that I’m worried about. Nor Buddhism, nor Hinduism…
Anyhow, I think some of the rampant sex culture will decline on its own even without religion, just from people noticing what they previously weren’t socially allowed to notice - most people do seem to emotionally bond from sex, so for most people it really isn’t just some fun casual activity to do with randoms, and also long-term accomplishment tends to build a higher baseline level of happiness than momentary hedonism.
it is v amusing to me that i didn’t expect ppl to find this puzzling
uh non-exhaustive collection of reasons
A) i don’t like being obsolete. i like solving problems and building cool things and stuff, and i like it when those things are useful.
a_1) it tends to go along with something resembling Fully Automated Luxury Communism Where Machines Will Do Anything For You If You Ask
a_2) it tends to allow for arbitrary intelligence boosts and/or hivemind creation
a_3) i don’t think i want to live within range of either of those things because A
B) takes a very gung-ho attidute toward modifying minds which i consider a thing to be done Extremely Cautiously
b_1) i should not be able to make significant changes to myself on impulse. especially not irreversible ones.
C) many of the Ideal Forms i have heard described i would not actually ever want to be in the presence of, often due to effects relating to B
D) pettiest objection: monsters are not my aesthetic :V
E) I REALLY do not want to end up in a Red Queen race where everyone is recklessly modifying themselves so they aren’t at a mental or physical disadvantage relative to their neighbors.
In the future, this era of involuntary death, famine, and war will be thought of as in some ways a more innocent time where the barriers of reality as we intuitively know them were only just starting to break down.
I will miss the year 2007. However, for those unwilling to die, there is no choice but some level of Transhumanism.
What we do in this time, however, matters perhaps more than at any previous time in human history. The ideological justifications for Capitalism as a moral system rather than a means to an end (merely a pragmatic choice based on its effectiveness) must be destroyed if total competition is not going to destroy everything we hold dear.
Honestly tho I just want to be Motoko Kusanagi or Hideo Kuze plzthx.
All of us, Democrats and Republicans, libertarians and communists, tradcons and feminists and cybertranstopians, believe in philosophies that could, if given real power, do harm to people because of their failings. We can not predict what government enforcement or cultural dominance will really look like, and all the mistakes the fallible humans instituting it will make.
The question is not the purity of our mission at the outset, but if, when confronted with these grievances, will we acknowledge them and try to fix them, or will we declare all complaints as trivial, hoaxes, distractions, “not the real problem,” and double down on our vision?
Tell me you’ll give a damn when the errors start mounting up in lives destroyed, and I don’t really care what form of government you pursue.
I’m sympathetic to this, though finding someone who is both that pragmatic and that compassionate is difficult, much less putting them in power.
remedialaction said: As usual, you all approach from an attempt at designing some system, rather than one of what is morally correct. Or I guess thats a utilitarian tendency of conflating the two.
do you really want the state making determinations of what is morally correct?
why do grown ass men at my work think it’s a compliment to say things like, “it’s so endearing that you’re such a nerd but if you were a guy i’d totally wanna be you up for being a loser!!! hahahaha!!!” fuck off jesus
“since I wanna fuck you I don’t think you’re a loser”
It's not necessarily a "fail" if the min-maxing is itself enjoyable, especially if the thing you're min-maxing is itself recreational and not subject to any particular time pressure. I suspect that sometimes when the thing *isn't* recreational, then min-maxing is a subtle attempt to wring some kind of enjoyment out of the process.
I was wondering why Dubya is being marketed lately. Turns out he is releasing a book of portraits of soldiers wounded in his wars, all profits go to their rehab.
I… don’t know how to feel about this.
It’s easier to imagine that he didn’t care, and sent them away to fight solely for his own benefit.
I think maybe he cared, but many of the people around him didn’t, and those who did were blinded by ideology.
I think it’s alright to feel okay about this book. It’s a net improvement in this timeline, isn’t it?
What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?
I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.
Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.
However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.
Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.
Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).
But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?
Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.
Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?
All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.
But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.
And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.
Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.
transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd
but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious
so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”
why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?
like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.
like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.
so why won’t that work?
I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)
Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?
If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.
And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.
We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either
A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or
B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?
right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”
we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”
if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
I find it very hard, in the general case, to see “giving people free stuff, but in a different way”, as screwing over. Given that a reasonable alternative is “you get nothing” (this is definitely reasonable, as people 60 years ago did not receive medical care from the state and nobody thinks this was screwing anything), why the hell should you be allowed to tar refactoring the system as “screwing”
I’m guessing this applies to me and not SE…
That basically ignores the massive impact that both random chance and imbalances of power have on people. Illness is largely not distributed in a meritocratic way, and even just staying employed in a Capitalist system can contribute to it.
Also, there was a post not long ago about normalizing private charity as the way to provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it, which implies that the alternative is indeed “you get nothing,” since there is no way that private charity will truly replace the cost.
Mostly, though, I don’t mind some level, quite possibly even a very significant level, of liberalization, but I’m seeking something from a basket of ideological trades. Think of it in the vein of “you hate minimum wage because it lowers employment, I think we normally would need minimum wage because those at the bottom are often desperate (thus less negotiating power) and they have a minimum cost for survival, so let’s ideologically trade by lowering minimum wage while simultaneously issuing direct wage subsidies.”
Or having a well-regulated insurance requirement for worker safety or environmental damage by corporations, since causing damage is so much cheaper than fixing it, executives are gone before the damage actually hits, the company can cause more damage than it can ever pay back, etc, so not having a pot of money to solve it creates externalities… That sort of thing. Technically, it’s a kind of state intervention. Technically, it’s a kind of wealth transfer. Also, it pulls on optimization from markets in the hope of more accurately pricing the externalities of injuries/environmental damage/etc. So is it a “market solution”? Or is it evil Statism? Etc.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
Look. You claim you want an efficient system, right? Not just trading someone else’s increase in suffering for another $10,000 worth of luxury car for yourself, right?
I like an efficient system. More healthcare can be purchased for the same amount of money in an efficient system. But as far as I’m concerned, if the money just gets redistributed upwards it’s worthless to my goals, so I have no reason to free up those resources for the sole purpose of them being captured by the wealthy so they can plow them into political campaigns to further undermine public ownership of the state.
And I have no reason to believe that the people complaining about how they have to pay taxes to help those accursed poor single mother welfare recipients are really going to put an equivalent amount of money into charity. Why would I?
But I do like efficiency, so I’m willing to make a trade. If it’s really an efficiency solution, not just a cash grab for the upper class, then we can keep current healthcare spending, oh, or maybe a little lower, so let’s say on par with those evil European countries as a percentage of GDP, and cut everyone a check evenly just for healthcare funds. Let them put it in a health savings account, spend it on insurance, maybe let the unspent health savings be inherited or something. Collect %s of future checks to offset the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.
Maybe not a check, maybe that’s not the most efficient method in particular, but you get the idea.
If you’re willing to make that sacrifice or one like it, then, maybe I and others could believe that this is actually, really about efficiency.
(Edit: Also, on a side-note since it’s not really the core purpose of this post, as the core purpose is to offer that above ideological trade - legislators are actually paid to do legislation, and they have staffs and think-tanks that work for the parties at their disposal. Specialization of labor doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Individual citizens largely don’t have these things and the trust networks around them are different since there’s a lot of money to be made by scamming people (see: homeopathics are still a thing). So there is some reason to believe that the political parties and legislators might outperform individuals. Now, regulatory capture is an issue, but since the proposed solution tends to be “just let companies do whatever they want”, and that usually is the situation that caused regulation to come into existence in the first place, it often isn’t a real solution. I think government itself can be designed much better, but others seem to either believe we don’t need to, or that it’s impossible, so…)
Your fetish is the main topic of a two hours long movie where it’s applied to the whole world. There’s no sexy time, the whole movie is about the financial and societal consequences on your fucked up fetish on society.
How boring is it?
Oh my goodness.
Well, at least there would be immortality, and an effective guarantee that the universe wouldn’t end. On the other hand, prepare for one helluva culture shock, we’re going deep, and magic is real.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Additionally, by trying to refocus their campaigning for lower taxes and reduction of artificial costs of living by showing them the calculations on how much even minimum-wage workers can end up paying (an awful lot, possibly even more than some millionaire investors) and how the state wastes most of the money it takes instead of spending it in any useful way, and how much of the price in the things they would want to spend those minimum wages on is artificially created through dysfunctional regulation.
