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[Max™]

You all had salt without me?

My....my life has no meaning now....

Sorry, I had to dump our stocks, but I got you reinvested in Canadian property futures, so after the election you're due to make a killing.

[mainiac]

Comeon dude, all that talk about violent crime by Vancoover immigrants is a bunch of media hype.

[Rolepgeek]

And the obsession with public image can work both ways.  If the corporation decides they can bury a problem instead of dealing with it ethically, they will.  There was sexual harassment buried and neglected by HR at the 120+ employee office I worked at with FedEx.  The victims were intimidated into silence.  Small businesses have less resources to make their people feel like they're too insignificant to seek recourse.

Yeah this kind of shit happens.  But small business people can just harass people and then fire them and it's impossible to prove 99.9% of the time.  It even makes it harder for the harassed person to get a new job because getting fired looks bad on your work history.

Can and do are different things. Small business people can harass people, but because they have no recourse other than the local area and community for their business, they're much more accountable on a personal level. You're right in that Federal anti-discrimination laws are less able to affect them, but with big businesses the penalties involved don't affect the companies all that much. Small businesses fail much more easily.

Plus, more competition tends to be better for a consumer. Big businesses just about always try to take over the market if they possibly can, and have the funds to lobby Congress to enable such, as well as to shut out smaller businesses that could challenge them. Creativity blossoms best under limited constraints. Competition+basic regulations+information out the wazoo for consumers is what allows Capitalism to function best. Economic growth may increase more with big business, but it doesn't seem to reach the common person, given how wage levels have stagnated.

Many things we could/should improve upon though, from the reduced financial flexibility created by the shift to two-income households, to the work week creep. Hard to do purely through legislation, though, as most things to do with the market are.

On an entirely different note: I got some info from one of my classes that relays some basic Gallup poll stuff out millenials (in this instance  defined as people born between 1980 and 1996 apparently), that notes that they have the lowest rate of engagement with the workforce, but also look for very different things in jobs than previous generations. More concerned with the meaning than the benefits, so to speak. If I remember right. I could probably look at it again to be more accurate.

[mainiac]

Can and do are different things. Small business people can harass people, but because they have no recourse other than the local area and community for their business, they're much more accountable on a personal level.

You must have experienced very different service industries then my experience of having a manager fire three different people in two months because she didn't like their attitude.  Out of a group of six.

Plus, more competition tends to be better for a consumer. Big businesses just about always try to take over the market if they possibly can, and have the funds to lobby Congress to enable such, as well as to shut out smaller businesses that could challenge them.

Just because they are large doesn't mean they are a monopoly.  Competition exists between large businesses.  For instance McDonalds was the US restaurant with the highest domestic sales last year at about 25 billion.  Total restaurant sales were 785 billion.  Let's suppose for instance a hypothetical US restaurant industry consisting of nothing but 32 identical 25 billion dollar chains.  This industry would have a Herfindahl Index of %3.125.  That's way more competitive then most industries you rely on.  And that's just a theoretical case with nothing but super-chains.  In reality there are hundreds of large chains because they aren't all the size of McDonalds so the concentration is much lower then that.

[Strife26]

I think that grouping different industries together is a dangerous thing to do. There's a very big difference between a Walmart and a McDonalds and a Monsanto and a Lockheed.

[mainiac]

Yeah Lockheed has never killed as many people as Monsanto.

[Loud Whispers]

Yeah Lockheed has never killed as many people as Monsanto.

McDonalds has blood on its arteries

[mainiac]

Legally speaking you can't call it blood anymore after it has been processed that much.

[Rolepgeek]

I'm not saying all large businesses become monopolies. They just push for them. Equilibriums definitely exist for certain businesses. But for things like, say, Epipens? Or the way they'll umbrella everything under them eventually? Hell, I've not enough got anything much against most chains. It's multi-national corporations that have issues.

And restaurants probably have one of the highest rates of competitiveness. Compare, say, markers.

Can and do are different things. Small business people can harass people, but because they have no recourse other than the local area and community for their business, they're much more accountable on a personal level.

You must have experienced very different service industries then my experience of having a manager fire three different people in two months because she didn't like their attitude.  Out of a group of six.

Isn't the issue about discrimination, though? If someone can't work with the group, that's a valid reason to fire someone, as far as I know. But I know very little about that specific instance, and anecdotes are anecdotes in any case. I'm sure that labor unions would solve the issue pretty handily as well, but I also think this might be a case of it depending on the environment. Cities, with a glut of available labor, probably do better with big industries and scales of economy and labor unions, where they're already local financial centers, while small towns probably do best with similarly small businesses, where they won't be essentially overrun.

I read something about why cities are typically democratic, and it's a similar thing; cities are expensive, and you depend on the people around you. You really can't be self-sufficient, typically, in the manner of the Republican ideal. When people are down on their luck, you see a lot more of them a lot more often, because there's such a concentration of people. Plus, the mixing pot means you get exposed to such  And welfare has to be high because of how expensive things are. Meanwhile, rural areas are conservative because when the welfare calibration is designed for cities, when work becomes hard to find, it becomes easier for the people who are willing to leech off the system to just sit back and do so. I notice a lot of statistics brought up about how red states tend to be net tax drains while the blue states tend to be tax producers, and that this thereby means Republicans are voting against themselves, when it could well be that Republicans are being exposed to the sorts of folks that are willing to take advantage of the system, while Democrats see people that depend on the social safety net to bounce back, rather than use it as a hammock. Makes me wonder if differential policies based on local cost of living or the like would be a good idea for welfare.

[PTTG??]

I suppose that it wouldn't hurt to look at the statistics to see if welfare cheating is more common in rural areas. I would be surprised if that was the case, though.

[Max™]

While the ratio between taxes paid and federal funding received is skewed heavily towards the Republican voting states, I'm pretty sure the people who really benefit from cheating over the government tend to be skewed rather further up the income ladder, like that time Trump apparently lost ~916 million dollars and didn't have to pay taxes for 18 years as a result?

Welfare queens are a myth Reagan helped spread, implying that it was some sort of widespread thing, rather than one woman with far worse crimes, but the idea sticks around that if you receive welfare you're quite happy to lay around and snort oxycontins, because it's easier to make that leap now that the high bar (or low in this case) was set by Linda Taylor.

These people receiving welfare, they're human traffickers, druggies, murderers, and some, I assume, are good people.

[Reelya]

That reminds me, that TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) - the program to "help" single mothers by booting them off welfare, was actually a Bill Clinton initiative in 1996, to fulfill an election promise. "TANF" is some Orwellian language right there. In other words, the poor had an arguably better deal under Reagan than under Clinton. People forget that you guys basically had European-style welfare but Clinton got rid of it. No wonder Hillary Clinton doesn't get what the "Scandinavian Model" is about - her husband worked to disassemble anything that resembled it when he was in office.

[Max™]

Uh... that isn't quite how it worked out.

Anyone else remember the "Contract with America" stuff?

The Personal Responsibility Act
An act to discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by reforming and cutting cash welfare and related programs. This would be achieved by prohibiting welfare to mothers under 18 years of age, denying increased Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for additional children while on welfare, and enacting a two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. H.R.4, the Family Self-Sufficiency Act, included provisions giving food vouchers to unwed mothers under 18 in lieu of cash AFDC benefits, denying cash AFDC benefits for additional children to people on AFDC, requiring recipients to participate in work programs after 2 years on AFDC, complete termination of AFDC payments after five years, and suspending driver and professional licenses of people who fail to pay child support. H.R.4, passed by the US House 234-199, March 23, 1995, and passed by the US Senate 87-12, September 19, 1995. The Act was vetoed by President Clinton, but the alternative Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act which offered many of the same policies was enacted August 22, 1996.

The relevant PRWORA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act

[smirk]

TANF

If anyone here likes NPR podcasts, Marketplace did a short series earlier this year on the creation of TANF and what exactly American welfare is today. 6 episodes, right here (starting with 'The Magic Bureaucrat'). It's an interesting and occasionally infuriating listen.

[Max™]

Bonus is that a lot of the anti-welfare push on both sides was helped along by a eugenics proponent, but naturally that isn't brought up much because who wants to open that can of worms?