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[WealthyRadish]

I don't want higher minimum wage. I want people to stop paying for things that have price increases, so that benefits of technology are given to the masses instead of the corps (in the form of lower prices, not higher profits).

Consider there are two solutions to the problem of "if AI takes over the world, there will be no jobs": the first is to just make up money and give it to people; the second is to let prices drop.

No, I don't mean that I favor deflation - I favor profits being realized in the form of lower prices instead of larger bank account balances.

The obvious thing that would do this (without the government) is the competition between businesses that can occur when there's an incentive to acquire more market share by undercutting prices. When competition doesn't exist and the market is dominated by private monopolies and cartels, any improvement in methods that reduces labor cost or otherwise improves efficiency instead gets converted directly into economic rent (the purely parasitic "passive income" that the powerful always seek to acquire, whether by land/resource ownership, monopolization of industry/trade, debt slavery, political corruption, or more traditional means like chattel slavery or a protection racket).

Part of the reason for the drive toward consolidation is that competition forcing prices down and profits to near-zero (discounting for inflation, risk, etc) itself acutely creates enormous incentives for consolidation. Imagine a "small" firm (relatively speaking, mere tens of millions of dollars of capital) in a mature and competitive industry making near-zero profits; the workers get their wages, the executives and managers heading the bureaucracy get their loyalty payments, and the consumers presumably get things that make life better (the whole point), but this business is nonetheless totally unsustainable. The owners will view this whole enterprise as a curse and waste of their time, liable to implode at any moment and completely not worth what little bother they haven't delegated to their bureaucracy.

If a would-be monopolizer comes along (financed either by some other corrupt industry they dominate or the financial system that is today always saturated with capital seeking ever more sources of accumulation), this small business will view getting noticed by them as a godsend. A company seeking monopoly will buy out smaller companies at prices extravagantly higher than the mere liquidation value of the business, and will have the financing to absorb the losses incurred by doing so (or if sale is refused, temporarily undercutting prices far below a level that's profitable to drive their competitors out of business or into a merger). The whole "start-up" craze is entirely based on this without even the pretense of useful work, with all the hundreds of companies that only to seek the attention of a monopoly and get bought out. When the monopoly is complete, they can then happily fire half the workers and raise prices to whatever they want.

Anyway, the point is that I don't think it's realistic to think that competition will really work to solve the "living wage"/prices problem under the legal framework as it currently exists.

[MrRoboto75]

Part of it is the big company would rather the startup take the brunt of the risks and costs of innovation.  They'd rather buy a successful startup than extend out and try whatever the startups are doing themselves.

If the innovation is a failure and the startup dies, then the big company doesn't buy them, but also didn't waste money trying it either.

[dragdeler]

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[Frumple]

Hey, they're apparently finding it's not satan's throbbing dong these days, from what I've been picking up. More recent studies on rent control seem to be getting much more "it depends" findings than the whole "literally the devil sodomizing your first born" that used to be the general consensus. Be interesting to see how things go on that front going forward, heh.

[dragdeler]

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[Eschar]

The Alabama senate has voted to make approving puberty blockers for trans teenagers a felony. The bill will also require teachers and school counselors who know that a teen is transgender to out them to their parents. Because that's not dangerous at alllllllllllll.

The kicker? They're calling it the "Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act."

[McTraveller]

I'm increasingly trying to decide if a view that one way to avoid monopoly power it so simply abolish mergers and acquisitions entirely.  If you want to join to companies, you have to do it by dissolving both entities and forming a new one.

Side note, the politics aside - I don't think I understand the medical concept behind whatever these "puberty blockers" are.  Are there fatal or debilitating physical conditions that these things are to treat?

To be fair, I cannot think of any legitimate reason why there would be a need for schools or anyone to know what medical treatments anyone is taking, unless it's necessary to indicate in the event of a medical emergency.

[Eschar]

Puberty blockers, given to cis people who would otherwise start puberty unusually early and to some trans people to delay puberty, pause the development of puberty. They are entirely reversible, as once the person stops taking them puberty continues as usual. In the case of trans people, they are sometimes used to pause the development of puberty to prevent the sometimes debilitating dysphoria puberty would/could otherwise cause.

[voliol]

The Alabama senate has voted to make approving puberty blockers for trans teenagers a felony. The bill will also require teachers and school counselors who know that a teen is transgender to out them to their parents. Because that's not dangerous at alllllllllllll.

The kicker? They're calling it the "Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act."

I hate it when Orwell wasn’t exaggerating.

[Vector]

I had a post, but it got eaten when I was logged out. So here's the short version.

Virtually all medical interventions trans people want to use were designed for the cis population, from surgery to hormones.

-> puberty blockers are used to halt precocious puberty (think elementary school girls developing really early).
-> they can also buy trans kids a couple years to think about things and transition socially before starting a medical hormonal regime.
-> not going through the wrong puberty both saves them from dysphoria and results in less need for surgery:
--- top surgery
--- some facial feminization surgery
--- thousands of dollars of electrolysis to get rid of body hair
--- and protects women from developing a deep voice that threatens to out them for the rest of their lives.
--- much more likely to be able to buy clothing for their gender that fits their body frame.

The famous statistic of "41% of trans people attempt suicide" is often shared without the following points.
- mental health issues virtually disappear compared to the baseline population when trans people of any age can transition socially and are accepted by their communities.
- more than 90% of those suicide attempts occur in people who are younger than 25.
-----> Access to puberty blockers is almost literally the cheapest, easiest way to help the trans youth and adult population and overwhelmingly cuts down on societal and personal costs generated by trans people. They are not dangerous and they represent a necessary medical intervention. They are entirely reversible if the child opts not to continue with trans-consistent healthcare.


And yes, requiring teachers to out children showing gender non-conforming behavior is fundamentally violent.
- Note the only other comparable laws -- reporting suspected child abuse. These mandated reporting laws equate the two in the public imagination.
- Many trans children start being bullied for nonconformity in elementary school. Drawing their parents' attention to this when they are so young and vulnerable is not necessarily a good thing.
- Part of the purpose here is to criminalize adult allies committed to protect trans children, which will be more likely than not also LGBT. One of the fundamental goals of people attacking the LGBT population is to recriminalize them, and in particular to get them out of schools.
- Trans people are heavily overrepresented in: the youth homeless population; the foster care population. This is without the mandated reporting law.

[Duuvian]

Is the small business bailout part better written this time? It was disheartening to know my boss probably got a lot of free money when he uses temp services to avoid paying for worker's healthcare in a pandemic. However at least that might actually be a small business; when I heard things like McDonalds were taking bailouts was the real problem. Also unemployment paid higher at the time than working lol. That's not the case anymore but if I were in charge I'd offer a small weekly bonus to workers under a certain income based on the number of hours they work in order to make safe unemployment less attractive while still doable for those who would feel better served by the existence of such a choice. I would call this radical idea hazard pay.

[Iduno]

Is the small business bailout part better written this time? It was disheartening to know my boss probably got a lot of free money when he uses temp services to avoid paying for worker's healthcare in a pandemic. However at least that might actually be a small business; when I heard things like McDonalds were taking bailouts was the real problem. Also unemployment paid higher at the time than working lol. That's not the case anymore but if I were in charge I'd offer a small weekly bonus to workers under a certain income based on the number of hours they work in order to make safe unemployment less attractive while still doable for those who would feel better served by the existence of such a choice. I would call this radical idea hazard pay.

It's better written, but you and I aren't the ones who are meant to benefit. It's written to remove more of the middle class from benefiting and give more money to larger companies.

[KittyTac]

In the recent bill there is a clause that forgives debt of socially-disadvantaged farmers. What exactly does that mean here? If it's only for, I don't know, black farmers regardless of their actual condition then it's racist.

I don't care about race, if someone is poor then they need aid no matter their skin color.

Edit: That's actually what it says. Well how is this not discrimination?

[Rolan7]

It's complicated and I certainly haven't gone through the details thoroughly, but based on this article there is probably debt forgiveness based on skin color specifically, sure.

The details were debated a lot, like whether to simply forgive the debt or to forgive "extra" to cover the collected interest on these debts.  Which might seem extraordinary, but the contention (which seems very likely to me) is that these were predatory and racially motivated loans targeted against black farmers during a very institutionally racist time.  I'm not prepared to prove that's the case, and I'm not even sure where the bill landed on the issue, but that's the argument that was made in Congress about it.

I have to go but I'll just opine that affirmative action and reparations for racial injustice can *look* like racism, but are justified when redressing prior harm.  Redlining and other loan fuckery was one of the most inescapable and recent tools used to prevent people of color from accumulating generational wealth.  They were deliberately preventing from having an equal playing field, and there's nothing racist about trying to address the results of that.

[hector13]

In the recent bill there is a clause that forgives debt of socially-disadvantaged farmers. What exactly does that mean here? If it's only for, I don't know, black farmers regardless of their actual condition then it's racist.

I don't care about race, if someone is poor then they need aid no matter their skin color.

That’s rather the point of the phrase “socially disadvantaged”, though. It includes groups that were discriminated against for racial and ethnic identities, plus veterans, plus women, according to the USDA website.

It’s still within living memory that there were actual laws discriminating against non-whites, and we have just had a US president that emboldened white supremacist groups in the US. Also fucked over farmers with his trade war, but Republicans didn’t care when they had to almost triple aid for farmers to offset the damage that did.

Anyhow, socially-disadvantaged farmers tend to be of the small-to-medium variety rather than the corporate owned:

Spoiler: USDA Economic Research from 2017 (click to show/hide)

 According to a GAO analysis of the 2017 Census of Agriculture, SDFRs accounted for 41 percent of all producers. Of these SDFRs 88.3 percent were women of any race, 8.1 percent were Hispanic, 4.2 were American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.3 percent were Black or African American and 1.6 percent were of Asian descent. In 2017, 30 percent of all farms were SDFR farms - meaning a SDFR was the principal operator. On average, SDFR farms were smaller and brought in less revenue than non-SDFR farms in 2017. These SDFR farms operated 21 percent of all acres and produced 13 percent of the total market value of production.

Ninja’d, but sure.