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A God Damned Separate Thread For Your Argument About Government Dependency
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It's especially frustrating because executive pay is so often a crock of shit, both in terms of amounts and in terms of variables by which performance is measured.
I'm not under any impression that executives are going to do anything out of the good of their hearts.
I'm talking legislation. Yes it'll be an "attack" on success, but seriously, being successful doesn't mean eating ALL the profit margin.
Unfortunately the service based economy is largely dependent on the fact that low paying, long hour jobs exist.
Raising the minimum wage is also a lot less effective than it should be due to how the market reacts to the possibility of showing a potential loss of profit.
Care to elaborate on that? Are you saying that the service industry or service type jobs only serve those with the minimum income? Because I have a bridge to sell you.
I believe he's more referring to the high turnover and poor treatment of most low paying service jobs, not those who are consuming the services.
I think he means that shareholders and nasty company leadership need more reigning in. Earlier this year I think Cisco laid off thousands of employees, not because profits were down, but because they didn't increase enough. Their in much deeper shit now, not because of that, but there's shit like Wal Mart "threatening" to not open stores, and companies "threatening" to lay off people in response.
"Oh did you just increase minimum wage? I just fired a couple hundred employees, so suck that, Robin Hood!"
Oh and lets not forget those "I'm laying you off because Obama" employers.
Secondly, the problem with 'dependence' is more a rhetorical problem than a 'real' one. People are already dependent--they're dependent on their bosses, parents, etc, for their well being People who are at the extremely low scale of wages are deeply dependent on anything that can help them live because it turns out that selling stuff on etsy doesn't earn you a living and that you can't just create your own employment out of thin air.
Which gets me to the issue of 'dependence' being a rhetorical problem. That we refer to government programs which attempt to alleviate poverty and starvation as 'dependence' but not being unable to quit your crappy job because the rent's due next week is a problem of rhetoric, not an objective problem that exists in the world.
The issue is more that we have little to no one advocating the lower class to the point where we've spawned this 'dependence' ideology.
This aversion to "dependence" creates a large section of our society that necessarily must be dependent because they do not have any opportunities not to be.
Hey, I earned minimum wage as a teenager, and I got on just fine, living in my upper-middle-class house and driving the car my folks strongly subsidized while still pulling in $20 a week in allowance.
If I could make it work, clearly anybody can!
Gentrification isn't the result of income inequality (aside from certain specific instances there are a few areas in New York and London that are basically just full of pied-a-terre but not many) so much as an issue of zoning, NIMBYism, and the securitization of housing debt (which was arguably due to the Clinton surpluses which we are trying to recreate). You can have nice neighborhoods with affordable housing. You just need to build a lot more housing when the rent starts to go up. Unfortunately that tends to be illegal in most places and the regulatory change to make it legal angers everyone that already got in, so instead of more granny flats and 4 storey town homes replacing 2 storey you just have increased prices. Because people are horrible and value their free parking more than anything else.
We (US and many major countries) are increasingly a service economy. In manufacturing the product is a material good while in a service economy the product is the service. In manufacturing you can cut costs by re-engineering what goes into your product, changing material input, new production forms, quality, ect. In service industries you're almost always relegated to reducing costs via some measure of personnel reduction. Even when it's a new procedure or process it's there to impact personnel (either to supplement a work force reduction or to act as a work multiplier for your current workforce).
The output sector of the service industry is the larger population of lower paid, unskilled labor (mostly on-the-job training), while further up the ladder is more skilled/educated labor (requiring experience or education) jobs that exist to process the information from the unskilled labor.
The output sector of a manufacturing industry is a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. Engineers, welders, skilled and unskilled mechanics, technicians of every creed, solderers. They're a solid mix of people who require formal training and people you can pick at random off the street.
The service industry is based on the fact that low-pay, long-hour workers exist to fill their unskilled labor personnel stables. The manufacturing industry, on the other hand, requires a strong mix of skilled (formally trained), unskilled (informally trained) and educated labor* (Formally trained to a higher degree).
*Note: I used "educated labor" to distinguish between higher degree requiring jobs (such as engineers, doctors, and scientists) and those jobs not requiring high-level degrees, not to distinguish between educated and uneducated workers. Skilled, unskilled, and educated labor can all be highly educated, but not everyone utilizes their degree in their field. I've met several people who held masters degrees while working unskilled labor jobs.
Sorry, I meant more that gentrification tends to price people out of markets in areas they could previously afford. It isn't a result of inequality, it contributes to it.
I love this post, but I have a minor quibble. The link you posted on the securitization of housing debt misses a lot of contributory causes to the housing bubble - particularly financial system deregulation in the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Biley act.
It's not just the CRA, not just the budget surplus, not just GLBA or CFMA, but the combination of all of these things, and probably some other factors that I am missing right now.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This "service economy" thing you're talking about isn't mutually exclusive from (did I miss that up? you know what I mean) manufacturing. It's all hand in hand. Every service job is selling a good or material service.
Fast food people sell food.
Best Buy employees sell you electronics.
Tech support sells you (indirectly) internet access.
etc
Your whole analogy sounds like a disingenuous reasoning to making it okay to make people's lives miserable. Just because people work service jobs doesn't mean they're some lower rung of a ladder or worthless POS. People avoid working service jobs because it is thankless - by means of pay AND by means of social stigma. But if you remove service jobs, people will shit themselves wondering where their omg servants went. Please avoid the "they're expendable" attitude. The whole stigma of these kinds of jobs somehow making people "dumb" or some implication that they "aren't trying" is personally infuriating and observably untrue. A lot of adults, young or middle-aged, are busting their ass to support families on these jobs. For a time, it was barely passable, but in the last two decades the growth of cost of living has outpaced the income these jobs provide.
This isn't a machine, these are people's lives. Figuring out where and how to cut costs shouldn't be similar at all.
Also as an aside, people refer to service jobs as being "unskilled" or whatever, but man, from what I've experienced in life, people lack the social skills to work these jobs - either actual employees, or the critics of employees.
I think this was the point; not that he is approving of the situation, but that this is, in fact, the situation. The only variables that can be manipulated in a Service industry are Workload and Workforce; where in manufacturing, you have further variables that can be manipulated (raw materials, manufacturing processes, etc). This is why service jobs are "thankless": they trend toward requiring very little skillset, and as such, any worker can be replaced at any moment by another who will perform more for less pay, driving down wages across the board.
Also the repeal of Glass Stegell made all those juicy mortgages toys for the securities and derivatives market
It's mostly bullshit because at a certain level "failure" means you get slightly less filthy rich
Aye, sorry about that Ded, I went on a jag pretty unfairly.
Just like Larry Ellison, who graciously declined a performance bonus because stocks weren't performing as strongly as Oracle had hoped, and who took an 18% pay cut in 2013...
to just under 80 million dollars.
BTW, this is after shareholders voted down Oracle's executive pay package, a rough feat at any company, and especially at Oracle, since Ellison owns 25% of the company.
There is nothing wrong with being a service based economy. Every job I have ever held was in the service industry, and I have a graduate degree: Retail Clerk, Architectural Intern (never got licensed so it'd be illegal to say I was an architect), Call Center, Librarian, Taxonomist. The problem is that a lot of the service jobs that we have suck and don't pay well (retail clerk, call center) rather than are awesome and pay well (architect, librarian), or even just suck but still pay well ( ? ), and that is what needs to change. Having more people making shiny objects doesn't have to be part of it. Not that there's anything wrong with having more manufacturing employment, but it isn't some sort of magical sector that will solve stagnant or declining median wage growth on its own right.
Right. The nail in Glass Steagall's coffin was part of Gramm-Leach-Biley
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Since it increases the cost of products because of our higher wage standards.
We don't even necessarily want manufacturing to be in the US because of global labor factors.
Not that I approve of paying people pennies a day to make products we want, mind.
You were paid well as a librarian?
Astonishing. I'm paid cents over the federal minimum wage (Georgia's is around $5, thank god state sovereignty is frequently bullshit). I'm grateful for the job, but that's because everyone born after 1986 is paid a few cents over minimum wage. I know STEM guys who are basically making $8/hour in database programming, and they consider themselves lucky only because they get full hours (unlike librarians).
What I was explaining is that a service industry job relies heavily on low paid and long hour workers, and why this is the case.
The bit on manufacturing jobs was only there to contrast how this is different from other job industries.
Seriously, it's been two pages, the context isn't hard to find.
Manufacturing relied on low pay, long hour workers until we changed that.
Why do I have this feeling that Flanagin's keen sense of who could / couldn't be trusted relied mostly on the skin tone of the person he was evaluating?
"Psh. Look at this black woman and her kids. they have a car and food, and everyone knows that black kids just act that way, so I don't see no disability. Fuckin' moochers!"
What a couple of pieces of shit.
Yes, in the dawn of the industrial revolution. Now (and since about WWI) it relies just as heavily on technicians, welders, machine operators, machinists, coders, mechanics and other skilled labor.
Welders in particular are highly sought after (seeing as how there's several hundred thousand welder jobs that will be unfilled this year).
The difference between "then" and now is that the processes and product became much more complex and requires a tighter tolerance. Regulations and public pressure didn't change the industries nearly as much as technology did. Even after the muckrakers had finished, the manufacturing industry was based on low wage immigrant labor.
Service industries are about keeping the service simple.
The CRA had nothing to to with the bubble at all. It would be nice if that right wing talking point would die.
so what point was this video supposed to make?
That it wasn't just the Reds who made propaganda films?
I made $20/hr in a contract position with no benefits. One of the four of us was hired on permanently and basically just got a slight raise, but mainly it was IMRF and insurance bennies. Which made it the 25th percentile for librarians, and is reasonable for people fairly fresh off their MLIS. If you're barely making minimum wage...you need to look to move to a different district as soon as you can.
That's only true for certain sectors of the service industry or if you arbitrarily restrict what 'service industry' means so as to not include, say, a dental hygienist.
Where's your reasoning? I work alongside the financial services and consulting industries. They seem pretty well-paid.
What about service industries makes them intrinsically lower-paid than manufacturing ones? Or have you just confused 'serving' with 'service industry'?
That's mostly gone. One of the myths the continues is that manufacturing is low skilled labor. Unless you're talking about textile sweatshops most modern manufacturing jobs are highly trained technical work.
CRA based loans had to much governemt interference to be attractive to the predatory mortgage lenders
Not really: "buying american" is most definitely good for the economy if you're an american.
Isn't buying products where they're cheapest better for the economy overall?
Doesn't buying American just make products more expensive and therefore suppress demand?
I guess this really isn't on-topic anymore.
That emnmnme is clearly a Libertarian.
He only speaks in video clips.