NietzscheanNull
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
Well, fortunately, the graph makes at plain as a clear blue sky that neither of those hypothetical individuals are anywhere near the demographic that ought to be targeted by a wealth tax. When people say "eat the rich," they're not referring to late-career millionaire lawyers or doctors; those people work for a living just like the vast majority of us.
As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.
The median annual wage for a hotel cleaner in Ohio (as an arbitrary middle-of-the -road example) is $28.4K per year.[1] (And on average, immigrant workers earn 6% less than their native counterparts.) And in Ohio, the official annual household income poverty line--based on an outdated food-cost-heavy model that doesn't properly account for the explosion of housing and healthcare costs--is $27.3K for a three-person household.[2]
To me, that very much is a poverty wage. I agree that tipping is a subsidy to business owners and ultimately depresses wages at the expense of consumers, but that doesn't change the fact that under the status quo, tipped workers absolutely rely on their tips to provide for themselves and their families. The type of work they do is, by and large, grueling and thankless; they deserve fair compensation from the business that benefit from it, but in the absence of government-driven intervention, those business will continue to externalize that cost to workers and consumers regardless of whether you and a handful of others decide to tip.
Refusing to tip on principle results in a direct and tangible harm to those workers, but doesn't move the needle at societal scale. A true solution would require top-down overhaul of our wage-and-hour regulations to eliminate tipping loopholes and impose steep penalties for businesses that subsidize employee wages through the expectation of tips from customers. Any bottom-up approach is likely to fail as it's a prototypical collective action problem, and a patchwork implementation of that strategy would disproportionately harm those who can least afford to shoulder the burden for a long time before ever impacting the businesses and policies directly responsible for the current state of affairs.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm#:~:text=Earnings%20and... [2]: https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/v1778780151/jfs.ohi...
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating '_PyRun_SimpleString(r)')People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.
Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.
Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.
For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.
If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.
It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
This showed up at the top of HN for me today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.
Honestly, I'm at a loss for words.