BeautifulMind

BeautifulMind , 5 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Also genX, I went hard in corporate life for a long time, survived many rounds of layoffs and watched good friends go for reasons that are bad ones- until one fine day I was laid off with 18,000 others. Meanwhile they kept hiring H1B workers and doing stock buybacks and doing mass-layoffs every 2 years to keep the regional labor market full of competition and wages depressed. Knowing that they’re not interested in keeping their promises of stability and prosperity goes a long ways towards me never going above and beyond

BeautifulMind , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

LOL whenever I have to work with DateTime systems that try to account for every possibility (and fail trying) I am reminded that in some disciplines, it’s acceptable to simplify drastically in order to do ‘close enough’ work.

I mean, if spherical cows are a thing because that makes the math of theoretical physics doable, why not relativity-free or just frame-constant date-time measures that are willing to ignore exotic edge cases like non-spherical livestock?

BeautifulMind , 6 months ago

Oh boy. That’s a lot of traffic on not a lot of boats

BeautifulMind , 7 months ago

It’s as if when people can afford to work for you, they will work for you

BeautifulMind , 8 months ago

One thing worth noting that’s tangentially related: the reason Social Security faces solvency concerns is not that they couldn’t anticipate the Boomers’ retirement, but because under Boomer management, wages (which are the basis for Social Security’s funding) have been suppressed, particularly on the low end of the wage scale.

They saw the Boomers coming a mile away. What they didn’t see coming was that they’d flatline the minimum wage and kill off unions

BeautifulMind , 8 months ago

Yeah the NPR weekend roundup talked about the city ending this program, and cited the costs as a reason for shutting it down- and strangely, there was zero mention of Seattle adding $20M to what it spends on police.

So, instead of dealing with homelessness by helping the homeless out of it, they’ve elected to re-org Seattle DOT back into SPD.

I was about shouting at the radio asking them when they’d consider funding homelessness outreach out of cuts to the police budget but noooo Seattle media people seem to think the answer to any problem is cops

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

Nothing like plonking that work laptop open on the train and billing for your time

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

If conditions are unlivable for too many people, that’s bad and it calls for a re-negotiation of everything. It also bears reminding today’s leisure class/ultra-wealthy that part of the basis for their existence as such was always a trade-off between them paying their workers enough to live with dignity and the metaphorical torches and pitchforks and guillotines staying in mothballs

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

would result in a smaller economy

Only to the extent that withheld labor during a strike affects it. Once the strike(s) are over, an economy that puts more spending money in more pockets will be a bigger one

It turns out that the size of the economy is related to how well-distributed the wealth in it is. If most of the money goes into wealthy pockets and everybody else lives in a sort of poverty-imposed austerity, that depresses a lot of that economy’s potential.

What the UAW are after is not a smaller economy, but a more-robust (likely larger) one that includes more people in it.

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

I like where you’re going with that!

I think the problems (of high inequality, of unsustainable resource use) are distinct, but related and can probably be gone after by targeting the same things: price gouging and suppressing wages.

If capital can’t do those things, labor will have the choice to work less if it doesn’t need the money to survive. We’ve long-since passed the point Keynes predicted (at which, productivity would be high enough to support people at a high standard of living without them working full time) in terms of production, the obstacle to that happening is that capital gets to allocate those surpluses and it keeps most of them

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

But if you consider the counter-argument, maybe arrogant billionaires need to be reminded again that the deal by which they wouldn’t be dragged out of their homes and beaten senseless in front of their families was that they’d pay a living wage and deal with unions and submit to antitrust regulations

BeautifulMind , 9 months ago

This article is garbage, […] doesn’t fact check the police

Typical KOMO/Sinclair media fare, then

BeautifulMind , 10 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Same. I use reclaimed commute time to get groceries and cook now. Wife is thrilled now when I call it ‘my’ kitchen (it was hers by default when my commute + work had me out of the house 12-16 hours a day), and I can whip up a decent meal these days pretty quickly without having to go out