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I don't think Irami realizes the extent to which we rely on business with other countries.
I've occasionally seen economists on blogs run quick numbers on various degrees of drop in exchange with other countries.
Typical results of massive drops in exchange would be depressions that put the great depression to shame.
Trade creates wealth. Making trade significantly more difficult destroys wealth. This is true no matter who the trade is with.
edit: I also wonder if Irami would be okay with the result, which would be that the poor are worse off (in terms of what they are able to consume, including housing and healthcare), but that other people (the middle class, the rich) would be even more worse off, meaning there was more 'equality' in terms of income.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Dude, I've been in that world. You know how I got out of it? I got job skills. I didn't insist that people pay me more for labor they didn't need that much.
Tom wins the thread. Open up more avenues for people at or below the poverty line to get and keep more job skills, and widen the avenues already open. That's your solution, not paying landscapers >200% their current wages and benefits and thus price them right out of business.
quote:Depending on who his clients are, this is where public policy becomes an issue. You call them "blue-collar workers," I reserve that term for unionized construction workers or plumbers, I get the feeling that I'd employ a nastier noun to describe the guys in your dad's plant.
You can use one term, the rest of the planet can use another term, Irami.
quote:Keeping your father in the states and maintaining a broad economic base is important for American stability, but I am not willing to degrade what I consider our nation's democratic principles in order to do it.
Your democratic principles will be just swell to the people you priced out of jobs...or are you going to force suburbanites to purchase the services of landscapers, and weddings of caterers, etc.?
quote:Keeping your father in the states and maintaining a broad economic base is important for American stability, but I am not willing to degrade what I consider our nation's democratic principles in order to do it.
Katie's father is white, and most of his employees (if I remember right, he lives in Utah) probably are as well. White strangers are, at least if Irami's behavior is any judge, unworthy of any kind of courtesy or benefit of the doubt on any subject whatsoever.
quote:Trade creates wealth. Making trade significantly more difficult destroys wealth. This is true no matter who the trade is with.
Wait, now Tom's victory in this thread becomes much less certain...
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quote:Katie's father is white, and most of his employees (if I remember right, he lives in Utah) probably are as well. White strangers are, at least if Irami's behavior is any judge, unworthy of any kind of courtesy or benefit of the doubt on any subject whatsoever.
We've established that I'm a bigot removed from reality, but I have a suspicion that if we seperate the white collar from the blue collar jobs, we'll find that white collar jobs are largely held by white people, with maybe a bilingual latina secretary or two, and the 100 blue collar jobs are largely held by latinos and blacks- way out of proportion with the state census, with a handful of white developmentally disabled, ex-cons and obvious tools mixed in. Furthermore, if we looked at the salary breakdowns, 30 of the 35 top earners would be white. (I'm assuming an odd Asian and a handful of religiously loyal minority supervisors to account for those five salaries,) and 47 out of the 50 lowest paid jobs will be held by recent immigrants or other minorites. But this is all conjecture.
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"Conjecture"? Is that what they're calling pulling invented numbers out of your-- excuse me, out of thin air?
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Why would you engage in conjecture of that sort? Leaving aside the fact that you're trying to draw conclusions from purely imaginary suppositions, does your "conjecture" actually produce useful recommendations?
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Lets see, 30 out of 35. That is slightly excessive at 86%, only 75% of the US is white. Even a fairly slight bias could, at the high ends, cause that much discrepancy.
Regarding lower paid jobs, there's a substantial population of immigrants coming in with comparatively few job skills and little education. Unsurprisingly, they are represented more in lower paid jobs. This is not a problem. In fact, this is a good thing. Our economy is very free, allowing us to provide numerous jobs, lifting people out of abject poverty into relative comfort (part of the reason so much money is sent home every year).
The problem occurs when this happensbecause they are immigrants. The problem is when this happens because of the color of their skin. The problem is when we fail to have a system that allows people to leave poverty.
Some of those problems happen today. The solutions to them are not, however, what you think they are. Your 'solutions' are devastating to those you think they would protect. Any philosophical advantages would be outweighed by ruin.
Furthermore, many of those solutions seem tailored to produce an underclass. Right now, working hard matters. Working hard improves one's lot in life. Immigrants and racial minorities may dislike the US for many things, but we're still a land of opportunity, particularly in comparison to most of the places immigrants are coming from. Making it so working harder won't make any significant different in your wages unless you work an incredible amount harder, because you're already being paid more than you make the company, is a recipe for proles.
If you want, we can look at places like France, where there are similar guaranteed wages and greater difficulty being fired. Young and less educated people have insanely high unemployment in France; those guarantees aren't protecting them, they're, in the long run (which the system entered long ago) transferring wages from the young and less educated to the older and better educated, because in the long run companies just become more careful about who they hire and avoid people less likely to increase profits by the necessary costs.
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quote:Why would you engage in conjecture of that sort? Leaving aside the fact that you're trying to draw conclusions from purely imaginary suppositions, does your "conjecture" actually produce useful recommendations?
Because I think that Rakeesh, rivka and I worlds apart in conceiving the problem, and if we can't even agree on the facts of the problem, discussing a solution is worthless. Katie's dad owns a non-unionized manufacturing company, I think that I have a rough idea of the working climate. Rakeesh has a rough idea of the working climate. Katie has been silent on the issue, and while I respect her decision to plead the fifth, I can't help thinking that she wouldn't skip an opportunity to rub my face in it if my characterization were wholely off. (Thankfully, I'm just happy she didn't lie. We are talking about people's lives, and my convictions, and a smaller person in her position would have told a big whopper.)
Fugu, if the working environment in the factory is as I suspect, a "land of opportunity," shouldn't mean that everyone has an equal opportunity to run a plantation. That may have been the America the founders fought for, but that's not the one in which I want to live.
quote:Katie's dad owns a non-unionized manufacturing company, I think that I have a rough idea of the working climate.
Baloney. You know nothing and your conjecture is insulting and baseless.
I am not delineating circumstances because no one believes you and you yourself wouldn't listen if you were told.
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Also, I didn't bring up my family's business - you did, and you know nothing about it beyond it's existence. I find the invasion of my personal privacy to be both in poor taste and of questionable value. You are completely dependent on me for facts, but instead choose to invent them - and do it as insultingly as possible.
Fortunately, you're completely wrong and it's obvious.
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quote:Katie's dad owns a non-unionized manufacturing company, I think that I have a rough idea of the working climate.
Bull. I've seen non-unionized manufacturing companies that treat their workers very well. I've seen non-unionized manufacturing companies that treat their workers like dogs. Without knowing anything else, you don't know anything about working conditions there.
My company was non-unionized, and we paid great salaries and had great benefits. It wasn't blue collar, so it's not directly parallel, of course.
But here's the thing you seem incapable of understanding, or even addressing: there was a limit on those salaries. At some price point, it wasn't worth it to our clients to use our services.
quote:Fugu, if the working environment in the factory is as I suspect, a "land of opportunity," shouldn't mean that everyone has an equal opportunity to run a plantation.
So now it's just a suspicion?
You've proven yourself woefully uninformed about quite a few things I happen to have first-hand experience with in the past. Given your admitted bigotry, I find your suspicions to say far more about you than the way this country does or should operate.
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quote:Because I think that Rakeesh, rivka and I worlds apart in conceiving the problem, and if we can't even agree on the facts of the problem, discussing a solution is worthless.
You have no idea what my ideas are about "the problem", Irami. Well, wait, maybe you do...I'm a white man, so that means by default you know what I'm thinking.
Discussing a solution with you is worthless, not because we disagree on the the problem, but because you're perfectly willing to use total speculative BS in support of your "convictions". In my opinion, it's difficult to hold a 'conviction' about something you've entirely made up.
quote:Katie has been silent on the issue, and while I respect her decision to plead the fifth, I can't help thinking that she wouldn't skip an opportunity to rub my face in it if my characterization were wholely off. (Thankfully, I'm just happy she didn't lie. We are talking about people's lives, and my convictions, and smaller person in her position would have told a big whopper.)
Man, you're an ass.
You still haven't addressed a whole series of objections to your stupid ideas. That's not a word I throw around lightly on Hatrack, but given your complete refusal to address things that challenge your "convictions", your open bigotry, and your totally speculative 'numbers', I feel comfortable using it here.
So answer the question a bunch of people asked, Irami: exactly why do you think demand for landscaping and catering (to pick two) services would remain the same if you increased their price by 35%? Not that I believe that ridiculous number, because given the benefits and wages you want to give them, compared to what wages and benefits landscapers and restaurant workers usually earn, the increase would be far above a meager 35%.
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A plantation? You're insulting all those people who did live on plantations, as well as those who are currently put in situations where they're effective slaves. You insult the people who work there, who enjoy working there, and who leave for better situations whenever they present themselves. There are problems with the structure of protections in this economy, but exaggerating the magnitude of protections to draw emotional connections to times where people were bought and sold is an awful practice.
We live in a country where immigrants routinely arrive and open new businesses, run by them, shortly after arrival. Our 'plantations' are so nice that people from other countries risk life and limb for the chances to work on them. This is a land of opportunity, and to imply that those who work hard and advance themselves are slave drivers is deeply offensive.
quote:I can't help thinking that she wouldn't skip an opportunity to rub my face in it
Irami, your mistake is that you judge everyone else to be as tacky and rude and unethical as yourself.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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I'm with fugu on this: it is not cool to denigrate slaves by saying what they suffer is no worse than being paid low wages. (I'm not saying anybody did this -- I didn't read all the posts -- but it is a pet peeve of mine.)
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This conversation should probably be rebooted. This time we could leave out the "douche bag" comment.
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While I completely disagree with what Irami has been saying, and I recognize that he's made some pretty awful and unfounded assertions about kat's father's business, I think that the personal attacks on him are over the top. I'm also aware that this isn't an isolated incident (Irami's rude and unfounded assertions or the offense taken to them), and that there's probably more history between the posters than I am aware of, but I still feel that we should be careful to take issue with what has been said and not attack posters themselves.
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You're probably a decent guy, Rakeesh, but when you say things like this, it makes me think you're not old enough to have gained control of your emotions. Does that not embarrass you?
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There are times I wish Hatrack let us embed images. I have this pic of some cast iron cookery engaged in brief repartee that would be appropriate here.
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quote:You're probably a decent guy, Rakeesh, but when you say things like this, it makes me think you're not old enough to have gained control of your emotions. Does that not embarrass you?
Where were you when Irami called people he's never met a douche bag? Or expressed surprise that people didn't lie just to prove him wrong (as thought that were necessary)?
Yeah, that's where I thought you were.
Irami said that he thinks Katie wouldn't skip an opportunity to be...well, something unpleasant, to rub his accusations in his face and then said he was just glad she didn't lie about it. One obvious inference is that he expected her to lie about it.
Coupled with the other statements he's made in this thread, and in others, yeah, I'ma call him an ass. Given the things he's said, that's actually a pretty mild response to his behavior.
Your "you're so immature!" criticism is laughably ironic, and not because I think you're immature.
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quote:...and that there's probably more history between the posters than I am aware of, but I still feel that we should be careful to take issue with what has been said and not attack posters themselves.
I am taking issue with what's been said. Both now and in the past.
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Tom, I never call people names. Period. Once again, smart as you are, perceptive as you can be, you miss my actual point. But who cares? Not I.
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quote:Originally posted by steven: Rakeesh, you make fairly good points.
Tom, I never call people names. Period. Once again, smart as you are, perceptive as you can be, you miss my actual point. But who cares? Not I.
Steven, how about when you repeatedly called katherina a quote,"attention junkie", endquote in the "hey mom, I'm an atheist" thread? It was less than a month ago. Doesn't that count as calling people names?
Although I will admit you were more polite than I remembered in the Dr. Price threads.
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Oh....there is absolutely no need to engage steven on my behalf, although if someone wants to do it for themself that's certainly up to them. In all the vast membership and lurkerdom of Hatrack I don't think there's a single person who takes what steven says about katharina (me) seriously; if there are, I am certainly not concerned about that person's opinion.
The ignorant, unfounded, slanderous allegations about my family's business are irritating, but I suppose they are useful to show exactly what Irami bases his view of reality on: nothing.
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Actually, I'd love to have it out. Irami, you've done a lot of insults and sideways innuendos, but I think you should lay it out.
What exactly, are you imagining the features of work at my dad's plant to be? What's that bad word you want to call my dad's employees that you won't say out loud?
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Oh...about Irami's opinion, not really - it wouldn't change when confronted with reality anyway.
I do care about the general impression that my dad is a ruthless plantation owner. I will say that most of the people employed there have been reccomended by other employees and that out of 100 blue-collar workers, about a quarter have been there ten years or more. Another quarter have been there five years or more. The plant went from about 75 on the floor to about a 100 on the floor within the last three years, so all in all I think that says something.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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"Steven, how about when you repeatedly called katherina a quote,"attention junkie", endquote in the "hey mom, I'm an atheist" thread? It was less than a month ago. Doesn't that count as calling people names?"
There's a difference between calling someone a word that would have gotten you sent to the principal's office in school, and calling them a name that notes that they tend to try to hog attention. I'm not defending my behavior, but what I said was not as much the result of an emotional outburst, IMHO.
Also, I have been called names many, many times both here and on Sake river. Rarely have I responded in kind.
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When you are in a position of prominence you will get slammed. It is inevitable. I'm happy his business is prospering and I am sure his employees are happy about that too.
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Steven, don't get huffy when you say something like, "Tom, I never call people names. Period." and get called on a laughably false claim like that.
At the very least, you must admit you exaggerrated.
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