🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@rmerriam

And you arent paying attention... thats not what happens..

You have a group of people not making enough to live... You enact minimum wage and cause those people to go from making not-enough to 0.

You solved nothing, you probably killed a bunch of people. You made nothing better.

@trinsec

@olives As far as classical high level languages go I like it more than most partly due to the freedom it allows.

That said it has horrible handling of immutability. Sadly many languages handle that poorly.

@rmerriam

You can buy as many politicians as they want, those voting simply have the choice not to vote for anyone they buy... because the voters have the real power.

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@rmerriam @trinsec

I am entierly serious, and not stirring a pot.

If you think taking away what little money someone makes because it "isnt enough" is somehow solving a problem then I hate to tell you but it sounds like your the one who isnt serious here.

You dont solve the problem of people making a less than living wage by taking away what money they make. That should be obvious.

@rmerriam

No matter how much a business donates to a super pac they still cant dictate even a single vote.. the tohousands of employees votes have far more power than ANY amount of money spent on a super pac.. .which by the way is something people can do too (invest tons of money into super pacs)... so very poor argument.

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@rmerriam @trinsec

"Solving" the fact that people dont have a living wage by making it illegal for them to have their less-than-living-wage job and essentially firing them leaving them with less than they had before.. is NOT solving anything.

@rmerriam

It literally has no effect other than to cause all the people who are making less than a minimum wage and barely able to feed themselves into people who now have no job at all and are in a much worse position, starving, meanwhile more educated/skilled people have replaced their job, people who would have made a living wage regardless.

No it doesnt fix a problem.. it makes a problem much much worse and fixes nothing.

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@antares

There are plenty of jobs which may be a decade or two out before they will be automated.. it will take time and its a process.. but its a very real future we are moving towards quickly.

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@VoxDei

> But from the workers' point of view, whether the company is gouging its customers by price fixing is irrelevant to how it treats its staff.

No its very relevant, because price fixing isnt just something they can do on products but its something they can do on wages as well. Therein lies the problem, it is **very** relevant.

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@voidabyss

> It seems to me that reinventing a lean and work condition oriented union is more feasible then “fixing the government”.

No because you still wind up with a broken government that wont represent the best interests of the people and unions will, at best, stem the tide of the damage the government will cause.

> Unions played a major role in the past 60s/70s pushing for work condition reforms that many are enjoying today and especially uplifting the manual labor class from poverty to middle income.

Unions played a role trying to stem the tide of a broken government, no doubt. But they are still a hack to try to compensate for building a government that represents the people and far from a proper solution.

@voidabyss The more we refuse to address the government and accept half-measure broken hacks like unions simply because the government is useless... the more the problem will persist.

This is the failing of the left side of politics, they refuse to fix things the right way, if at all, and tend to accept half measures that make the problem worse or at least harder to fix.

@freepeoplesfreepress

Certainly no arguments there.

@freepeoplesfreepress Yes, unions developed due to a broken system... which is exactly my point.. time to fix the system and cut out the stuff that should have never existed if we did things the right way.

@georgetakei

Holy hell, thats just intentionall pointless racism at this point...

@JonKramer

Walmart was not the reason for anti-trust laws... anti-trust laws goes back way further.

If you are using refgulation to prevent businesses from opening because they got too big.. then you are implementing an anti-trust law already. But your "fix" doesnt address coalitions, at best that may address single companies getting too large.

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@JonKramer

This isnt theory, it already happened witht he gas industry and was the reason we needed anti-trust laws. This isnt theory, its history.

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@JonKramer

No thats not how data analysis is done, ive mentioned this pattern many times. You would have to look at how the wealth of a country **changes** after a change in its minimum wage.. You cant just look at minimum wage correlation, thats not how you investigate causation.

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@JonKramer

Because once the coverage starts to approach a whole niche you have complete control.

Imagine the extreme of either of these cases, where the vast majority of people and companies decide to collaborate. Price fixing allows you to set unfair prices that prevent competition from undercutting you as you can fix the price locally to beat your competition while raising the price marginally everywhere else to make up your costs. Then when your competition goes out of business you just bring prices higher int he area and recoup your costs again.

It completely prevents competition from arising and thus eliminates any possibility of a free market.

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