GaBeRockKing
No bio...
User ID: 3255
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Why wouldn't they have a union? It's in every corporation's self-interest to become a monopsony on labor so they can pay below market equilibrium rates for talent. It's in every worker's interest to become part of a monopoly on labor so they can force pay above market equilibrium.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty." Brutalist buildings are like tragic plays. Not every tragic play is good/pleasing, and not every play should be a tragedy, but people should be forced to read hamlet and people should be forced to interact with the occasional brutalist building.
I remember in particular the church my mother took me to in some of my earliest memories-- the famous brutalist church in UW Madison. I loved that church, and think it was a tragedy that it was later reformed. Sure-- it was ominous, and eerie. It doubtlessly inspired guilt, and fear, and terrible awe among its congregants. But those are all things one should feel before the Lord. It was unique, and special, and beautiful, and useful. Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?
This is a solved problem. If you're getting paid hourly and there's no good way to discriminate non-work time from work-time you just claim as much time as you think your bosses and a court of law would let you get away with because that's what you're incentivized to do. If they can't accurately correlate your level of output to your hours worked that's a them problem.
And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?
You don't. Abuse is the point. There's no possible way to segregate between "legitimate" hourly work and "illegitimate" hourly work without massively expanding the regulatory state... which of course would lead to regulatory capture that would favor all the people favored by the current system anyways.
"No tax on overtime" is transparently the sort of populist bullshit that succeeds as messaging but is is totally unworkable as a policy proposal. It's a way for trump to tell blue-collar workers that he's their guy without having to actually promise workable policy. When he tries to pass this and it fails his base will blame congress instead of him, and then content themselves despite a complete lack of further advancement. Just like his "build the wall" spiel.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Passing around information is what software engineers do. And more importantly, I'm under no impression that the value of my work is correlated to how long I work is correlated to how much I get paid. And yet it would be trivial accounting-wise to turn me into an hourly instead of salaried worker, and the same is true for the rest of the bullshit-email-job cadre. The business doesn't even need to pay me any more money on net; in fact they could pay me less and it would still be worth it looking at total post-tax compensation.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Our society feels as if it is run for the benefit of retirees and people with fake email jobs.
Hi, I'm one of those people with a fake email job (software engineering.) You do understand that offices could easily shift to paying their employees hourly, right? I already track hours. CEOs work a massive amount of "overtime" too. Who's going to tell them that golfing with their business partners isn't a business meeting? They can just shift their stock compensation to income instead. "No taxes on overtime time" alone or in conjunction with "no taxes on tips" is effectively just a massive, widespread reduction on income taxes for everyone who's not a public servant.
If your goal is to destroy the public sector, balloon the deficit, and justify cuts to every type of welfare-- well, I admire the elegance of your murder weapon. But at least be honest about it. This isn't a proposal to "help blue collar workers." It's a proposal to kill medicare, social security, and medicaid all at the same time.
And for the record, I 100% believe Kamala Harris is going to end up saying something similar, just like she copied trump's homework on the "no taxes on overtime" thing. The only difference is, she'll also impose punitive wealth taxes and maybe a VAT to continue funding our existing welfare state. It's a truly no-win scenario.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.
I think you have an overly narrow view of what the "industry" is. The publishing industry, certainly is staffed mainly by 30 and 40 something white women trying to appeal to the same. But the superset-- the literature industry-- is much larger, still relevant, and wholly unkillable. We think of "literature" as being "classical books about people being depressed in russian" and "modern books about suburban moms leaving their husbands" because that's what we learned about in school and that's what makes it onto the talk shows. And so because nobody reads those books and actually changes what they believe, we think literature is a dead, academic pursuit. But in reality, I think it's stuff like dark romantasy smut and isekai webnovels that are having the greatest net effect on philosophical and moral development. (Which is a terrifying thought, but I digress.) You can find any number of people talking about how, for example, Mushoku Tensei changed their lives.
/u/coffee_enjoyer this is also relevant to your comment.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
I mean in exclusively the technical sense, but you're a scrub. Effective emoji use is associated with better social outcomes. (Low quality study but I'm being lazy since I don't think you'll disagree with me.) Emojis are the new midatlantic accent are the new cockney rhyming slang. Their aesthetic qualities are totally irrelevant-- what matters is that their effective use signals charisma and social status.
Yes. And? I want something from you. Does it make more sense for me to offer something I want, or something you want in return for it?
Are you seriously pissed off that I'm not assuming you should share my values and arguing from them?
If so, here's your argument: "Pope said so, Q.E.D."
More options
Context Copy link