Qwortech
13d ago
I'm genuinely curious about a projected 2-3% inflation when imports are all increased in cost by >10%, and that includes a lot of input costs for domestic goods. It doesn't pass the sniff test. I'm open to being educated about it though.
Qwortech
8mo ago
Does renovating a 1950's bungalow count? I've been working on this since January and living in the house since May. Full rewire, gutted the kitchen and bathroom down to the studs, built my own kitchen cabinets, installed a pantry over the basement stairs, hardwood floors refinished, repaired and painted every surface upstairs. With the exception of part of the wiring and refinishing the floors I've done everything myself with help from my father and a friend. I've learned so much. Electrical, cabinetry, flooring, mud and taping, working with old plaster (hauled out thousands of pounds of it), clever workarounds to avoid going into the vermiculite filled attic, plumbing, painting, demo work, landscaping, installing windows... It's so tedious and eats up all of my free time but I think it's something I'll appreciate in the long run.
Part of my wishes we'd just shelled out more money for a 'move in ready' home. It would have been much easier, waaaay less stress, and I would have had so much more free time. But I'm 'saving' tens of thousands of dollars, and all of this experience is invaluable. I wouldn't recommend it unless you know it will take twice as long and be twice as tedious as you expect.
Qwortech
10mo ago
Couple of minor responses:
social media has a lot of upsides and there could always be a counter cultural push back against the all encompassing sides of it.
Inequality growing is a contested issue and I don't know how strongly to feel about it. I live in a low CoL city in Canada and I have lots of friends with highschool or less who own homes and have families. I think the extremes make it to our attentions. That said, housing prices are controversially a big problem right now but it can be solved, and there's lots of mainstream attention pushing that direction.
AI may not devalue certain kinds of labour in the short/medium term. And there's always a chance of it ushering in so much productivity that material needs are much more abundant and cheap. It's cheaper and easier than ever to purchase low-risk index funds and at least get a piece of the productivity pie.
Online dating sucks but again, you only really hear the horror stories. I used it for the first time after a divorce and met a long term partner within 2 weeks. I did not optimize for the system, I was 100% honest and straightforward in my profile and got a minor number of matches but they seemed to be higher quality for me.
Politicians have always done this. It's easier to find out what's going on and discuss it meaningfully than it used to be. I'm cynical about this one though so I say focus on local politics and things you can actually affect.
Qwortech
10mo ago
I think in interest of actual usability, two scores could be used on a positive/neutral/negative scale: 'value' and 'agreement'. You could remove the neutral if you want since it's basically the default reading of a non-vote. So then you get +/- on value and agreement. Lots of times I can see value in posts that I disagree with and my usual habit has always been to prioritize that as the metric I use. Others prioritize agreement. Maybe you could separate them out. I have my doubts that it would work, but maybe.
Qwortech
1yr ago
You could do what Europe did to civilize. They killed off the bottom 1-2% of their population every year until those with the most violent tendencies had been eliminated.
I can't tell if this is trolling or just completely lacking in any empathy and interest in giving a serious response.
Qwortech
1yr ago
To be fair I'm getting more out of the responses. Without the catalyst get generate those responses where people do try fairly hard to elaborate their points to someone who disagrees with them, it's not nearly as interesting. The way he's shifting around and stuff is annoying but at least it's generating a conversation that a bystander can skim through and find good nuggets in.
Qwortech
1yr ago
Qwortech
1yr ago
I've been around since the /r/SSC culture war thread days. I'm probably more centrist that most here and I have really always appreciated the contrarians who participate in this space like Darwin used to. Since the move to /r/themotte and even more since the exodus here, unfortunately it does feel more and more like the spirit has shifted to dunking, probably partially because of the friction need to find this forum and setup an account rather than just popping by on your normal reddit account.
I have been reading this discussion and all of your posts in it though. I don't agree with everything you're saying but I do appreciate the fact that it forces the conversation into words so that I can read arguments and rebuttals. Please continue.
This is one of those things where I assume it can't be as bad as it sounds. I skimmed through 5 or 6 articles on the strike and only one of them mentioned the details of the equal pay ruling in 2012. If you just looked at the current articles, you'd never know the underlying issue.
So then I asked GPT4o for some context. The city is forced to deal with the costs and have tried to find reasonable solutions but the union is understandably not into the removal of higher paying roles and cuts to wages down the line for people that take those affected positions. The roles that are in question (bin men, street cleaning, parks - all outdoor jobs AFAIK) were deemed to receive higher than market compensation during that equal pay case due to union negotiated bonuses and regular OT hours. Those rates were hard to reduce as you would expect. I couldn't find any real hard evidence of the magnitude of all of this but it sounds like par for the course for long standing union jobs like this.
I did some more digging though and the real meat is the 2012 case which hinged on the legal principal of "equal value". According to 4o:
It's noted that the female-dominated roles include more flexible hours, less physically demanding work, less exposure to the weather, later start times and shorter expected working hours. But those things would not be taken into consideration, except that those are factors that made those roles more appealing to women and that these differences in working conditions are part of the reason for the gender divide. In other words: the higher paid jobs are harder, lower status, less flexible. That means they have to pay more and they are more likely to be held by men. And because the easier, more flexible roles are filled by more women, but the "value" they create is the same, they must be paid the same amount.
I'm sure those male-dominate roles are overpaid to some degree due to the union doing what unions do. fair. But they don't seem to care about the real reasons for the pay difference. It's wild.
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