yestrusocialist
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User ID: 2545
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
Here's my proposal for how to solve this, with a plan I am shamelessly stealing from Greg Abbot and Camp of the Saints.
Step 1, just start rounding up Palestinians and putting them on boats. Let them grab their possessions if they want to cooperate. These are nice, safe, clean boats with cameras everywhere to film all the food/medicine/clean water being provided. Maybe also Gaza is 100% blockaded and no food goes in, giving people an incentive to leave.
Step 2: the boats set sail to Iran. Egypt allows them to traverse Suez because...well keep reading.
Step 3: the unarmed boats full of refugees and cameras go directly to shore in Iran. They ignore warnings to stop. They let the Iranians inspect them for weapons. They land, tell everyone to get off, and repeat.
This puts Iran in the unenviable position of either a) having to martyr thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees on camera or b) live with Palestinians. If Egypt doesn't let them through Suez, then Egypt can have the Palestinians.
What you guys think of this plan?
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
Again, the distinction they make is initiation of violence, which you seem to be trying hard to ignore.
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
I'm confused. You seem to be trying to get from "union labor has allies willing to use violence" to "this is good" without advancing any argument why. Instead, you are just repeating truisms that no one disagrees with as if they make your case.
Your last sentence is an odd non-sequitur since free market types don't object to using violence against others who initiate violence.
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
My mistake, I thought you were attempting to make a statement more substantive than a purely descriptive "workers have lots of power due to threats of violence".
No one disputes that, so I'm not sure why you are devoting so much verbiage to repeating it.
Why vote to pay union dues for no benefit?
I was responding to this. They voted for unionization due to benefits they hoped to achieve for white workers, at the expense of black ones.
As noted in the article, the higher pay for black workers also reflects that Ford was greedy where others were racist.
That's the whole point of unionization - letting some workers get a great gig at the expense of others.
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
And when the bottleneck goes the other way companies can push down wages and so on. It's just swings and roundabouts.
When a union refuses to work unless excess pay is provided, men with guns will harm the employer if they seek alternate arrangements with willing third parties.
When an employer refuses to pay enough to employees, nothing happens if the employee seeks alternative arrangements with willing third parties.
This is not an emergent process. It's explicit coercive action by the government to favor one side over the other.
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
If you read your own link, you'll discover the reason Ford got lower priced workers is because they hired lower priced negros and minimized racial discrimination. As many right wing economists have noted, taste-based discrimination costs money and free markets penalize it.
One reason the (majority white) workers voted for unions was to reduce labor market competition by colored workers. This was a major motivator for many other pro-Union laws such as Davis Bacon and minimum wage.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act_of_1931
Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too–the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage–and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work–it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?
- Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, 1957, after many colored workers moved to MA and started competing economically with his constituents
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
There's a 25% import tax on light trucks, which are 69% of the market and consist of basically anything bigger than a Toyota Camry. So as long as the unions steal 24% or less, it's not actually cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1714156/light-trucks-take-record-69-us-market/
This is primarily caused by Obama era fuel efficiency rules, which hold big cars to unrealistic fuel efficiency standards but allow trucks to escape fuel efficiency standards by becoming larger. For obvious reasons unions have opposed attempts to fix these rules.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/kdkdx3/normal_truck_vs_american_truck/
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
How does it do that? Hanson quite explicitly narrowed his questions about rape in general to "gentle silent rape":
I presented evidence that most men would rather be raped than cuckolded...[referencing a prior post which is linked] It occurred to me recently that we can more clearly compare cuckoldry to gentle silent rape. Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret. Now drugging someone against their will is a crime, but the added rape would add greatly to the crime in the eyes of today’s law, and the added punishment for this addition would be far more than for cuckoldry.
A few hours later he called out again that gentle silent rape differs quite a lot from standard rape:
Added 11p 1Dec: 95 comments so far, almost all of which ignore my “gentle silent” modifier, and just argue about standard rape.
So no, Hanson is not implying anything of the sort.
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
Did the white conservative protesters actually do anything?
Near as I can tell, the public's vague conception that they did is mostly based the lie - spread by the NYT - that protesters killed Brian Sicknick. That's why the left was so mad when Mitch McConnel released the tapes of Qanon Shaman wandering around peacefully and listening to cops telling him "don't go in there".
yestrusocialist
1yr ago
There are plenty of serious tech investments in India. But sometimes western VC's - such as "Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million" - are simply idiots.
But it's also worth recognizing - as every engineer in India does - the distinction between product and service companies. The vast majority of Indian software employment is at service companies like Infosys. These engineers are paid a lot less and are not very good. If you live in the west they are probably your only interaction with Indian software engineers. The idea of the service companies building a ChatGPT competitor is laughable, but they can certainly help migrate from one HR software provider to another. The price difference between them and a western engineer is where this dumb VC got the idea of ChatGPT for $10M from.
But in reality, OpenAI spent $8M on cloud compute alone in 2017. Indian engineers capable of building Indian ChatGPT might cost 30-40% less in BLR than in SF. So if you want to start Indian OpenAI on a budget, the budget is upwards of $600M compared to OpenAI's initial budget of $1B. That's a discount but not much of one.
There is serious tech investment in India, but it's mostly by western companies or inside big Indian companies (e.g. Ola). Salaries for comparable engineers are higher than in Europe, a bit less than in the US. But there's plenty of important and technically difficult internal projects being executed.
Or you need 100 boats with 1000 person capacity if each one takes 10 trips. I'm shocked at your suggestion that the Palestinians are a bunch of terrorists, rather than innocent victims of Israeli oppression!
As I see it, Israel + USA.
USA and Israel can certainly provide tons of Israeli/American flag branded food/water/etc, which Iran can distribute as they see fit.
Yes, Iran certainly does have the ability to shoot guns at boats full of Palestinian refugees while the cameras broadcast videos of innocent women and children dying to the world. How is showing Iran to be bloodthirsty killers of Arabs and getting rid of Palestinians not a huge win for Israel?
Getting from the Meditterranean to the Persian Gulf is a far simpler logistical problem than Persian Gulf to America, and Iran is far less capable of logistics than Israel or the US.
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