I think a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living. When I was unemployed for a while, I was pretty happy in general but stressed about money running out. Without the money issue the last thing I would want to do is to sell my time to a soulless corporation. I have enough interests to keep me busy. Work just sucks up time I would love to spend on better things.
I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable.
Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products.
Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.
Agreed. To me "conservative" means to be cautious and slow/reluctant to change things. The quick dismantling of institutions that's happening right now is the opposite of conservative.
"It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes."
All dictators/authoritarians have a whole layer of very capable people under them that will implement orders from above without thinking about ethics or morality. But they will do a good job. Hitler had people like Himmler and Speer, Stalin had Beriya and many others (don't know names). The interesting thing is that these people will also do well in democracies. A lot of ex-nazis in Germany turned into good democratic people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Filbinger). You also have these people in companies where for example layoffs are done in the most humiliating way.
I really, really, really hope this guy gets treated like very else under similar circumstances. Top execs are totally used to be able to buy their way out of problems with company money without any personal repercussions other than maybe a big severance package.
The argument for the high wages was always the "big responsibilty" the manegerial class has to bear. IMO to hold them personally liable is the absolite bare minimum, they already for the money for it. In reality CEO processes are often among the line: "You earned 10 Millions in boni for illegal behavior? Here is a 100K fine!"
A simple tradesperson is also personally responsible when they fuck up their job despite better knowledge. So if those can go to jail for the consequences of their dealings why shouldn't a CEO where the consequences are potentially of a scale several magnitudes higher? Wasn't personal responsibility in everybodies mouths, or is that only important when we talk about poor people?
Aren't the wages high because the people who decide the wages are the execs themselves? (Alternatively a genius scheme involving a "remuneration consultant".)
The market amd the law allow it, and so it is the case. Moral justifications are just post-hoc fluff.
That is the real reason, yeah. But I will hold them accountable to their moral fluff, because that is their public justification wheneverthat topic is being discussed publicly.
I agree with disincentivizing white collar crime with more severe punitive measures, but if you throw capital punishment into the mix you’re just trading one ethical dilemma for another.
Capital punishment is capital punishment, but let's be real here: if there is a group of people who should fear it, it's the people making decisions that affect people in the thousands, millions or billions.
Hypothetical: how many people should get cancer or other serious illnesses and defects from chemicals a company produces, until the company management who knew about it were in the "war criminal" crime bracket?
I still love this "hoax" the Yes Men managed to pull off [1] in it they appear as representatives for Dow Chemical on BBC and claim that the company will now after 20 years take full responsibility for the largest chemical accident in history that killed ~18k people and impacted many more, making the victims right. Only for the real company to back peddle and say "no no no, that's a hoax we will not do that.".
However most justice systems have a severe anti-poor bias. People that rob a store out of pure devastation for 100 bucks serve longer and harsher punishments than a CEO who embezels a million leading to safety violations that cost the life of 20 workers purely for greed.
Sure, the former is much more straigthforward in terms of the crime (= less wiggle room for excuses), but the latter is an entirely different magnitude of value and impact on human life.
We need to hold these people accountable to the same standards. If stealing 1000 bucks lands you in jail for years, stealing milions should actually result in a longer conviction.
And fines as a percentage of income or with a point system, e.g. when they catch you speeding. The goal is to make it equally painful to break the law to a poor and a rich person as is only just.
Otherwise what is painful punishment for a poor person is just a laughable fee for rich people.
I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy.
The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
I think it will be both. Raising prices for some goods because of tariffs (and adding some percent for good measure and profit) while also discontinuing others. It may go like the car market where cheaper options are slowly being phased out and the focus goes to higher priced vehicles.
If anything it will be very short term. Nobody knows where this is going so it would be suicidal for small businesses to scale up. Large companies have the reserves but little guys don’t. I am very worried that this will lead to another dying of small businesses like happened during COVID.
reply