The point is that Creationism isn’t even an issue in most other countries. Almost no-one in their right mind would be seriously advocating for it to be taught in schools at all outside the context of a Religious Studies class.
Add in things like the curious reluctance to adopt the Metric system like nearly every other country on the planet, the resistance to eminently sensible and reasonable ideas like the abolition of the 1c piece and the introduction of $1 coins, the atrocious minimum wages, the militant opposition to the idea of giving everyone- rich or poor- free access to healthcare, and it’s really not hard to see why places like Canada, Europe, the UK, and Australia/NZ look at the US and wonder what the fuck is wrong with you guys sometimes.
It’s the almost uniquely American tendency to stand near a cliff, hear someone say, “Don’t get too close to the edge, you could fall and hurt yourself,” retort with indignation, “It’s a free country and I’ll do what I damned well please! Nobody tells me what’s best for me but me!” and fling oneself over the side.
Sometimes it’s endearing and can even be a powerful virtue in times of true oppression. More often it’s just embarrassing and counterproductive.
Underline mine. That hasn’t been adressed again, as far as I can tell. May I ask where did anybody get this notion? From statistics about Romanian orphanages under Ceaucescu?
Starving Artist, thanks very much for taking the time to write this up, it’s very much appreciated and I don’t disagree with this as much as you might think
Reading through the above I think my main response (and some of the background for my asking) is that those of us who do want to push ourselves further still rely on those people who either just want to do the minimum to get by, or alternatively don’t want the stress of a higher position (which is something you find in Denmark quite often where family life is rated far, far higher than anything to do with work).
Being a CEO is no use if you don’t have a workforce to produce the things you sell at a reasonable price. By not taking care of the workforce (by which I mean making sure things like their healthcare are taken care of, that they do have a reasonable safety net if they are unemployed for x period of time, they have a decent salary and so forth) you are effectively shooting yourself in the foot since you are only harming your own workers (either your current workers or those you may employ in the future). In my mind it’s vital to make sure that those of us who want to push ourselves further along also remember that we would be nowhere without the people who are content doing their 9 to 5 and going home. I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to clock in their hours and go home quickly at the end of the day, it doesn’t work for me since boredom at work is something that drives me nuts and I like to push myself, but I think we do also have to remember how much every business relies on everyone in the business and make sure that there is provision to ensure that everyone has equal access to the basics. I’m not saying that everyone should be contributing so much tax that people can happily sit around twiddling their fingers all day but I do mean that there is never an excuse (not even once!) for someone to go into debt over a long term illness or a similar circumstance where they may not be able to work for a while. I realise that this means that some people will find a loophole in the system and sit around at home when they could work, but I would rather this than we ever let someone who wants to work but cannot be driven into debt over their own health or similar.
I’ve started to ramble on a bit here, but do you see what I mean? In your example, where you pushed yourself up in the autoparts world, you would still have been nowhere without the people who just wanted to work their 9 to 5, the people who were actually making what it was that your business sold. There is such a close relationship between the people to whom their career is a major factor in their lives and those who are more interested in just getting the money that they need to enjoy time with their family that those who push themselves up cannot forget to make sure that the fundamentals are provided for the ‘workers’ (I hate to use that term) should they experience hard times or to make sure that the fundamentals do not cost a crippling amount. This isn’t in a patronising “there, there” way but in a “you make me what I am and I should make sure that I don’t drop you in the gutter when you have a problem”, it’s also self serving since you never know when you may be debilitated by accident or illness and lose your potential to pay for yourself for a short or long term period.
The above appears to place the responsibility on a purely corporate level, but (as I’m sure you gathered I would think) this can be applied upwards as a societal responsibility. Since from the above we are all interdependent on each other, why are we not looking out for each other’s well being? I’m not about to break out into a round of singing here but since we are all dependent on each other then all of us providing a helping hand to each other if/when we need it can’t be a bad thing can it? By knowing that ‘society’ (government) is taking care of your health, that you have some help to get back onto your feet in times of trouble and so on then a great deal of stress will be lifted from people enabling them to function far better.
Just about everybody who pays to have their lawn professionally mowed gets this much, if not more. The lawns are just average size, like you’d expect to find in most low to middle class types of housing. Probably around 4,000 to 5,000 sq. ft. on average, with some variation each way. Small enough anyway that they can be mowed with a standard 20" mower, edged, weedeater trimmed and concrete surfaces blown clean in an hour or so.
You can check this out for yourself pretty easily. Just knock on a few doors in your neighborhood (or any neighborhood that you’d consider low to middle class with an average size lawn) and tell the people who answer that you’re thinking about having your lawn done and ask what they pay. I’d wager that among those paying for professional service (as opposed to college kids working for beer money) you’ll find that $30 to $35 is pretty much standard.
There are also a variety of lawn care forums you can Google online where guys in the business from all over the country go to talk shop. You can learn a lot there.
I thought about writing a step-by-step guide telling people how to do all this after I discovered it a few years ago, but it became fairly obvious in talking with the minimum-wage types who I regarded as the target audience that they were largely uninterested…the impression being that they either lacked confidence and drive or that it just seemed too much like work. So I never got around to writing the guide even though I did gain a lot of knowledge about the business itself. (Some of it firsthand btw. I did some mowing myself just to make sure I knew what I was talking about and could speak with the voice of experience, and to glean the finer points that would have been missed had I not done the work myself.)
Feel free to PM me anytime if you have further questions.
The problem with government interference in markets isn’t that people have different levels of ability. The problem is that it distorts the market. Similarly, the areas in which the government generally does things better than the market, like national defense or having a common currency, has nothing to do with people’s abilities and everything to do with the fact that those are markets where the benefits or cots are externalities and so the markets will fail in private hands.
People having different abilities is not (mostly) why capitalism and socialism work the way they do.
We’re not talking about government interference in markets; we’re talking about who deserves what portion of the money pie. My contention is that those who work harder/smarter and/or provide greater value should by rights earn a larger share of that pie. grey_ideas (and I promise to get back to your last post soon, grey :)) asked me how pay should be handled if everybody had the same intelligence and work ethic, given that not enough upper-level jobs exist for everyone to do and that certain low-level jobs such as garbage collection would still have to be done.
My opinion is that if no one can do any given job better than someone else, he deserves to make no more and they deserve to make no less. It is the difference in intelligence, talent, work ethic, judgement and how they choose to spend their time that makes the difference in why some people earn more and others earn less, and it’s also my opinion that those who choose the road more easily traveled have not suffered unfairly under the system and do not deserve a share of the produce earned by those who work smarter and harder than they do.
I think we should all earn our own way in life. This is what certain people around here call an “I’ve got mine, screw you” attitude, but which I would characterize as an “I’ve got mine, why don’t you get yours, too?” attitude…followed by a “Why do you feel entitled to mine when I worked for it and you didn’t?” attitude.
Those are unavoidably interconnected. Equalizing pay is a distortion of the market.
The thing is, hardly anyone on this board would disagree with the central truth of that. I think we’ve had a hard core Marxist or three, but not many. Who do YOU know who seriously argues for totally equal pay across the board?
But pay isn’t connected - not directly, anyway - to intelligence and work ethic. That is not how it works. Pay is connected to the market value of the labour being done; you can be very smart and hard working but if your labour is worth just $15 an hour, you will and should be paid less than I am even though I’m lazy and not very bright. Hell, market conditions could make your salary jump, or fall, or totally vanish tomorrow, even though your intelligence and work ethic would not change.
Stupid or lazy people can, and quite often do, make more money than smart or hard working people. There’s certainly a strong correlation between intelligence and good decisions and making good money, but it’s not an absolute correlation, never has been, and never will be.
It’s fine to say that, but you don’t totally believe it. You don’t want to pay for EVERYTHING in life. You seem happy to participate in the collective purchase of things like naitonal defense, law enforcement, highway construction, currency production, civil law, and a wide variety of other things. And I sincerely doubt you’ll be sending back your Social Security checks.
You aren’t seriously saying you want to entirely pay your way through life, because you think nothing of the collective benefit you get from the things everyone pays for. If your house catches fire you’re not going to complain about the fire department coming to put it out even though that would mean you’d “used” more in fire department costs than you’d ever paid in. And not many people on this board, and none in this thread I can see, are seriously arguing the theoretical opposite, wich I guess would be total utopian Marxism.
The arguments here are along the margins; what constitutes government interference in the market where the positives outweigh the negatives? In some cases the positives clearly outweigh the negatives (e.g. the govenment running the courts and police force) and in some cases the government clearly does a hack job (nationalized petroleum consortiums are famously awful.) But there’s a lot of areas where, frankly, it’s not at all clear whether government does better than the private sector - Social Security is a fascinating topic in this regard - or if the best choice is a mix of public and private, as is the case in most countries with universal health insurance.
Is this actually your viewpoint or are you just putting a hypothetical counter-argument out there? Because I can’t believe a 13 year old male is honestly saying they don’t want to see boobs on TV or hear Samuel L. Jackson in badass-mode calling someone a “Motherfucker”.
I think most people can agree that hardcore porn shouldn’t be on prime time TV, for obvious reasons. But it’s insane that swear-words get bleeped out of movies intended for adults, especially when they’re being shown at night.
This clearly isn’t the case in other countries with legalised prostitution and there’s no reason it would be true in the US. And as someone else said in the thread, “So what if they do?” It’s a job, and as long as it’s properly regulated and so on, if a woman wishes to voluntarily work as a prostitute I think she should be allowed to.
