Wage Increases

How much does insufficient time contribute to a lack of invention?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “To which degree is not having enough time, and being relatively busy, contribute to most people not being able to come up with new ground breaking ideas, make new inventions, or even making novels, manga etc.?”

Many answers are the typical soporifics based on the presumption that today’s economics are “normal.” There is no accommodation for the dysfunctional state of economic affairs people live with today.

People can conceptualize how one income earner per family was the norm 50 years ago. Still, they can’t imagine the math well enough to understand the differences between then adequately and now when a two-income family can barely make ends meet.

During the heyday of the middle class and the economics of a time we’ve lost, blue-collar labourer dad could earn enough from his low-skilled job to afford a mortgage, a relatively new vehicle, and an annual vacation for himself, his wife, and their two-and-a-half kids.

That’s just a pipe dream which no longer exists for the average citizen, particularly not when a large contingent of full-time employees can’t afford stable housing.

Unskilled labour means being unable to afford to live. In the U.S., one needs two full-time jobs to afford to rent a cheap private suite. Shared accommodation is the only way to make ends meet. Consolidating incomes to meet basic survival needs has become the norm.

One job is no longer enough to survive on.

Forget investing in one’s future.

Income mobility has all but vanished.

Everyone today has been living with a supplemental income in a gig economy while learning to monetize every waking moment to feed and clothe themselves for so long that it’s become a normalized existence.

There’s no time left for a social life, let alone any entrepreneurial initiative. Topping that challenge off, no disposable income exists to permit investments in education or capital purchases to allow expansion. One must scrimp and save while sacrificing meeting sleep and nutritional requirements to cobble together something of a hope for building a better future.

It’s insane, and no one knows any better because the period in which trillions have been stolen from the working class has happened so slowly that one would have to understand what starting from scratch then was like compared to what starting from scratch today is like.

How unfortunate for me but fortunate for those who will listen. The difference between then and now is nightmare and day.

Getting a job that would not only pay for living expenses and a social life while having plenty left over to bank and save for an education was a matter of a decent paying labour job during summer break from school and a part-time job during the academic year. Even with those financial burdens, there was still plenty of disposable income to afford a very healthy social life. A concert back then, for example, didn’t cost a week’s worth of pay but half of a shift for one night’s work — a movie cost less than one hour’s worth of labour. A movie night out now is an entire day’s worth of labour.

I think it’s essential to stop counting numbers on the level of an abstraction like money and start counting the increasing costs we’ve been enduring based on our time because that’s the most valuable commodity each of us has.

It’s much easier to ignore the costs we’ve been increasingly enduring without matching increases in our income when they’re treated like abstractions. If we were to look at how much time has been stolen from our lives, I’m pretty sure the guillotines would be out in full force right now.

The problem with factoring economic changes based on dollar figures is that it allows the victim-shaming mindset we see displayed by so many sycophants for the wealthy to assert their nonsense positions with righteous indignity.

They can remain utterly oblivious to reality and the delusional nature of presumptions autonomically adjusted to a dysfunctional economy while failing to account for the severe impact on one’s time that has been stolen from the working class.

It’s been slightly over ten years ago now that I had my life destroyed by a nuclear bomb being dropped on it, not because of anything I did but because others assumed their fraudulent righteousness permitted the devastating assault. That was a severe lesson in the extent to which overcompensating behaviour can become a destructive force in society — that I intend to share in more detail but not here because it’s a distraction from the point of this answer.

At any rate, I can unequivocally state that if that had happened to me when I first started carving out my niche for a professional future almost 50 years ago, it would have been a relatively minor event in my life. I would have recovered within a couple of years and been well on my way to having put that traumatic nightmare in my rearview mirror.

Instead, I’ve struggled to regain my footing for over ten years. The life I had is gone and unrecoverable.

Instead of making small bits of progress on the road to recovery, I’ve been enduring an increasing degradation in my quality of life as I find bits of it and my dignity being slowly stripped from me every day, not because of my bad decisions or because of anything I’ve done to warrant this nightmare, but because others choose to pile on their abuses atop the mountain that weighs me down.

For example, I’m currently scrimping to put together enough of a buffer in my economics to afford a minor upgrade to a graphics card that will allow me to become more efficient and competitive in the marketplace while allowing me to work at resolutions that can secure income. It’s funny how an obscure specification such as image resolution can hinder success, but that’s our world today. Forty years ago, such a minor upgrade would have been, at most, a couple of months of saving up spare cash to pay cash for the upgrade. I’m saving to afford an additional monthly payment for an 18-month commitment.

The world we live in today is characterized by a lifestyle I first became familiar with in art school with the dynamic of patrons. Relationships between artists and their patrons financed art production in the Middle Ages. Today’s equivalent to that in the high-tech world is an “incubator.” For general entrepreneurs, it means a guest appearance on Shark Tank to hope a capitalist can see a parasitic profit relationship from your initiative by doing nothing but assume control over your enterprise and collecting cash for your efforts.

The alternative for the little people is to turn to the government to find themselves herded through an infantilization process and vetted to identify the value to be extracted from them by financial enterprises that have developed relationships with pseudo-government entities called “Stewardship.” They are intended to provide business development services but don’t do anything beyond setting you up to be bilked by predatory lenders from whom they get a cut.

In my case, I went along with the puppy mill program with a naive attitude that I could trust a government-aligned agency to tell me the truth about my options. I went along with the program to develop a concrete plan for recovering my entrepreneurial income within a couple of years with a product idea and niche that would generate over $100 thousand per year working for myself without needing support staff.

A simple demand loan of less than $15,000 would have been sufficient to get my life back on track. I discovered early on that it wasn’t even on their radar for a support option. As it turned out, the $10,000 in financing I was promised was not even close to possible by the time I had completed their program.

I was informed at the outset that I was eligible for a grant that would have made financing possible. At the end of my programs for creating my business and financial planning documents, I asked what had happened to the grant. I received crickets as a response and then was insulted with condescension by someone who’s never been an entrepreneur and nothing more than a bookkeeper.

The fact that I had progressively managed to succeed on my terms for over 25 years and that I had proven I knew what I was doing when I provided an advanced business plan in greater detail than they expected or had ever seen through their program was irrelevant. (Most people I met in the rudimentary courses I was herded through were quite naive about business processes. I found myself contributing value on a level that augmented the instructors’ efforts — and in which they expressed a sincere appreciation because it increased class engagement).

Everything, every entity, and every stage in society is rigged at every level from a predatory perspective to drain value from anyone unlucky enough to have to rely on their “altruistic” roles in society. It’s become a game of indentured leveraging, not unlike the days of gladiators who would agree to a couple of years in the arena getting beaten and stabbed to get themselves out of debt.

Had I been living through the same economy as when I started, I would not have even needed to rely on external support. I would have had sufficient disposable income from a typical labour job to use my initiative to climb out of this nightmare of a hole I’ve been dumped into — within only a few years.

The short answer to the question posed after this long-winded rant is that it is to EVERY degree that the little people no longer have a hope of income mobility. The ideas, inventions, and initiatives still exist. It’s the resources we once had that have vanished from the landscape. It’s the disposable income that we could rely on to improve our lives that no longer exists.

That is the most motivationally destructive assault the wealthy have perpetrated upon us, and I would not be able to restrain myself in the presence of many of the sociopathic assholes who are playing games with our lives. While increasing their hoards to historic levels of obscenity, they parasitically drain our value from us.

The dynamics of today’s economy are enraging on a level I could never have imagined experiencing, but here we are. I’m now someone who, after a lifetime of being vehemently against capital punishment, endorses precisely that with guillotines for the 1% in our society if they don’t wake up and start taking economic restorations seriously and beginning with supporting UBI.

With UBI, all the repressed creativity withheld from society and human progress will be released into a new era to make our first Renaissance appear like a trial run. We are on the verge of a fully automated society. The only thing holding us back from an explosion of creativity and initiative is the sick competition among the most parasitic among us to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Could poor employee performance be due to being forced into a job?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you feel that Wal Mart employee’s lack of performance could be due to the fact that welfare literally forces people to accept a job offer or lose benefits that provide Food and Housing? Support #UBI”

When employers don’t care about their staff, their staff stops caring about them.

When employees stop caring about their employers, they disengage and produce the minimum they can get away with. They focus less on productivity and more on toxic politicking to gain personal benefit over others in an increasingly misanthropic culture that pits people against each other.

The sociopathic Walton family is teaching their people to hate them, their operation, and the society which permits them to exploit the vulnerable. Their people, staff and customers are being virtually trained to devalue everything about human life and modern society. This naturally results in the disengagement that every other historic failure of society has experienced preceding widespread systemic collapse.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s reciprocity.

Most people understand it clearly as “you get what you give.”

Sadly, we’ve allowed our societies and our systems to forget the most critical principle to acknowledge and characteristic of the human condition to preserve within everything we do. Strangely, it’s also a core principle within almost every religion throughout the history of religion.

It’s not complicated in the least.

Even science acknowledges it.

It’s cause and effect.

“Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.”

It’s only a matter of time before the greedy, misanthropic Walton family finds themselves confronted with the bill for the consequences of their sociopathic and parasitic disdain toward society. In effect, they are no different than this person who justifies shoplifting.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-think-I-should-feel-guilty-shoplifting-when-literally-so-many-people-in-the-world-want-to-use-other-people-for-what-they-have/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

They are responsible for breeding this kind of thinking because this is precisely their reasoning as they disempower their people and force them to rely on government assistance so that they can increase their hordes in an escalation of the misanthropic decay of society.

They are spitting on the social contract from the comfort of their luxurious mansions.

They are no different from this person and are responsible for validating this skewed justification.

UBI is a basic correction to veering off-course in the last several decades.
UBI is insurance for the transition toward automation, which is well underway.
UBI is a stabilizing societal element that will eliminate poverty, homelessness, and various social problems that create conflicts from which we all suffer.

Why don’t big businesses reduce profits when raising wages?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t big businesses reduce profits instead of increasing prices when forced to raise wages?|

Never in the history of generating income for oneself has anyone ever said, “Gee… I think I earned too much money. I should give some of it back.”

The answers you’ve gotten essentially echo the above sentence.

For example, many companies, like Walmart, deliberately underpay their people by enforcing tactics like union-busting and denying employees full-time status to permit them to qualify for additional benefits.

What they save on employee costs forces their people to qualify for government benefits. So even if you’re not their customer, you still subsidize their operation through your taxes. Their major shareholders laugh at you and your question.

There is no way to solve this problem within the status quo. Even worse, this problem will continue to worsen as technologies in AI and robotics mature while automation replaces jobs to reduce employment costs even further.

The Walton family doesn’t care about how their employees might struggle. Jeff Bezos considers employees dying on his warehouse floor as collateral damage and the cost of doing business. A few thousand dollars toward a token effort to address optics is a low price to pay to force people into running according to the inhuman scheduling they’re forced to endure by filling orders according to a timed system.

Part of the problem with this question is that it presumes wages determine the costs of products that you pay for when that is the furthest thing from the truth. Wages are a minimal determinant in the price of products you buy.

Products are priced at the highest level that a market will bear. IOW, the price of a product is based on a formula applied to the speed at which shelves for that product are emptied. You have probably heard of the phenomenon of “supply and demand.”

The more demand for a product, the easier it is to justify its increased cost. The company knows it will still sell its product but get a higher margin, growing annual revenue and making it more attractive to investors. In turn, its stock value increases, and it appears much more successful as a company doing business in the marketplace. The entire system is geared around pricing products as high as possible while reducing costs as much as possible. The cost of labour is considered the most significant repeat cost of an operation, so it’s always targeted for reduction. Capital costs are written off in tax deductions, so a one-time purchase far exceeding the cost of labour for the year is still cheaper than labour because of that tax benefit.

When employers, capitalists, and their flying monkeys threaten higher costs for products due to higher wages, they’re just lying to the public to create the optics that their products require price increases that are functionally unnecessary but acceptable because people believe the justifications that are given. This happened due to the COVID lockdown when companies took advantage of public sentiment to indulge in price-gouging strategies.

Solutions to this and many related problems, such as the persistence and even increase in poverty, involve multiple strategies.

  1. First, the downward pressure on wages can be addressed by eliminating the leverage of destitution that employers have with employees. Suppose an employment candidate doesn’t like the pay scale offered by an employer. In that case, they currently have a choice to begrudgingly accept being underpaid or face the risk of homelessness, starvation, and premature death. The solution to this problem is easily implemented through a Universal Basic Income. If candidates are free to turn down insufficient wages, then employers are put into a position of being more competitive to attract those they want on staff.
  2. Corporate structures are an inherently antiquated holdover from medieval organizational structures. Corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that function like mini-autocracies. This dynamic existing within a democratic society cannot be but at odds with the society it operates within. It is in the “corporate DNA” to essentially function as a subversive entity within a democratic society that inevitably plots the demise of democracy and its overthrow to institute an oppressive two-class society of owners and serfs. The solution to this problem exists within worker co-ops.
  3. Worker Co-ops (continued) Richard Woff is an economist and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts who provides compelling arguments in favour of worker co-ops. — Richard D. Wolff — Wikipedia — RDWolff –

  1. 4. (Numbering Bullets in this kind of HTML formatting truly sucks the big one) Finally, the primary solution to the greed infesting human behaviour today that functions as a threat to human society is to place a global cap on personal net worth. This is the most difficult of all challenges to implement because it’s already hard enough to have an entire nation agree on something. For the world to develop solidarity in this matter appears to be an unreal fantasy, but it may be the case that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are opening the door for the world to get on board with it. There is no valid argument against it, particularly since the only argument that once held validity — financing large-scale endeavours — is now rendered moot through crowdfunding. The more money that exists in the working class’s hands, the more able the working class can participate in a democratic economy rather than be subjected to the whims of psychopathic power-mongers. We must first drop this delusion that wealth is accrued only by “special humans” who stand above the rest of us. It’s becoming ever more apparent to the public that not only does power corrupt, it is the corrupt and corruptible who are attracted to power.

We are rapidly approaching a point of no return in which we will either quickly resolve the problems threatening human civilization or lose the ability to respond to a global environmental threat.