Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "How Money Works"
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In defense of "entiteled Zoomers", who's gonna birth the next generation? To have kids, you have to have sufficient income, to feed the family and you need to be able to do it, at least for a while, on single income and save up for retirement. If 60 000 USD is poverty wages these days (just try that in NYC, SF, or literally anywhere, where there are high paying jobs), then demanding 600 000 USD might still look ludicrous, but also reasonable, given you will have expenses just holding down the job! What are the expenses associated with holding down a job, that pays 600 000 USD? What's the net total take home pay, after you deduct taxes and job related expenses like gas, tools (ranging from literal wrenches and suits to software), car/household reparis, recommended 20% of income to be put into savings for retirement, etc.? I ran the numbers back in a day for the country of Czechia, where I live in, and I came to about 60 000 CZK a month (most incomes and expenses are on a monthly basis around here), while median wage at the time was around 30 000 CZK. That was before the pandemic, when we had some 18% inflation for a while! Today, that wouldn't even cover rent and utilities in a ghetto (I know, I live in one).
Knowing all this, tell me, is this really entitelment? Who in their right mind would wife up (not taking divorce laws into consideration) and have kids, which are kind of necessary for the society exist going forward? It is true, that money is not the only reason for low birth rates, but it is a contributing factor. Hell, how is a man supposed to impress a woman, when he can't even afford a coffee in a nice coffee house? How is he supposed to find a job, when he can't afford even to buy and maintain scooter? Why would a woman have a kid in her best years from fertility standpoint (18-24 years old), when that is the time, when people have no, or below minimum economic wage income?!
This has to change, if we're to survive as a species, hence, why there should be not just a minimum wage strictly linked to local cost of living, but also mandate to hire young people to ensure, that we at least procreate!
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I have a few problems with this video here...
1) I have Bachelor's in accounting. Companies, even accounting firms, cry and whine around where I live, how they can't find qualified workers including accountants, yet, I can't find a job in my field. Even on rare occasion get refused and then see that same ad refreshed on the same job board the next day. It is as if companies refused to hire people that they needed. Furthermore, some companies, usually the bigger ones, run ads, that are never supposed to end up hiring people right away, rather they are meant to create a database, so question is, what is the actual demand for any particular job? This has persisted for years. The "lack of skilled workers" is discussed on TV all the time, yet youth unemployment is still double that of general unemployment! If there truly were no qualified workers, you'd expect companies to hire people and grow and train them them selves irrespective of education, meaning the requirement we'd see the companies drop would not be education alone. We'd also see the working experience requirement dropped, however, what I have seen across my nation is the opposite (I'm talking thousands of sent CVs and hundreds of interviews here. At this point, I am statistically significant). I'm talking junior level jobs demanding two, three, four, I've even seen once five years of working experience in the field for a junior and the working experience requirement is not being dropped, rather it's on the rise! Given it's the employers, who supposedly dictate the job requirements (I mean, you had a video on this yourselves), if they can't hire anyone, shouldn't they raise their own workforce?
2) No, the problem of housing is not workforce shortage. Look at, where lack of housing is the most acute! You'll get California, especially San Francisco, New York and other similar places. What do these have in common? Overbearing and overblown bureaucracy, that makes construction process start in an office and the in office stage takes 60% to 70% of the time spent on the whole construction from initial planning to sale of the finished house. The problem here is, the larger the city, the more economic opportunities but also more bureaucracy, meaning fewer new homes and therefore higher prices.
3) The video appears to me to ignore the influence of technology. Sticking to the world of construction, there are already prototypes of brick laying robots and construction materials techniques, that will not need to use mortar. First houses using these technologies have already been built too! Meaning we will not need so many laborers to actually build the house. We're being told AI will replace jobs being done (most visibly drivers, but also basically any entry level job in finance, coders...). If we look back in time, we'll see, that technologies have usually displaced the more vulnerable people, who tended to be blue collar. Wouldn't it be appropriate to assume, that the same is going to happen in the future and is happening now?
4) And on the count of trade, how many of these blue collar workers have university degrees? We usually think about electricians being only a trade, however, where I live, in order to become a freelancer in the field, you either need loads of working experience, or you need a university degree in the field and a few less years of experience. Forestry also has a degree in the field. The point is, there are university degrees, that produce blue collar jobs. How are these graduates counted?
5) Sticking with the degrees, what is it, that actually gets you a job? Because I'd argue it ain't the degree. It's the skills you were learning getting that degree (hence why it's so important to evade ATS and get straight to the recruiter). Which brings to mind the quality degrees them selves. What the hell is a Woman's studies degree for? I recall having a subject called "Leadership of diverse teams" in my failed attempt at Master's. I thought, that I'd learn, how to accommodate for different employee needs based on their cultural background. Result? Seventy percent of the course was about how women are "discriminated against". Meanwhile, women are absolutely killing it in the economy. My chosen field of accountancy is outright dominated by women! And any back office team you can bet has majority of women doing the job. The session was literal propaganda. Point being, assuming I'm right (which I'd argue I am, given employers are whining, that universities don't prepare workers to do their jobs, though there is a caveat, that unis have to be a bit delayed, given they don't work with the live process), shouldn't we scrutinize university programs more? That propaganda session I had been through could have been replaced with something different, for instance how customs are done, calling it "Regulatory aspects of international commerce". Why don't we ask ourselves the question, whether the quality of degrees had not fallen because of identity politics or bloatation of unnecessary knowledge in academia?
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That would bring it's own set of trouble with it, though. Say you wanted to make a lumbering big conglomerate more efficient, breaking it down into smaller chunks based on activity done by each individual chunk can help with that, because, for instance, what were mere support processes for manufacturing before can become revenue generating processes in them selves. Objection, that owned company owes debt would then arbitrarily prevent a company to reform into a more efficient version of itself. To ilustrate, take big manufacturing company from Texas, making some kind of industrial machine and selling it both on domestic market and for export. Breaking that company down into individual chunks department by department would allow that same company to market under different names more tailored for it's own market, while at the same time handling the same agenda for the now only manufacturer. From that one inflexible conglomerate, you can have accounting company, export-import business, IT business, logistics company, real estate developer... all runing more efficiently, because they are not tied to the primary business, and if the original manufacturing business folds, the other companies to can survive and preserve more jobs, than if the company didn't break up... And that's not even starting with the international aspect of the thing, because pooling multiple manufacturing companies and then creating foreign company to represent all these would also bring advantage to the whole group, for instance, accepting local currencies and engaging in biderictional trade with said foreign market.
The problem is not, companies breaking up as they see fit. The problem is, companies holding bank debt paying out dividends and sometimes even being forced to do it by the court. Famously Henry Ford lost a case about this, when, instead of paying out dividend, he decided to pay out bonuses to his employees, and shareholders sued him over that decision. So, what I'd like to see, would be about 75% tax on dividends, if company owed any debt for longer than 30 days, except of debts steming from an invoice with longer pay period, in which case such invoice going overdue would be the criteria to trigger the tax. I would also want to see that ruling overturned with language in the court opinion speaking about long term financial sustainability of the business.
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Don't think like this, it's a trap. Housing these days is massively overpriced and a correction will come. Maybe a little bit later and a little bit less to in demand places, particularly like Texas, which is also going on the boom of US reindustrialization, but it will come. An argument can be made, to buy a house off the beaten path and try to come up with a career, that would accommodate for that lodging. As long as you can get somewhat decent Internet there, you're golden, because most of the stuff that's done these days is done on a computer (we'll see, what AI will do with this, though), if push comes to shove, you can provide some services as entrepreneur from your home.
Ultimately, the only thing, which will completely solve this, will be global return to consumption and leaving environmentalism behind, because that will drive demand for capital goods meant for manufacturing of consumption goods and thus move money from non-productive part of economy back into the productive one. But that won't come back for at least fifty years, I'd reckon
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yeah, doesn't work that way. You're forgetting wear and tear due to use of anything, including a house. If rent doesn't cover the difference, between lower appreciation due to the building being in use, why rent it out? Sure, you'll have better cash flow position, but your earnings will be lower. Why do that, if your cash flow is sufficiently good already? You'd have to implement empty house tax and it would have to be excessively steep and linked with a lot of bureaucracy to motivate landlord, who didn't buy the property to rent it out in the first place, to do so, in order to evade said tax and bureaucracy.
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@CuriousCrow-mp4cx Except, you're forgetting, that all production needs to be consumed by someone, otherwise it's worthles and its value is 0, but has born expenses. Vast majority of consumers are workers, hence why true capitalism would NEVER see them as mere input. Tomorrow's profit also count's (why would banks give businesses loans at the same times as businesses saught them, if it didn't) and the workers are the ones in whom the tomorrow's profit grows. The fact, that particularly in the US everybody's obsessed with weekly and monthly figures and doesn't care about a year and above, is not a flaw of capitalism, because capitalism thinks holistically. Hell, even things like the environment, which the Left claims is destroyed by capitalism for the sake of profit, has been better preserved in capitalist countries than in actually communist ones, which had protection of environment within their laws. Why? Because some functions of that environment gain such a value, that expending it to produce profit reduces profit even without external factors being involved (it would be nonsensical to destroy hotsprings to mine couple fo tons of coal. It makes sense to build hotels and other infrastructure for guests, provided there is not enough coal to mine). As to the three options you presented. I have some bad news...
i) the situation I described is everywhere and thanks to legislation where I live and general employer attitude, I cannot transition easily into another field, hence why I need to ride this out. To illustrate, in order to beocme an electrician, I'd need to attend a highcshool for three years obtain the diploma (not even a proper degree), in order to become eligable for another set of education and experience to obtain a license, which is required by all the employers in the field. Even ignoring the impossibility of obtaining the experience without the possibility of getting hired, that's another five years of no income, all the while having normal living expenses. That's a non starter. Similar situation is in most fields, that are likely not going to get affected by AI. So retraining and transitioning is not viable option.
ii) UBI is BS, because that money has to come from somewhere. The problem is even if you perfectly matched inflation with creation of new money and deposited it into bank acounts of actual people, base necessities like utilities (if they're not properly regulated), fuel (because you still need to hold down a job and it doesn't matter, how you commute, gas get's burned somehow somewhere), food & drinks, healthcare and most importantly rent and house prices would run faster than general inflation, because these things are very price inflexible, because these actually need to be expended for a person to live. Meaning if you introduced UBI, those who already don't earn enough to maintain a living wouldn't get help (they're in the red as it is) and those, who are right above them would get sucked in with them, because these base expenses would grow just slightly above what was actually distributed by UBI, because that can only be tied to either median or mean inflation, as to be socially acceptable. Mandatory employee ownership of employers could provide a better outcome (employee shares as a mandatory hiring bonus)
iii) likely not Soilent green, but I do see use in Fertilizer (It's Spacer's Choice!)
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Do you want to know why? Wages are not enough and even if you start working, your expenses shift. If you go full Gamer-Hermit mode, you can actually survive. That is why people are basically lying flat in the West as well as in China these days. I'm in that camp myself... well partially. I actually aggressively job hunt. But even then, In the last five years, I worked 28 months, because I either didn't receive proper training or my job was literally transferred overseas. So what am I to do? Cleaning? Who likes doing chores? Nobody, so do that at absolute minimum. going to interviews? Yeah, when I get invited, but conversion rates from sent CVs to invites is low and from invites to jobs even lower. So what rational option do I have other than gaming, particularly if I have a PC, that is no slouch, but didn't cost me arm and a leg? I can't job hunt more, because new positions for me to review and apply to don't pop up as often! I do a check once a week, reply to a couple dozen positions and spend some time in a week on actual interviews, but even then, I spend what twelve hours a week job hunting, because even a minute more would have been wasteful? (eg. I'd not send another CV due to the visible market being completely ran through). What am I to do otherwise in my spare time, than game? Really, the only reason, that I am still trying, is, that I have something to prove. I failed in getting laid or getting my significant other to reciprocate my feelings. I've managed to get a Bachelor's after five years of studies, but couldn't get to obtain a master's due to a combination of factors (primarily due to conflict with on site time, when working.) , so that was a failure too, because nobody cares about Bachelor's. The only field for me left, where I can prove myself, is work. But without that, I'd be just wasting away, nearly homeless doing just enough to survive too. Why try, when everything you do, is worthless to the society at large? The answer is simply, don't try. Waste away.
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@personzorz There is a very fine line between there. You see, there is only one place, where you are truly safe through regulation and that is prison. Do you want to live in prison? Let me remind you, we're using these facilities as punishment. Regulation should address abhorent excesses, not make doing business impossible, because we suffer as a result. Just look at zoning, which are also a form of regulation, or natural conservation zones or energy efficiency standards for new buildings. That land may be pretty, even well intentioned, but there could have been a lot of houses built, if there were no such regulation and we wouldn't pay 50%-60% of our gross income on roof over our heads!
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