I understand the inclination to leverage the argument that “it’s cheaper to house the homeless than incarcerate them.” I really do.

But I want to point out that I really don’t care how much it costs, people deserve to have a home where they live and keep their things and sleep and eat meals and have clean water. It’s the most basic thing we can materially offer; a safe place to exist. I don’t care how much that costs, arguing against it is inhuman.

Arguing over costs accepts a fundamental belief that cost is an equal consideration to survival. I reject that fundamental argument. It is unconscionable. Human beings deserve agency, dignity, and care. Cost is nothing.

The reason I like it is once you've explained that your plan will cost less and treat people better you get to ask "so why do you want to treat people worse for more money"

you're not going to convert a person with this approach but putting it that way makes everyone in the room uncomfortable, which is its own kind of victory (if, of course, that's safe for you to do)

I don't think you can actually get across the idea that all human beings deserve agency, dignity, and care until you've forced people to acknowledge that they don't want society to fulfill those needs, because as it stands they'll say "yeah of course everyone deserves those things" and then drop half a mil on anti-homeless architecture without noticing the contradiction

American Economic Association, “Welfare reform and recidivism,” 29 May 2019:

It’s well meaning in the end but I need to have a word with everyone going “what if doctors found guilty of bias or malpractice and teachers who abuse their students were let off the hook as often as the police”

Oh my god, thank you for saying this.

Like two weeks ago i left an essay in my friend’s dms explaining why the smug “cool you have a phd in Google” is such a misguided and condescending approach to people who’ve concluded that doctors aren’t to be trusted - not because anti-vax and homeopathic remedies are the correct way or because prozac nation but because as far as I know, every single person I’ve met has at least one story where they were fucked over because of a shitty medical professional, and I can’t think of any where the victim pursued repurcussions.

This whole “we should hold the police to the same standard as we hold medical professionals who fuck up” because when is the last time any of you (general you) reported a doctor? I lodged a complaint regarding sexual harassment by a psychiatrist, and I still have the form letter stating the board investigated the matter and found there to be no issue or need for consequences and there’s no need to contact us about this anymore.

I’m not trying to guilt trip people because as you said, it’s a nice sentiment and I get what the intent is.

But also ask me about the pediatrician who insisted my brother’s hearing was fine, that toddlers can’t read lips, that my mom was simply used to having daughters - boys just don’t listen, haha, you’ll have to get used to that, - and the aural surgery he got years later + lifelong speech impediment.

Aldi is a great example if you ever need to illustrate the impact of efficiency gains/technological improvement on workers and industry. It's consumer-facing, and the differences between Aldi and other grocery stores are obvious, so anyone who's shopped there will know what you're talking about.

So the thing about Aldi is they pay their workers relatively well. In Illinois an Aldi employee makes about 30% above minimum wage, and minimum wage is going up here so it might actually have been higher in the past. In comparison, bagging or cashiering at most other grocery stores is a minimum wage job.

But the other thing about Aldi is that they employ fewer workers - a small fraction of those at a similarly sized competitor. No baggers, because customers do their own bagging, and they've eliminated redundancy by asking their handful of employees to do everything. No specialized employees working registers and stocking shelves - at Aldi, if you're not doing one, you're doing the other. Eliminating redundancy also means eliminating employee downtime.

The culture of the chain is - I can't stress this enough - extraordinarily German. They are obsessed with design and efficiency. At my cashier job, as long as I'm not visibly slacking, the number of items I scan per hour is an afterthought - it might be recorded somewhere, but no one looks at it. At my partner's job at Aldi, they drill you, get to 1200, get to 1200, get to 1200, until you do. They instruct you on the ergonomics of efficient scanning - back straight, elbows bent, wrists rigid, swivel at the hips. Every item is covered in barcodes so you never need to lose time looking for one.

And paying their employees well is another part of that German culture. German workers work efficiently, to high standards, and they're well-compensated for it. That's part of the self-mythology of that country.

But here's the thing with Aldi, and Germany too: that compensation can only come as the result of relative efficiency advantage. In other words, Aldi can't afford to pay their workers more because they're efficient, they can afford it because they're more efficient than their competitors: they can take a similar amount of wage money in relation to total expenditures, and distribute it among fewer workers. But if everyone else adopted Aldi's methods, that advantage would evaporate. The intense pressure to cut prices in the extremely low-margin world of groceries, especially discount groceries, would compel everyone involved to drop right down to minimum wage as fast as possible.

And what would you have then? Fewer workers, doing more demanding work, being more intensely monitored, for the same wage they had been making originally. I'm not saying this because efficiency is bad, or to valorise the vanishing trade of bagging or whatever. Fuck bagging. But this is a clear illustration of how efficiency operates on the scale of the entire economy and why, under capitalism, not all of its effects are good.

(For the interested, what I described here in terms of competition is already happening. Kroger owns a couple regional discount chains that they're using to lab-test Aldi methods, and they're sure as shit not paying $13 an hour. The company I work for has one, too - I think most of the big players do. Give it a couple more years, and let the idea of bagging your own groceries percolate through the consumer base, and they'll pounce on the more upscale market.)

US Americans praising Aldi for labor rights is so baffling to me as a german because that company is known for the opposite here. Like all discount stores it seeks to minimize expenses and mostly does so by exploiting the workforce. Minimum wage pay, and a system of oppression and control as workers describe it are the norm here. Aldi is not some beacon of labor rights it's barely the bare minimum.

Also please stop with the myth of "German efficiency" and that workers here are treated fairly, they are not, it's just that we have actual unions. The corporations try to mostly circumvent german labor laws by using timed workers or seasonal immigrant workers who they can exploit much easier.

The bar is so low.

"The bar is low" is right; you have to remember that the comparison being made is to American companies. It's not that Aldi is good, it's that the situation for workers in America is so absolutely dire that even the worst that Europe has to offer looks appealing. The concept of working a menial, grocery store type job and even having the possibility of benefits (instead of just being paid so little you qualify for Medicaid) is basically a novelty.

And they're also not doing it out of any kind of altruism. Like I said, the work is more demanding; there's an essentially Taylorist regime of (in your words) "oppression and control." The higher pay is the main reason this doesn't give Aldi trouble in attracting and retaining employees. As long as other grocery stores are also hiring it's a tough pitch to be like, "Hey, do that same work for the same money, but worse."

Germans will be like "It's not German culture, we just have unions!" - which is absolutely correct, but severely underestimates the degree to which "not having unions" is part of American culture.

babbling goofs

i understand desire to catch conservative devils in hypocrisy but sometimes when i think to analyze im faced with larger point that void crab eggs have hatched in their skulls and theres nothing left but bubbling sludge. there is no 'point' to be found. theyre just babbling goofs

goofs like jorbin peterman always looking for 'debates' bud what am i supposed to debate? youre just groaning and crying and shrieking with ten different points that all contradict each other and change with every issue. there is no consistant philosophy to any of it

Every time I do my taxes it's a potent reminder that Turbotax and H&R Block are nothing except parasites on the US economy that purposefully lobby to make tax filing overly-complex so that they can continue to force you to buy absurdly-priced products after they've spent an hour telling you that you're using their free service. Smash them into dust

wild that there's an entire subculture of people who apparently believe they can use magic

the obvious explanation is that he's just a far more powerful mage

people are apparently accusing him of being a warlock

other popular explanations:

- it doesn't work if you're expecting it

- he is being hexed, he's just lying about his life being fine

- other people are counter spelling and protecting him

Lot of people on this post talking derogatorily about "TikTok witches". I don't know how to tell you this but witches on tiktok are exactly as capable of using magic as every other witch in the world

#do you ever wonder if the us government has like#a contingent of witches#casting hexes against other nations#just in case it works

there's a long record of the CIA trying a bunch of pseudoscientific bullshit in the 20th century to see if they could get anything to work, but of course nothing did

relatedly, the result that arguably played the biggest result in uncovering the incredibly flimsy standards of psychology research (and touched off the whole replication crisis) was Daryl Bem's attempt to prove that ESP was real - he found that there was statistically significant evidence for ESP, which led the entire field to realize they'd been publishing garbage for decades

for everyone who’s for prison abolition “but not sexual predators!!!” I am begging you to understand how many guys write our prison books program who are sexually deviant, ineligible for parole EVER, and have the mental capacity of elementary-age children.

their letters are a barely legible scrawl of broken sentences or they get someone else to write the letter for them and scribble their names at the bottom with letters backwards. they ask for coloring books and comic books and books with lots of pictures because they can’t read. they will tell us that they’re sexual predators in their letters but from the way they talk about it, it’s clear they don’t understand what that means, it’s just something someone told them.

they are never getting out of prison.

they will die in prison.

they can barely write their names.

looks like we fired a $500,000 missile from a $300,000,000 warplane to shoot down a $100 hobbyist balloon. It circumnavigated the globe 7 times before it met its end at the hands of the American Air Force and a political imperative to Not Look Weak. You can hardly make this shit up.

So you agree; capitalism is about establishing monopolistic business models based on gouging and screwing consumers

Read this excellent article.

My final paper in my Political Science class involves comparing republican and democrat party platforms during a presidential election year in the 20th century and I picked the Bush/Dukakis election and I want to set something on fucking fire.

my sister was 8 years old when morality police in Tehran stopped us because she wasn’t wearing a headscarf. Dad tried to tell them, she’s only 8, it’s not mandatory until she’s 10, but it didn’t matter to him because she “looked” older. She was forced to wear a scarf before he let us go.

The same day another police stopped us because he could glimpse my mother’s ankles, even though she was wearing a long trench coat. She had to buy and put on black tights before he let us go.

In 1997 we got stuck in the airport in Teheran because they “lost” dad’s passport. Mom ended up leaving with me and my sister, leaving dad behind. Since he’s an Iranian citizen, the Swedish embassy couldn’t help even though he also is a Swedish citizen. My uncle went every day to the airport to pester them about the passport. They “found” the passport 2 months later, finally allowing him to fly back to Sweden.

when ordering school photos my dad would always ask the photographer to edit out our cross necklaces in one copy, so that he could send it to our grandparents. He knew it wouldn’t be safe in case officials checked the mail and realised we we’re christian.

These are mild examples of the oppression and fear the Iranian people have had to live with for over 40 years, of the oppression Iranian women have had to live under.

i could give a thousand more. the people of Iran are terrorised by it’s government. I could tell you about relatives executed and relatives scattered around the globe. About the per capita executions and the examples of attacks on Iranians outside Iran by agents of the regime. The risks of traveling into Iran as a Iranian citizen.

I’m just part of the Iranian diaspora. I’m Iranian, yet not Iranian. Cut off from my heritage due to the risks, due to the distance. It’s an open wound. A wound that will never have a chance to heal unless the regime falls.

but my wound is a paper cut compared to my dad’s, compared to the Iranians in Iran fighting for freedom and justice. The ones that’s been truly robbed of their homeland. For that, I have no words.

what we’re seeing now is a fight to reclaim it. A fight for justice for Masha Amini, as well as other women before her -and sadly after her. A fight for human- and women’s rights.

I can only voice my support.