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jgh

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Care to elaborate? Many of us held minimum wage positions for some period of time before gathering the skills / tools / time to move on to something better.

So did I, but I don't regard someone a failure who deserves misery if they did not 'gather necessary skills'. There are a lot of reasons why someone might not be able to move past minimum wage work in life, not all of them their fault. Even if it is and they threw away every opportunity they ever had does that mean they deserve a lifetime of hardship?

A citizenry has moral obligations to its society. Demanding handouts for minimal contribution does not create a strong society.

Our society provides trillions to oligarchs like Bezos. If we're OK with that then we should be OK with giving more to those who need it most even if they dont work "hard enough".

Capitalism is a system created by humans, presumably for the benefit of humans. If it doesn't do a very good job of making the lives of humans better then it could be considered a failure.

As we're seeing now, wealth and income inequality are at terrible levels. Wage stagnation has been hurting the middle class. Housing is becoming increasingly expensive as jobs centralize on cities. Gentrification pushes out the working class.

We have climate change bearing down on us, the effects of which are already being seen through mass migration, fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry would have us believe there are "two sides" to this argument so that they can continue to profit instead of adapting and doing the right thing. The first to feel it certainly won't be those of us making several hundred thousand dollars per year and looking down on those living paycheck to paycheck. It'll be those living paycheck to paycheck who feel it first.

Neither artists nor bartenders have the power over humanity that capitalists do.

A simple fact is that all 7 billion people can't live like upper middle class Americans, it's impossible. Why not have one place in the world that a huge number of people sit at the top?

Because winning the birth lottery gets you to the top, otherwise if you're from somewhere else in the world...good luck.

Of course 7 billion people can't live like upper middle class americans. Upper middle class americans are going to have to bring their lifestyle down to a sustainable level.

We have a myriad of problems at this moment in time, some of them existential. I have very little sympathy for people who think we should maintain the status quo in the face of these problems.

The massive amount of money basically sits in an investment account and generates dividends to live off of. That's what people are talking about. In order to have a salary they're used to they need like 20-30x the cash in the bank to generate it (preferably a bit extra to keep up with inflation too). Otherwise if you weren't using it to do that presumably you'd eventually run out of money and have to go back to work (except now you're old and 30 years out of date)

my cat likes to pretend like he enjoys going outside, then when he gets outside he flops around for about 10 minutes and then goes back inside.

Interesting, thanks for the link! I'm strongly considering doing this for my next project and all the information I can get is helpful.

Aardman Animation becoming a coop has captured my imagination. I am very curious how well it could work in the context of a tech company.

Chrome started becoming really popular when Firefox started becoming terrible around 10 years ago. Chrome was much faster and had better features. Firefox was bloated and slow and was pretty much resting on its laurels. These days it has inertia on its side, not that it's necessarily better anymore (I would argue Firefox is better now)

The non-PC argument

If you want to have a reasonable discussion about these things, don't front-load your argument with labeling people who disagree with you in such broad, and frankly wrong, strokes.

Indeed. There's a dead reply to your comment that mentions eastern european salaries being comparable. That might be a bit of an exaggeration but there are outsource to Canada companies that, I think, are mainly in the KW area and are not really that much more expensive than eastern europe (think like $90k per head vs $70k per head)