asher2789 wrote: ↑May 13th, '21, 18:17
i disagree on the construction wage, the work i was doing was incredibly dangerous. dangerous work should be paid well, and $17 isn't well. if you can easily lose a limb or your life doing work, you should be compensated for that risk. the fact that others do it for less is irrelevant - some people are desperate, and desperation leads to bad decision making.
I don't dispute that the work was dangerous, but I don't think the economics of it support the notion that dangerous work should be well paid. It's about supply and demand, and if people are willing to do the work for $17, that's the market price. You weren't, but that doesn't mean everyone wasn't. I think we need a minimum wage to set the market floor, but otherwise, the market should determine wages.
That said, I do think we need to protect workers who accept dangerous work for that kind of pay. We need to have strong OSHA/safety regulations and inspections to keep job sites as safe they as can reasonably be. In addition, there needs to be workers comp insurance for injured workers and a fund to cover those whose employers don't carry it (we have both in Massachusetts).We also need universal health care. So, free market but with a safety net.
Speaking of which, I was listening to Cathy Wood's vlog yesterday. She posits that the genomic revolution in medicine is going to send health care costs plummeting in the coming decades. If she's right, and she very well could be, technology just might come to the rescue to solve the U.S. health care problem. Wouldn't that be something?
Summer 1998 between my junior and senior year of college I took a job as a carpenters helper in Stowe. I got paid $8/hr with 5 hours of overtime per week paid to me in cash. So $320 per week in W2 wages and $60 cash. Looking back I probably should have been paid better. But at the time I felt it was ok. My portion of the rent in the apartment I was living in was $275 per month. So, one weeks worth of work covered my rent. That's a fairly common benchmark people use to calculate their housing affordability. 25-30% of income towards rent or mortgage. That same room in Stowe would cost $750/month today. So, I could see a 22 year old taking that job at $17/hr or so
I also had reasonably priced health insurance through being a student at UVM though. That's a big difference. Local contractors in VT rarely pay anything towards health insurance of their employees. They just maintain a workers compensation policy and hope their workers don't get hurt.
I also worked construction for many years. I worked a lot of unsafe job sites that would not pass muster with OSHA regs. At the time I thought I was pretty well paid, but it was a lot less than $17 per hour. It wasn't for me but skilled construction workers can do very well. I know an electrician and a plumber who both make six figures. I know a couple of carpenters that became G.C.s building residential homes and they do very well. It's a field with a lot of potential if you have the aptitude. But those starting out make entry level wages, just like any other area of work.
easyrider16 wrote: ↑May 11th, '21, 12:46
Tell you what, if I had Doc's Delorian and I could go back five years and put all my money into Vail, I'd be sitting pretty right now. But not as pretty as if I had had gone back three years and put all my money into Tesla.
i knew about bitcoin when it was worth pennies and somebody used it to buy pizza.
if i bought a pizza's amount of bitcoin back then, id be at least in the 8 figures, if not 9 figures range. that's straight up gambling, and the odds are like a slot machine. and yes, im still kicking myself over it. and selling my ethereum a couple years ago when i hit a rough patch and needed the $. although id have maybe in the low 5 figures from that hahaha.
i bet the boomers are like what?
Assuming boomers don't know about this stuff is racist and sexist.
asher2789 wrote: ↑May 13th, '21, 18:24
you should read up on the technology behind those cryptocurrencies.
Oh I agree, the technology is amazing and has amazing promise. But without a government or bank reserve behind it, ehtereum is just a high-tech form of monopoly money. Dollars might be fiat currency, but they're backed by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. government that will do what needs to be done to maintain its value. What does Ethereum have to maintain it's value or regulate inflation? It might be fun to speculate with but as a means of exchange it is terrible, especially with it's wild fluctuations.
Nonetheless, some day I think a government will adopt crypto and switch it's currency to digital. But it won't be bitcoin or ehtereum, it will be a new currency using the block chain tech. Actually, China is already experimenting with this. They will more than likely beat us to it, and there's a good chance in the coming decades they will displace the U.S. as the world currency and technology leader. At that point we'll all probably have some digital yuan in our digital wallets.
i think you're confusing ethereum and bitcoin. bitcoin is "regulated" by the difficulty of solving the math in mining each coin and there's a total amount of coins possible (artifical scarcity), ethereum is designed a little different, there is no total amount of coins just less mined over time (and with whats called "stake holders" that maintain the network), and its sort of but not really an exchange of currency - its more of a platform for other things to be built off of, and ethereum backs the tokens used in the things built off the platform.
the US dollar is backed by nothing but the full faith and trust in the US government. should our government get overthrown (as shown this year, potentially from within), our $ could one day be worthless. that's obviously a stretch. bitcoin was designed as an answer to the federal reserve, which is a corrupt private institution bound to nobody. you can't elect any of the officials that run it, and its a revolving door of the who's who in banking. and as we have seen over and over again but especially in 2008, banks dont give a f*** about the people.
Last edited by asher2789 on May 17th, '21, 16:51, edited 1 time in total.
easyrider16 wrote: ↑May 11th, '21, 12:46
Tell you what, if I had Doc's Delorian and I could go back five years and put all my money into Vail, I'd be sitting pretty right now. But not as pretty as if I had had gone back three years and put all my money into Tesla.
i knew about bitcoin when it was worth pennies and somebody used it to buy pizza.
if i bought a pizza's amount of bitcoin back then, id be at least in the 8 figures, if not 9 figures range. that's straight up gambling, and the odds are like a slot machine. and yes, im still kicking myself over it. and selling my ethereum a couple years ago when i hit a rough patch and needed the $. although id have maybe in the low 5 figures from that hahaha.
i bet the boomers are like what?
Assuming boomers don't know about this stuff is racist and sexist.
asher2789 wrote: ↑May 17th, '21, 16:48
the US dollar is backed by nothing but the full faith and trust in the US government. should our government get overthrown (as shown this year, potentially from within), our $ could one day be worthless. that's obviously a stretch. bitcoin was designed as an answer to the federal reserve, which is a corrupt private institution bound to nobody. you can't elect any of the officials that run it, and its a revolving door of the who's who in banking. and as we have seen over and over again but especially in 2008, banks dont give a f*** about the people.
I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you about the Fed. I think it's one of the best institutions our government ever came up with. It's not perfect, but it's one of the most apolitical institutions in the world and tends to be quite focused on its dual mandate of keeping inflation in check and keeping employment as high as possible. Lots of people disagree with what the Fed does all the time, but that comes with the territory of making decisions that affect so many people. I think the surest sign that it's working is that both Republicans and Democrats get angry with the Fed on a regular basis.
The biggest downside to digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that they lack the kind of regulatory body that the Fed comprises. That's the reason you have these wild fluctuations - nobody is trying to keep it from happening, and nobody's regulating it. It's not a viable option as a medium of exchange. How can you set prices in bitcoin or ethereum when one day the value is up 30% and the next it's down 25%? It's a fun game to trade with it but it's not a serious currency for commerce.
asher2789 wrote: ↑May 17th, '21, 16:48
the US dollar is backed by nothing but the full faith and trust in the US government. should our government get overthrown (as shown this year, potentially from within), our $ could one day be worthless. that's obviously a stretch. bitcoin was designed as an answer to the federal reserve, which is a corrupt private institution bound to nobody. you can't elect any of the officials that run it, and its a revolving door of the who's who in banking. and as we have seen over and over again but especially in 2008, banks dont give a f*** about the people.
I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you about the Fed. I think it's one of the best institutions our government ever came up with. It's not perfect, but it's one of the most apolitical institutions in the world and tends to be quite focused on its dual mandate of keeping inflation in check and keeping employment as high as possible. Lots of people disagree with what the Fed does all the time, but that comes with the territory of making decisions that affect so many people. I think the surest sign that it's working is that both Republicans and Democrats get angry with the Fed on a regular basis.
The biggest downside to digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that they lack the kind of regulatory body that the Fed comprises. That's the reason you have these wild fluctuations - nobody is trying to keep it from happening, and nobody's regulating it. It's not a viable option as a medium of exchange. How can you set prices in bitcoin or ethereum when one day the value is up 30% and the next it's down 25%? It's a fun game to trade with it but it's not a serious currency for commerce.
i dont disagree with any of your criticisms of bitcoin, im honestly not much of a fan of it. i think ethereum has long term potential, but not in the way we think of currency today.
as for the fed, the biggest issue i have is that they're a private corporation handling public funds and there's no say in the matter. you can't democratically elect anyone in power - which makes it a revolving door for the bankers. its like a casino, the house always wins.
Interesting NYT article this morning on wages in the U.S. Short version is that while some are claiming there is a labor shortage, the real issue is that companies need to raise wages to attract workers. Corporate profits are way up and companies can afford to do it. Some companies have started raising wages.
Let’s start with some basic economics. The U.S. is a capitalist country, and one of the beauties of capitalism is its mechanism for dealing with shortages. In a communist system, people must wait in long lines when there is more demand than supply for an item. That’s an actual shortage. In a capitalist economy, however, there is a ready solution.
The company or person providing the item raises its price. Doing so causes other providers to see an opportunity for profit and enter the market, increasing supply. To take a hypothetical example, a shortage of baguettes in a town will lead to higher prices, which will in turn cause more local bakeries to begin making their own baguettes (and also cause some families to choose other forms of starch). Suddenly, the baguette shortage is no more.
Human labor is not the same thing as a baguette, but the fundamental idea is similar: In a market economy, both labor and baguettes are products with fluctuating prices.
When a company is struggling to find enough labor, it can solve the problem by offering to pay a higher price for that labor — also known as higher wages. More workers will then enter the labor market. Suddenly, the labor shortage will be no more.
One of the few ways to have a true labor shortage in a capitalist economy is for workers to be demanding wages so high that businesses cannot stay afloat while paying those wages. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the U.S. economy does not suffer from that problem.
If anything, wages today are historically low. They have been growing slowly for decades for every income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century. Two main causes are corporate consolidation and shrinking labor unions, which together have given employers more workplace power and employees less of it.
Just as telling as the wage data, the share of working-age Americans who are in fact working has declined in recent decades. The country now has the equivalent of a large group of bakeries that are not making baguettes but would do so if it were more lucrative — a pool of would-be workers, sitting on the sidelines of the labor market.
Corporate profits, on the other hand, have been rising rapidly and now make up a larger share of G.D.P. than in previous decades. As a result, most companies can afford to respond to a growing economy by raising wages and continuing to make profits, albeit perhaps not the unusually generous profits they have been enjoying.
Sure enough, some companies have responded to the alleged labor shortage by doing exactly this. Bank of America announced Tuesday that it would raise its minimum hourly wage to $25 and insist that contractors pay at least $15 an hour. Other companies that have recently announced pay increases include Amazon, Chipotle, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart, J.P. Morgan Chase and Sheetz convenience stores.
Vail Resorts (MTN) beat estimates by 18 cents a share, with quarterly profit of $6.72 per share. The resort operator also saw revenue top forecasts. Vail said pass sales were up 50% by units and 33% by dollars compared to pre-pandemic results in 2019, as the company slashed season pass sale prices by 20%.
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