09:28 – Interesting article on CNN about how countries compare in paid holidays. The UK leads the pack, with 28 statutory paid holidays. The US comes in dead last, with zero statutory paid holidays, although, as the article points out, US companies typically voluntarily provide about 15 paid holidays per year.
Americans also typically take many fewer vacation and sick days than Europeans do. Back when Barbara and I were first married, her dad introduced us to a young woman who’d just moved here from the UK, where she’d been a radiation therapist. She was being paid literally two or three times what she’d earned in the UK, but she was stunned to learn that her paid time off was a tiny fraction of what it’d been in the UK. In addition to having half as many paid holidays here, she was very surprised to learn that she got only two weeks’ paid vacation, versus the six weeks she’d had in the UK. She was also surprised to find that many Americans, then as now, didn’t even take off all the days they were entitled to.
Work on the science kits continues. Now that we’re in a slower time we’re trying to build inventory. Although it’s nothing like the flood of orders in July through September, there’ll be another mini-peak from mid- to late-November through mid-January as people buy science kits for Christmas and the second semester.
14:19 – The other night when I thought I spotted an Indy car cruising down our street I was right, kind of. It was a replica 1989 Lola Indy car. I was also right about it having a serious engine compared to the Honda 4-cylinder of the replica Can Am car I spotted a year or so ago. The replica Lola has a Chevy LT1. Both cars are street legal. Colin and I spotted them during our walk a little while ago, and I talked to guy who built them.
We just had a new “Family Day” added to BC’s list of stat holidays, and it’s a paid one. That just cost every small business man one full day of labor costs for each employee, with the attendant drop in revenue from having their business closed. If you want, you CAN open your business on stat holidays, but you have to pay your staff their wages, PLUS the statutory eight hours pay.
We also added $2.25/hr to the minimum wage. “To help the working poor”. Of course, gas stations, grocery stores, and retail outlets all pay minimum wage, so Gas, Food and Clothing all went up in price. Now the working poor, are working even poorer.
And this is from the party that is known as the “business” party. Their main opponents, with an almost certain lock on the election is the socialists party, who will toss out the legislation that forces the government to have a balanced budget so they can give their union cohorts in the government unions a big fat Greek raise.
Well, as I’ve said, we’re in a post-jobs economy. The function of government will increasingly become to transfer wealth from the productive minority to the unemployable majority. Eventually, we really will have the productive 1% supporting the unemployed or pseudo-employed 99%. Literally. As much as I deplore that, the only alternative I can see is that the 99% will rise up and lynch the 1%.
I think Pournelle was prescient when he talked about welfare islands and the bifurcation of the population into taxpayers and citizens. Our society is rapidly approaching the point where only the very, very bright will be economically useful.
I’m just afraid that, like the British weavers who wrecked looms, our 99% will wreck the factories as it becomes clearer that there’s no longer any place for them to hold jobs that are within their abilities.
And Ayn Rand was even more prescient, writing about modern-day Luddites.
It’s going to be an interesting transition, whichever way it goes. I don’t think there has to be a jobs shortage. Productivity in the agricultural sector freed more people to work in the industrial sector (there was also a lot of feedback there, as industrial machinery freed more agricultural workers. Now industrial productivity has freed people from working in factories, and they have increasingly moved into the service industry. A hundred years ago, there were a lot fewer hair dressers, manicurists, tattoo parlors, etc. Also fewer restaurants, pubs, dance halls, game arcades, etc.
Generally speaking, these are luxury industries where excess productivity (and excess workers) can be useful to society. It seems to me that the service/luxury industry can, in principle, increase without bound. I would much prefer to spend my extra money going out to eat (or whatever), rather than having it taxed away and handed out as welfare. It is also hugely important to society: A society of welfare recipients is fundamentally different from a society of service workers. Pournelle’s “citizens” were not a happy group.
Minimum wage is a hard issue. On the one hand, it destroys a lot of low-end jobs. On the other hand, there’s something not quite right about people working full-time or more than full-time, and still not making enough money to live.
I think our government should look at how the UK handled the problem of economically-useless people.
One thing we could do easily is legalize drugs and make them and alcohol freely available, untaxed, and cheap. That would have the additional benefit of cutting crime dramatically. A large percentage of muggings, burglaries, and so on are committed to get the money to buy drugs. If those drugs were cheap or even free, dopers wouldn’t need to commit crimes to pay for them.
Ah, the old service industry will take over where manufacturing left off argument.
Except it can’t. Try and live on what a chambermaid makes and you’ll soon see the folly in that. When 99% competes for the money of the 1%, things will get very interesting. And the 1% people don’t stay in a Motel 6 or eat at Burger King, so those jobs will also be lost, unless there is also a vast reduction in the cost of living, so the poor can afford to travel and eat in restaurants. These sorts of jobs proliferated because of an affluent middle class, not because of the 1% group.
Without the middle class, the service industry returns to Upstairs, Downstairs. Except the English aren’t in charge anymore, so it won’t be so idyllic this time around.
Minimum wage laws are just stupid. My eldest works in a restaurant, he used to get paid $2/hr more than minimum, because “he was worth it”. Then the government raised the wage. So now he ONLY makes minimum wage, as his employer simply can’t afford to raise his pay by the same amount.
If I were the wishing type, I’d wish for an oral birth control which
works on both men and women, has no adverse long-term, and which can be
added to food. Then I’d stop food stamps and all similar money-based aid
and instead hand out food to anyone who wanted it. World-wide, if I
could swing it. We might need to support the poor in order to prevent
uprisings, but at least they wouldn’t pass on their laziness or
unintelligence or other problems to the next generation.
Ah, I see SteveF is ready for his Brave New World Alpha role!
Pass the Soma, please!
Given that my labors support a large number of people, any just world
would give me some say over the people I’m supporting. I’ve given up on
expecting any form of “justice”, and will be content with limiting the
load. Given that much of the world vocally worships Democracy, otherwise
known as mob rule, the best way to limit the load is to kill off the
non-productive.
Actually, I lied in my previous comment. If I were the wishing kind, I’d
wish for a highly robust, communicable, and lethal virus which attacked
the “stupid lazyass” gene. I figure that at least 80% of the world’s
population would die, but I can live with that. (At any rate, I’m pretty
sure I’d live through it. As noted, I’m a member of the diminishing
productive class in the US.)
Well, without getting into the eugenics minefield, it’s a serious issue. Lifeforms, including people, breed until they run out of food and other resources. If someone provides unlimited food, shelter, etc., people are going to have lots of children. Actually, the natural order of things, seen now in third-world countries, is that people have children until starvation limits the increase. We’re no different from those people.
Again, Britain addressed that issue, albeit not particularly explicitly, in the 16th through early 20th century. Starvation and disease limited the population increase in the cities. Large numbers of people were in service, where reproduction was extremely tightly controlled. (And, despite Upstairs-Downstairs and other accounts of the time, “thou shalt not screw the servants” was honored much more often than not. Of course, that presupposed a large supply of whores, which Britain’s social policies ensured. Funny how everything worked out…)
What worries me is that all of this stuff is unmentionable, and likely to remain so as we watch our current culture morph. Just another forbidden topic. If we’re not allowed to mention it, it’ll go away, right?
La-la-la, I can’t hear you!
Oh, were you talking about something potentially uncomfortable? I’m sure
you weren’t.
I think Pournelle was prescient when he talked about welfare islands and the bifurcation of the population into taxpayers and citizens. Our society is rapidly approaching the point where only the very, very bright will be economically useful.
Kurt Vonnegut had the same setup, just not as extreme, in Player Piano, his first novel. The workers displaced by automation lived in “Homestead”, the engineers and managers in a separate, gated community. (As Picasso may have said “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”.)
Lifeforms, including people, breed until they run out of food and other resources. If someone provides unlimited food, shelter, etc., people are going to have lots of children. Actually, the natural order of things, seen now in third-world countries, is that people have children until starvation limits the increase. We’re no different from those people.
Well, the evidence is that birth rates follow a curve, where they drop off rapidly as a society get more affluent. It’s called the demographic transition. Italy is at a point where without immigration the country will be depopulated in a few hundred years. It’s a combination of birth control, women getting into the workplace (especially into professional work), and the opportunity cost of a child for a middle class couple. Every major society where women have equal rights and a large middle class exists has gone through this transition.
If we get to the point were automation significantly displaces human labor, we’ll need some kind of work for the displaced. Fortunately, if productivity is high enough, moderate taxation could subsidize their work and allow them to have a good standard of living.
We are whistling in the wind, or whistling past the graveyard, or whatever. We have very little idea of how things are gonna transpire in the next few years and decades, and my guess, or prediction, is that it will be some wild-ass shit, seeing as we’re in new historical territory, which I’ve harped on before here: several hundred-million people with at least half a billion guns. Never before in history.
It will be very grim.