Many sites I visit are not because I like the design of the site, but that I like the content that the users it has attracted have uploaded. Sure, there’s YouTube alternatives, but they’re not a replacement for the scale of YouTube. There’s still a few subreddits I read because they don’t have a good lemmy alternative.
Yeah, for my own sanity I limit how deep I dive into some of this. I don’t think you need to dive super deep though to say the standard for bombing civilian infrastructure is higher than bombing military installations and what Israel has bombed are civilian sreas.
I get that Hamas is coopting a lot of civic locations like schools and hospitals, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to raze cities.
We support Israel is more ways than just military assistance, but even there paying for the Iron Dome just frees up money to spend elsewhere. It’s not like the only effect of our money is building this defensive capacity, it’s all the things enabled by Israel having gotten this infrastructure subsidized.
Some of it, yes. Along with training. Either way, the only skin in the game I have regarding what Hamas does is as a human being who condemns terrorism against Israelis and the oppression of Gazans, but I’m not materially supporting it.
With Israel my money is directly funding their weapons systems. I think it’s reasonable to demand that they not violate the Geneva convention and if they are going to bomb hospitals and refugee camps they at least have reliable evidence gathered beforehand that doing so will achieve military objectives of an appropriate magnitude that warrants it.
In my experience, people I interact with personally aren’t citing Hamas propaganda as if it were fact, they give it the appropriate level of skepticism. They don’t do that with IDF press releases or propaganda from the Israeli government so it is worth pointing out that all governments and affiliated news outlets put out biased reporting during war time.
Also, as a US taxpayer, my money is funding bombs being dropped on Gaza, they didn’t fund Hamas’ improvised rockets. Those were cobbled together using material stolen from the people of Gaza. As a result, I expect honest accountability of how those weapons are used.
There was never a mask
Your premise is that some worker’s labor is more valuable than others’, as an inherent or essential attribute of the activity representing the labor.
Literally not the point I was making. If your objective is to incentivize employees to be productive and achieve some kind of monetary objective which, because of the default state of even the most populist of countries, most people need to maintain their desired standard of living, then you should pay people different amounts of money based on how well they support those objectives (and practically to overcome market forces based on how many people are willing to provide those skills you need).
yes, some people based on some combination of experience and acuity are able to churn out 10 widgets and hour instead of 5. If you are an employer that profits from selling widgets and needs to pay people to make them, and you prefer people make an effort to increase this thing that you want them to do, you should incentivise that behavior in some way. I’m not saying you should exploit people, there is some minimum amount of compensation that allows people to survive with a reasonable minimum standard of living based on the prevailing societal norms of where you live. Anthing less is not humane.
Value is not an objective attribute.
The amount of money you pay people and the amount of money your customers pay you is a very objective and generally accepted definition of value. Coincidentally, it’s also the definition of value that the original premise is using
The real number I’d like to know is how much value my labor is actually producing versus what they pay me.
They’re talking about their pay, which is a concrete number, and comparing it to the value they are producing which, based on context clues, heavily implies they are talking about monetary value. You can’t really pay someone commensurate to the emotional or utilitarian value they produce without first converting it into something monetary.
Your objection about the plumber is a red herring.
Activities that are not productive are not relevant to a discussion over how various activities of labor are valorized, because labor is simply productive activity.
It was a bit hyperbolic, but you could easily say a plumber that makes a fix that breaks in a week provides some amount of value, you get running water for a week where you would otherwise not. No matter how you wish to quantify monetary value, that is clearly worth less than a plumber who will fix you faucet so it runs for 10 years.
Your conception of some workers being more or less removed from a product is simply a subjective feeling, irrelevant to the value of the worker’s labor provided to the social processes of production within the enterprise.
No, my whole point originally is its based on how difficult it is to quantify the monetary value (the kind the original question was about) for some roles compared to others. Literally no one would say that the IT professional that ensures that sales people are able to send out emails and track sales isn’t not essential to the objective of creating monetary value by selling something to someone, but at the same time without a sales person going out and convincing people to buy a product you’re not going to get a lot of sales either. So who is ultimately responsible for the sale? Both. What fraction is due to the IT professional and what fraction is due to the sales person who does a good job understanding the customer’s needs and making a convincing argument for why you should buy the widget? That question is very difficult. Most jobs instead are built around “how do I maximize my personal profit” which is usually what people who run companies care about which brings us back to the original concern that companies will try to pay you the very least amount they are able to while still incentivizing you to do the job well enough that you provide as much net positive value to them while minimizing how much they pay you.
As far as workers being more or less removed from the product, the reason it feels easier to apply this value to a sales person is because they can clearly show they made X sales calls and garnered $Y worth of revenue or net profit to the company. So, if you really wanted to figure out the direct monetary value of the earnings brought to the company by the IT professional, you would essentially need to work out how much of the pie that the sales person brought in was due to the IT pro supporting their needs and then do this for every other role that they IT professional helps and connect those roles back to the ultimate amount of profit they generate for the company (aka value in the context of this discussion).
If you are going to pay people in something with monetary value, which most people living in most extant economic systems that have been implemented to any non-trivial degree, then you need to somehow come up with a number for what to pay this person if you want them to show up to work and perform the function you intend of them.
Final note,
You can’t just declare a definition of a word to be something completely removed from the way it is used relating to the topic being discussed then act like a point you make relating to this other definition you are choosing to use is somehow valid in the context of the original discussion.
Bruh, the comment was about being paid commensurate to the value they created and my point was that’s a very hard number to quantify for people far removed from revenue, not that they don’t provide value.
This is literally what the UN secretary general was referring to when he said the Hamas attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum. I don’t think the attacks were justified or even effective but it wasn’t some random act, the growth of Hamas comes from Israeli government backed oppression of Palestinians which itself comes after failed peace talks so on and so forth until the birth of civilization (though you could argue until the late 1940s).
Except productivity isn’t a factor purely of activity. You can spend hours trying to fix something if build something and fail, because sometimes things are hard.
I think you should obviously be paid for your time as an employee, but if I hire a plumber, they spend 4 hours trying to fix a sink and it never gets fixed, I’m not hiring that plumber again.
No one’s saying you should valorize people at the top, I was just pointing out that directly quantifying value of an individual contributor who is far removed from the actual thing being sold can be really hard, if not impossible so paying someone proportionate to the direct value they create is not practical.
Of course there’s no law of nature preventing you from paying everyone exactly the same wage, companies are not some kind of fundamental unit of organization subject to physical laws. No one is arguing this, I’m just saying paying everyone the exact same thing means not just paying less productive people more, but also paying more productive people less.
Excessively verbose prose obfuscates the intent behind a post and hinders clear communication between parties undergoing a discussion as opposed to economical use of floral vocabulary which engenders a clarity of thought and facilitates a clearer flow of information allow both parties to more easily converge to an amenable conclusion.
Not sure if you’re quoting someone, but if you are it’s not actually very effective at communicating a point, especially when it’s only tangentially related to what we’re talking about. If you do find someone else has made a good point regarding a conversation you’re in, it’s more effective to paraphrase it and highlight key points that support your argument. Honestly, the quotes you picked out don’t really pertain to what we’re talking about. It’s ultimately not about what what is the best way to organize an economy, but whether or not you can directly quantify the productivity of an individual and what the effects of simply paying everyone the exact same amount regardless of productivity.
The issue there is not everyone is equally productive. In the most direct example someone who is more experienced with a piece of equipment or technology will often be more productive with it than someone who isn’t. That’s ignoring that different people have different competencies. If you ask me to design costumes for a TV show, I would fail miserably. If you asked a fashion designer to do my job without any training, they would likewise not be very successful at it.
There are plenty of ills that come along with capitalism, but I do think some amount of incentive will promote productivity. I don’t think that people are lazy and won’t do any work unless they are threatened with homelessness and starvation, but I do believe if an innovative strong performer in a role is not given recognition in a real tangible way, they will either leave to a place where they can get that recognition or just stop being as innovative and productive.
That’s pretty difficult for a lot of jobs. For someone in sales, easy, you can look at the value of the contracts they bring in. For someone who works in facilities maintenance or tech support? Good luck figuring that out.
I use uBlock on Firefox and never got any kind of notification either. Not a paying customer.
Haven’t read the paper so not sure about the specifics, but if it relies on subtle changes, would rounding color values or down sampling the image blur that noise away?
I’m a lifelong stutterer, I definitely noticed, especially in school when we had to read aloud, that I stuttered more when reading. I assumed it was more of a self fulfilling prophecy where I would get tense anticipating stuttering while reading so it happened, but would be interested in seeing if research around fonts ended up bearing any fruit.
They go after it mainly to appease external forces like other countries objecting to it, but people who are convicted often get very light sentences.
Why wait a year?
A government using war to revoke civil liberties and oppress their citizens? Color me surprised.
They don’t process words as unified tokens for something like an LLM, but they do process them as multi-letter encoding, like byte-pair encoding or more advanced techniques.
They’ve been living under an Israeli siege for over a decade and had a mature enough intelligence apparatus to plan a highly coordinated assault while living in a surveillance state… If you don’t think this wasn’t a calculated informed attack you’ve got your head up your ass.
I’m not condoning indiscriminate killing and rape of civilians and taking hostages, I also don’t condone the inhumane siege of Gaza that has been happening for decades. 50% of Gaza is under 18. That’s not because they’re popping out kids, its because you just don’t survive that long in that kind of environment, those are also deaths. Not graphic ones that make headlines, but lives were still lost. Its incredibly hypocritical to assume Israel’s shit don’t stink in this situation either.
I’m also queasy when I read the coverage of the recent attacks by Hamas, I also haven’t been living in a police state. Not saying this is the most effective way that they can achieve their objectives, but I can understand how someone growing up seeing violence, sickness and malnutrition for completely preventable reasons dehumanizes the people they see as being the cause of their situation and join or support an organization like Hamas.
Get up, come on get down with the sickness