this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Most of the world's major problems literally cannot be solved by an injection of funds alone.
I'm acutely reminded of when that guy said $6 billion would solve world hunger, Musk basically replied "prove how and I'll give you the money right now", and the response was a combination of impotent sputtering and backpedaling about how it would now help, but not solve.
Also, the majority of that "wealth" is a price tag, not cash dollars. If you bought a baseball card for $5 and it's now worth $100, you didn't create $95, you know.
It's about what that amount of money would go towards: education, healthcare, housing, food security, environmental protection, wildlife preservation, social programs, etc.
We can solve these problems with targeted funding that gets to the root of the problem. For example, rather than simply distributing food, you educate and equip communities with the ability to grow their own. Even low-cost water purification in some parts of the world can make a massive difference to literally millions of people.
Lifting people out of poverty, even by having a universal basic income, would solve a ton of issues facing those populations: low education, poor health, food security, programs for kids/teens, more equitable transportation, etc.
We're not talking about sending off grands for a few thousand dollars or even several million. We would have TRILLIONS to use towards implementing solutions. And that money would continue to come, because these rich assholes collect and hoard money faster than anyone can spend it.
We literally have enough food to feed everyone. But there are people who will prevent everyone from being fed because having control over the food gives them power (e.g. warlords in Africa).
The bottom line is, you can't solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and the fact is that you can't buy peace.
Food distribution (and the costs associated with it) have always been the root cause of food poverty, but that's only if you stay in such a rigid, master/slave dynamic.
Empowering communities to be self-sufficient in their food production and energy production can very effectively end the supply problem.
Peace can only come when there is no need to be greedy, especially among a handful of billionaires.
When people's needs are met, and there's no reward to take more than you could ever need, there's peace. When you have fewer people with more power than they should ever have, there's next to no chance for war, either.
In an equitable society, peace is pretty much the default. Using money wisely can give you a societal return on investment that can come through no other means; it pays for resources, education, and technology to get us there.
But at the very least, use the current state of the world and the recent examples of wealth hoarding as an example of how NOT to do things.
The implication that all conflict originates in resource scarcity is incredibly naive.
You subtly dropped your mask, there, but I know enough to recognize your ideology. We're just a few exchanges from "all struggles are power struggles where one is the oppressor and the other is the oppressed, and will inevitably culminate in violence".
Save it for someone more gullible. I'm exiting this thread.
Bottom line: billionaires are not the cause of poverty. Ironically, the increase in billionaires is correlated with a decrease in poverty in the population at large. You would not be any less poor if Amazon never existed.
Scarcity? I said greed. The rich are among the greediest, and they are far from living in scarcity.
What I'm saying is that there would be no need for conflict if everyone's needs were met. Although billionaires contradict this statement, I tend to exclude psychopaths and mentally unstable people when referring to the whole of society.
The business model that created billionaires is exactly what causes hard-working people to not have enough to afford to retire.
Please don't fool yourself into thinking that a system that incentivizes wealth hoarding is not a major part of the problem.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/11/1052719247/how-6-billion-from-elon-musk-could-feed-millions-on-the-brink-of-famine
Literally an NPR article on the subject, outlining how that sum could solve world hunger.
Then Musk claimed to have donated $5.7B several weeks later. However, this money was not directed to the WFP
So it looks like Musk was looking for a large tax write-off, not a cure-all for world hunger. And when he found a viable place to dump his money, he took it. This wasn't about food aid at all. It was about Musk figuring out what he could buy for the price of a tax cut.