Does this remind you, maybe, of the trajectory of a country you may currently be living in?
So, this Amazon union vote crap.
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
- Start date
The research is done by the university of amsterdam. It should be easy to translate with google.
No it isn't. The USA has spent 19 years or thereabouts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a cost of 2.4 trillion. This averages out at about $120 billion a year. It gets a bit tricky factoring in inflation, but if we take the "base" average defence spending in the period as about $600 billion a year, that means that the wars have increased the defence budget 20%. 3.5% * 1.2 = 4.2%.
Now, of course, the cost was not even across those 20 years: at peak, it did reach 5%, but that's only a couple of years. The US defence budget was a little over 3% in 2000 and is about 3.5% now.
The reason the USA has poor healthcare provision is because (aside from various structural reasons) US healthcare is obscenely expensive. If you check how much it costs to have a medical procedure in your average European country (like, fixing a simple fracture of the arm), the equivalent cost in the USA is much, much higher. Thus although the US government is funding public healthcare for per capita amounts not that dissimilar to some European countries, it's providing far fewer services.
I literally could not give a flying shit about your grotesque Islamophobia.
Actually, it is quite likely figures outside the UK are not as good as the UK.
The UK (and USA) have been remarkably good at attracting relatively high skill and educated immigrants compared to continental Europe, so the average gain from immigrants is significantly higher. Although of course the other consideration is where the calculation stops. After all, immigrants have children, and they will work too; plus with far less integration costs. And their children's children, and their children's children's children, and... The other factor is of course how the calculation is done. It's well known that the variability in results looking at ostensibly the same thing by different reports is high.
So as humans have a tendency to corruption, so will all human institutions have a tendency to corruption.
This isn't going to magically disappear even in an anarchist commune with theoretically no formal institutions, because humans with all their grubby vices are still going to be there leveraging what they can, lying, manipulating, amassing power and influence, etc. In the end, an anarchist commune is like as not to cease to be anarchist, because in the end it will be corrupted into something different by people who perceive gain from doing so and have the ability to make it happen. This is the way of the world: the only options are vigilance, transparency and accountability, but you can absolutely guarantee they will be permanently tested and occasionally fail.
Well, the inevitable happened. I caught one of my former managers in the wild last weekend, and in the course of shit-shooting and catching up, they asked me what I thought about this union stuff and I told them.
I gave them the short story, which is Amazon scored a tactical victory and strategic loss because the net impact of Seattle's choices almost certainly cost Seattle more than the next-best alternative (voluntarily recognizing a weak and ineffective union in a deep red state on Amazon's own terms), just to kick the can down the road. In the meantime, Amazon will continue spending money it didn't need to spend to fight court battles, repair PR damage, and fend off heightened public scrutiny. But the real problem Amazon will face in the medium to long term is, the Bessemer case acted as a key proof-of-concept, and now the blood's in the water for much larger, influential, competent, and better-funded unions that will pose a much more significant threat to Amazon than the RWDSU and therefore greater outlays to fight.
I punctuated it by telling them I already did the napkin math on how much it would have cost to just give BHM1 workers a quarter-an-hour raise: $4.5m per fiscal year. And from what I've seen and heard of Amazon's anti-union campaign in BHM1, based on my experience with the company it cost Amazon as much if not more to wage it alone, not accounting for administrative and legal costs associated with the vote or the court cases that will develop from it. That's not indicative of a rational upper management that determines policy in a supposedly data-driven company.
I gave them the short story, which is Amazon scored a tactical victory and strategic loss because the net impact of Seattle's choices almost certainly cost Seattle more than the next-best alternative (voluntarily recognizing a weak and ineffective union in a deep red state on Amazon's own terms), just to kick the can down the road. In the meantime, Amazon will continue spending money it didn't need to spend to fight court battles, repair PR damage, and fend off heightened public scrutiny. But the real problem Amazon will face in the medium to long term is, the Bessemer case acted as a key proof-of-concept, and now the blood's in the water for much larger, influential, competent, and better-funded unions that will pose a much more significant threat to Amazon than the RWDSU and therefore greater outlays to fight.
I punctuated it by telling them I already did the napkin math on how much it would have cost to just give BHM1 workers a quarter-an-hour raise: $4.5m per fiscal year. And from what I've seen and heard of Amazon's anti-union campaign in BHM1, based on my experience with the company it cost Amazon as much if not more to wage it alone, not accounting for administrative and legal costs associated with the vote or the court cases that will develop from it. That's not indicative of a rational upper management that determines policy in a supposedly data-driven company.
Hmm, okay, let's dig into this a bit...
Firstly, the report was sponsored and partially financed by the Renaissance Institute, which is a think-tank run by the borderline far-right Forum for Democracy Party. One of the Institute's other notions was setting up a "hotline" where they encouraged children to report their teachers for "left-wing indoctrination". Classy. With this in mind, I do wonder what you meant when you said the report was "swept under the rug", because it makes sense that the government shouldn't use research with potential financial conflicts of interest and funded by borderline extremist political parties.
I've not been able to translate the whole thing easily; for some reason, whether I try to upload it as PDF or .doc to Google Translate, it won't accept it. I've tried cutting it into smaller documents, still to no avail. So I've only been able to translate some chunks.
* He says the net cost of non-Western immigration was 27 billion for 2016-2019, and that Western immigration was roughly budget-neutral.
* It appears that to reach "net" figures, he's combining the impact of regular immigration with the impact of refugees and people seeing asylum. That doesn't appear to be a particularly useful way to go about it, since those areas are subject to entirely different policy considerations and international commitments, and have very different financial implications. For instance, the figure for 2016 is vastly inflated by the refugee crisis, which appears to account for ~50% of that year's figure; but that doesn't really tell us anything at all about what public policy should be towards labour immigration in the long-term.
Regardless of how seriously we take this particular report's conclusions, though, it's clear that a functioning welfare state can exist comfortably alongside immigration. Plenty of other countries do so. The UK has a welfare state and immigration remains a fiscal net positive.
I reject the idea that I have to be either a racist or a classist.
You are removing context of what I was replying to. I replied to people saying that socialists invented unions to break down the capitalist system into one of group ownership but even if they were to take the factory by force they would still have a leader or leaders. You can't run a factory through a large group of people just doing whatever they want. There will always be a hierarchy required, people will need to do different jobs, you can't have everyone do the same job and different people will have different skill sets.
The socialist concept is based on the idea that everything that they dislike about how a factory works is only because of corrupt people. I cannot run the machines in my work place AND work on getting the supplies shipped to my work place AND assemble those parts AND work on getting new jobs etc etc etc without a gigantic loss in efficiency. That's why jobs are specialized. The cost of huge specialization is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, the cost is distance. Either the socialists of a union would create a new hierarchy that replaced the old one or they would have to break up the factory into a system like that before industrialization which would mean they would not actually seize anything.
Distance leads to even good people being unable to treat their fellows well and also gives cover for bad people to disguise their motives. Representative democracies only work well so long as they stay small enough that the people in charge of them are close to the people they are leading. My country's heads of government are too far from the people and are attempting to make rules and laws apply to places as different as Hawaii, California, Alaska, Missouri, New York, and Texas. It's clear that the government cannot make everyone happy as things are like this and it's going to lead to some group or another forcing its ideas on the whole.
So you should. Likewise should we all reject the similarly used cryptoracist "the only way we can defend liberalism is by stopping immigration", which is both a damning indictment of liberalism and a fundamental betrayal of it.
There's a world of difference between an elected organiser who "rules" by consent, and an unelected organiser who rules by force.
Secondly, I think you are confusing organisation and hierarchy. Organisation does not require hierarchy. And even where there is hierarchy, it doesn't need to be a formalised structure.
No, the socialist objection to capitalist factory ownership is that it puts excessive power in the hands of owners to exploit workers as an inherent design feature, not "corruption".
Don't shoot the messenger. Any way you put it the total cost of immigration is a net negative of 40 billion euros. You can't have a shrinking population that pays taxes and an increasing amount of receivers and maintain a welfare state. The costs of immigration will simply collapse the system. This is not even counting for the indirect costs of increased social tensions, crime and otherwise failed integration.
It's a sound study and no Dutch politician questioned it's conclusion. Pro-immigration parties simply declared they weren't interested in economics. Think of that what you will.
Being anti-immigration has nothing to do with being racist. You also can't sustain a welfare state while letting everyone in. Neither is islam a 'race' but an anti-democratic, misogynistic, anti-feminist, anti-minority, anti-secular religion that spits on liberalism that you so apologetically approve of.
Said every nativist ever.
And once again we get the false binary that our only options are no immigration or all of the immigration.
Not a fan of freedom of religion, I take it?
I care very little about distinctions of whether gross bigotry is against race or religion. The problem is that it is gross bigotry.
If the researchers have a financial conflict of interest, that's reason to take conclusions with a pinch of salt. That's not "shooting the messenger"; it's distrusting the message.
It's clear that some forms of immigration are a fiscal net positive, even if we accept the conclusions of that particular study.
You seem to want to treat "immigration" as a whole in the same way, so... what do you propose? Cross-the-board purely numerical restrictions, that limit the forms of immigration which are a fiscal net positive as well? Means-testing those who enter? Discriminating depending on point-of-origin? Or just refusing all who're seeking refuge?
Did they actually declare that, though, or did they just ignore a particular study that came from a questionable source?
There is no financial conflict of interest. The study was conducted by the university of amsterdam and used both publicly available census data and disclosed micro-data.The entire conclusion can be verified.
If you read one of my previous posts I even said some form of immigration is necessary to compensate for shortages in the labor market. But this should be on temporary permits similarly like expats. What I mean with anti-immigration is a stop to the vast majority of immigration that is an enormous drain on public services. And a stop to the import of anti-democratic religious beliefs which have such devastating effects already.
You can ignore any study that doesn't fit your ideological narrative but that doesn't make it's implicationa any less real.
The irony and lack of self-awareness of this statement is truly astonishing, given you are attempting to argue an immensely complex subject has been answered by a single study. (A single study that as far as I can tell has not been subjected to any external analysis and criticism, including the most basic peer review.)
It was conducted by one particular researcher from the university, who (judging from his online presence) has a bit of an axe to grind; and was funded by a fairly extreme think-tank/ pressure group. That latter is almost a textbook example of a financial conflict of interest, since it's then in the researcher's interest to come to conclusions that benefit the financiers.
So you do mean cross-the-board restrictions, including for forms of immigration that are a fiscal net positive? You're being continuously vague about what approach you want to take, just as the study blurs lines by lumping labour immigration and refugees together.
Not going to bother addressing this bollocks, except to say it makes it quite obvious that your interest in this topic isn't really about fiscal policy.
Uhrm, right, but you didn't answer the question. What do you mean by "sweep under the rug"? Did they do anything more than just... not use it for anything? The study isn't peer-reviewed, so the government shouldn't be using it as the basis for public policy; it would be a fairly major ethical issue if they did.