Post: #1

Couldn't find an exact thread on this in the search, but this one comes close, though it covers Seattle's overall attempt to raise minimum wage.

Most of you probably remember Dan Price, the Seattle CEO, who decided to pay all his employees $70K minimum. The outcome doesn't look so good, though the real key here is that two very hard working employees quit, as they noticed people just going through the motions and making money:

Quote:Now Mr. Price says the decision has cost him a few customers and two of his “most valued” employees, who quit after newer, less skilled employees ended up with bigger salary hikes than those who had been working longer for the company.

“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a a bump,” said Maisey McMaster, 26, Gravity’s financial manager, the Times reported.

Ms. McMaster, who has now quit the company, said that when she approached Mr. Price with her concerns about the wage changes, he treated her as if she was being selfish.

“That really hurt me,” she said, the Times reported. “I was taking about not only me, but everyone.”

Grant Moran, 29, also quit after the pay changes were enacted.

“Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he told The Times. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

There was some parable in the NT where Jesus shows the world how absolutely retarded he was in economics, where a vineyard owner pays all the workers an equal wage regardless of how many hours they worked. In reality, people would have exploited this business owner by only showing up during the last hour and making the same wage as if they had worked all day, which anyone with a brain would realize would result in a reduced output of crops.

This CEO did something similar, but at least he may be coming around to the idea that he was wrong. Talent is not going to accept equal pay to untalented people; any of us who halls ass knows we'll leave in a second if they pay someone equal wages to us when that person surfs Facebook all day long.

Related story: I once worked at a job where my friend and I basically had to cover for this one girl, who rarely did work because the manager thought she was cute. When we found out that she made more than us, we both quit, and the manager later lost his job because he couldn't find competent people to do the work. Both Grant and Maisey are right on the money.

Post: #2

So raising the minimum raise equals socialism, and two people quitting their jobs means it failed? Very thin.

Post: #3

The hundred million dead in the 20th century means it failed.

Post: #4

(08-01-2015 05:37 PM)Repo Wrote:  So raising the minimum raise equals socialism, and two people quitting their jobs means it failed? Very thin.

It is an example of human behaviour.

Why do the extra mile when everybody gets the same? WOrk ethic is not rewarded, you feel like a chump and worse of all you can get into shit if your concerns backfire and it becomes gossip.

I've done enough minimum wage jobs to know it is just the few good ones amongst the dog shit employee's. I expect it from those jobs but a company paying people 70k or more? That is even worse.

Imagine at the end of every month you see the same slackers with the same cheque as you and all they did was half ass it. Office based work is full of that.

Post: #5

(08-01-2015 05:34 PM)SunW Wrote:  “Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he told The Times. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

There was some parable in the NT where Jesus shows the world how absolutely retarded he was in economics, where a vineyard owner pays all the workers an equal wage regardless of how many hours they worked. In reality, people would have exploited this business owner by only showing up during the last hour and making the same wage as if they had worked all day, which anyone with a brain would realize would result in a reduced output of crops.

[/quote]

Here's the thing that the "Jesus was a SJW too!" crowd miss:

The parable was not ever intended to talk about how things should work on a farm. It was an ALLEGORY, a story told using real life, mundane topics to better illustrate spiritual or moral concepts. In that example the story means that it doesn't matter when you decide to find god and that it's never too late to get into heaven. But as usual they are blind black and white, reductionist thinkers and aren't capable of understanding that nuance.

Post: #6

@Foolsgold

Well they could just lay off the slackers. Plenty of people would work their ass of for that much money.

Post: #7

(08-01-2015 06:14 PM)Repo Wrote:  @Foolsgold

Well they could just lay off the slackers. Plenty of people would work their ass of for that much money.

It's hard to determine exactly who's providing how much value. See below:

Paul Graham Wrote:Working Harder

That averaging gets to be a problem. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work. For the most part they punt. In a big company you get paid a fairly predictable salary for working fairly hard. You're expected not to be obviously incompetent or lazy, but you're not expected to devote your whole life to your work.

It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much wealth as an average employee. A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of revenue.

Companies are not set up to reward people who want to do this. You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.

Salesmen are an exception. It's easy to measure how much revenue they generate, and they're usually paid a percentage of it. If a salesman wants to work harder, he can just start doing it, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more.

There is one other job besides sales where big companies can hire first-rate people: in the top management jobs. And for the same reason: their performance can be measured. The top managers are held responsible for the performance of the entire company. Because an ordinary employee's performance can't usually be measured, he is not expected to do more than put in a solid effort. Whereas top management, like salespeople, have to actually come up with the numbers. The CEO of a company that tanks cannot plead that he put in a solid effort. If the company does badly, he's done badly.

A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly would be enormously successful. Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it. More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to work especially hard. It would crush its competitors.

Unfortunately, companies can't pay everyone like salesmen. Salesmen work alone. Most employees' work is tangled together. Suppose a company makes some kind of consumer gadget. The engineers build a reliable gadget with all kinds of new features; the industrial designers design a beautiful case for it; and then the marketing people convince everyone that it's something they've got to have. How do you know how much of the gadget's sales are due to each group's efforts? Or, for that matter, how much is due to the creators of past gadgets that gave the company a reputation for quality? There's no way to untangle all their contributions. Even if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together.

If you want to go faster, it's a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people's. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable-- and the rest of the group slows you down.

The rest of his essay "How to Make Wealth" is worth a read.

Post: #8

That's the point, when the productive worker complained about the slackers, the boss (commissar in socialism) told the productive worker to stop being selfish. So, the hard workers quit and the slackers remained.

It's a good microcosm to what happened in the Soviet Union, the smartest, most entrepreneurial people quit taking their real jobs seriously and became criminals and the organized mafia, who then became the nouve rich when the curtain fell.

Post: #9

(08-01-2015 05:37 PM)Repo Wrote:  So raising the minimum raise equals socialism, and two people quitting their jobs means it failed? Very thin.

Well he raised every employee's salary to a minimum regardless of their value. So while not purely socialist, it is indeed based on a socialist-morality.

Post: #10

He didn't give capital to his employees
Not even close to socialism.

WIA

Post: #11

Now a boss giving his employees a raise is socialism. What a world.

Post: #12

For the purposes of this discussion...

Can we define socialism?

Is it Marxism, the European welfare-state, or in this case a boss who took a salary cut to give his employee's raises?

I'm confused.

Post: #13

Lol, guess he should've read Atlas shrugged. At least he was the head of a company though, so he could lose his money and go out of business - feeling real pain because of his moral code. Unfortunately these types are normally heads of states, who can instead pass the pain on to everyone except themselves.

Post: #14

As opposed to what's banded around here as a reactionary slur, with froth and bile forming at the corner of the mouth, socialism means a communal effort to provide universal access, and nothing more.

Public school education is socialism, where taxes pay for everyone to access a level of education if need be.

Tax payer funded roads are socialism where everyone has access, as opposed to a private toll road.

Marxism is a ideological overlay, that goes to the extent there is no private property rights. They should not be conflated.

For you can have 100% of schools privately operated, and access would be granted by tax funded coupons. That would still be socialist.

Socialism has enabled until levels of wealth. A business owner would be much worse off if basic literacy and numeracy skills were scarce and required a huge premium to be paid for it.

Post: #15

^ All of those things could be provided, and would be provided, by capitalism if the state withdrew from them, and would do a far better job as always. And as always, the state gives you no choice, and demands gratitude and credit for it.

Post: #16

(08-01-2015 09:32 PM)T and A Man Wrote:  As opposed to what's banded around here as a reactionary slur, with froth and bile forming at the corner of the mouth,socialism means a communal effort to provide universal access , and nothing more.

Public school education is socialism, where taxes pay for everyone to access a level of education if need be.

Tax payer funded roads are socialism where everyone has access, as opposed to a private toll road.

Marxism is a ideological overlay, that goes to the extent there is no private property rights. They should not be conflated.

For you can have 100% of schools privately operated, and access would be granted by tax funded coupons. That would still be socialist.

Socialism has enabled until levels of wealth. A business owner would be much worse off if basic literacy and numeracy skills were scarce and required a huge premium to be paid for it.

Actually, socialism means production for use rather than profit. That's the defining difference between socialism and capitalism.

So, building a road is only socialism if the company building it were all government employees and no one made a profit. As I said in another thread, winning government contracts isn't inherently socialist.

Post: #17

(08-01-2015 08:54 PM)Chick Magnet Wrote:  For the purposes of this discussion...

Can we define socialism?

Is it Marxism, the European welfare-state, or in this case a boss who took a salary cut to give his employee's raises?

I'm confused.

Well it's a slippery term. Part right wing slur, part left wing semantics.

The form of socialist ideology which seems to be in vogue could be called Socialism-Lite: a growing bureaucracy which rent seeks off of capitalist production. So entitlements, laws about a "fair distribution", etc would be amenable to that goal.

But this was all proposed by Peter Brimelow who is right wing so maybe it's just him.

Post: #18

No, socialism doesn't mean 'not for profit' at all.

Its inherent feature is that product us created is for the good of humans, or mire so its citizens. Public education is a product that benefits the recipient if the education, and the society the educated person produces it for.

There are further debates where all that is necessary for 'free' education is a coupon and private schools compete, or in so far the government funds the school system.

Building a road via government employees is not the defining element of ut us socialist. Tax payers funding it and allowing unfettered free use is the socialist aspect. The view at thus point is about a common good, whether a public or private concern builds it is a further ideological strain, socialism is about everyone us the community having access.

For ir to be capitalist, the owner of the road would put his own money at risk, and charge a toll for the use of the road, and customers would decide whether the charge on the road offers value.

Post: #19

(08-02-2015 01:07 AM)T and A Man Wrote:  No, socialism doesn't mean 'not for profit' at all.

Its inherent feature is that product us created is for the good of humans, or mire so its citizens. Public education is a product that benefits the recipient if the education, and the society the educated person produces it for.

No, socialism is 'loot the able, give to your friends'. The socialist state (gang) loots those earning more money, and fences the loot in exchange for votes or support. It is not for the good of humans, it is for the good of the faction of humans comprising the state (who desire power), and the faction of parasites (who desire feed), to the detriment of all others, including the country's posterity.

The state especially likes control of education, so it can control the minds of the upcoming generation, so it can teach them 'the correct' ideas, by their self-serving conception of 'correct'. Socialist education is to the bad of society, and free-market education is to the good of society.

All the 'the state creates persons who contribute to future society' stuff is lie propagated by the state to strengthen and stabilize it's power. Individuals always invest in themselves contribute to future society anyway. It is a form of smoke and mirrors - the state points at its free education and says "look what I've done for you!", whilst simultaneously drawing attention away from the looting used to fund it. Welfare actually saps future productivity, since the recipient doesn't appreciate it like something they have to work to earn, so privately-financed self-interested education is of superior future contributory value to society.

Exactly the same as bridge-building. "Look! I made you a bridge!" the state says, "be grateful!". Forget about the resources that were drawn away from other projects in the economy to fund the bridge. Ignore whether or not that bridge was the most important use of those resources. We, the State, know best because we say so, and the wills and desires of the free citizenry are irrelevant.

Post: #20

As raised earlier about the definition of socialism, is it Marxism, or the European welfare state, or say the universal suffrage and harvester ruling of Australia, or the now very high welfare net of Singapore....

They have only one thing in common, and that's access to certain product. Once the community has decided that everyone should access a good or service for 'a greater good', then access made made.

Via direct government delivery, or funding to access private sector providers, it is about access. That no one I denied.

There can, and are, secular debates over the methodology of this delivery, the ownership, scale of access, etc... but these are overlays above socialism.

For one I cant think if a country that has traversed industrialism without universal access to at least primary education to around age 12. Not which sector delivers it, but just kids are attending a school environment until this age.

That just sounded like a parade of pejoratives from a loon pond.

Post: #21

(08-01-2015 09:43 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  ^ All of those things could be provided, and would be provided, by capitalism if the state withdrew from them, and would do a far better job as always. And as always, the state gives you no choice, and demands gratitude and credit for it.

I actually said the privately sector can deliver them if the extent was that all government dud was provide coupons. But the mandate to collect tax receipts to funds coupons for everyone who wanted access is socialism.

The ideological overlay if whether government should progress further by delivering the service is another issue, i.e. the Marxism vs Singapore for example.

Post: #22

Vague thread title. Re-titled.

Socialism Fails ... Again

Seattle CEO's $70K Minimum Salary Experiment Fails

Post: #23

(08-01-2015 09:32 PM)T and A Man Wrote:  As opposed to what's banded around here as a reactionary slur, with froth and bile forming at the corner of the mouth, socialism means a communal effort to provide universal access, and nothing more.

Public school education is socialism, where taxes pay for everyone to access a level of education if need be.

"Taxes" meaning money extracted by force, against the will of some of those from whom it was extracted. Paying for indoctrination and (in many cases) a less effective potential future employee. "Education" is not an intrinsic good that can only be provided in a public system to all, equally. It may have more to do with personal willingness on the part of the party eager to learn (whatever the form).

(08-01-2015 09:32 PM)T and A Man Wrote:  Tax payer funded roads are socialism where everyone has access, as opposed to a private toll road.

Everyone having access is not necessary a positive thing. Everyone having to pay for things that not everyone uses may create more conflict than the opposite.

But I absolutely agree that you identified two socialist things. You missed something in your definition though: "a communal effort, by a minority using force to coerce the remaining parties involved, to provide universal access". For the force to be justified, it would have to be demonstrated that "universal access" was always, and in all cases, a good. Even for those who, at the time of action, were opposed to it. Is there a possible proof for this?

Post: #24

Funny, in an environment where you elect representatives, say dating back to 1776, who run on a mandate of collecting taxes, in a language I use I call that consensus rather than the minority extorting the majority

Being an individual who vehemently opposed such consensus led to emigration. I think the reason states had such string rights back then was to offer choice.

But for the third time for the reading impaired, the provision if public schools isn't the socialist aspect. The government offering coupons for parents to use at any private school is also socialism. You're conflating the two.

Socialism means in regards to education, anyone you wants to go to school can have access to it.

Post: #25

This reminds me of the UK.

I am a professional engineer and I see unemployed people with not too dissimilar lives to me.

It undermines the incentive to work and to do a good job. I'm just doing this until I can move somewhere that pays.