So we the people are giving them (allegedly) $1000 instead of the multiple thousands that they could have produced for the economy.

sigh. it’s not like that

The people are dissatisfied economically, and that’s why they voted for Trump.

So, what determines people’s income? Wages on the free labor market are determined through supply and demand.

When there’s a lot of supply of labor, i.e when there’s many people who could work in the country, high supply lowers prices. Prices for labor are also called wages. High number of people in the country --> lower wages. That’s where the “immigrants are taking our jobs” saying comes from. The point is not only that they’re taking jobs, but also that wages drop if there’s more supply in labor power.

(What these republican jackasses forget to mention is that this also affects the birth rate. A lower birth rate is good for the people because it means less supply of labor power --> higher wages in the future. Yet the republicans are consistently for a higher birth rate, which makes their whole point that they actually care about the economic situation of the people inconsistent.)

What these republican jackasses also forget to mention is that it’s not only about the supply of labor, but also the demand of labor. Higher demand means higher wages, and lower demand means lower wages.

Now, if you’ve ever built a house you will know that the vast majority of labor requirement goes into building the house, not maintaining it. The same is true for the economy. The economy grew rapidly in the last 200 years mostly because of technological inventions, which lead to a lot of real growth in the world and that created a large demand for human labor, which made wages rise high, which is why people could live comfortably in the 1960s on a single wage income per family.

The economy slowed down growth a lot in the last decades (+0.5% annually in 2019 compared to +3% in 1990) so that reduces the demand for human labor drastically. That’s why people earn less today than last century. If the republicans were honest, they’d recognize that fact, and they would respond by saying “ok, the free labor market doesn’t pay enough wages anymore to feed the people, so we need to help the people by giving them a universal basic income, financed by taxing the rich”. That would do significantly more to help the people than deporting immigrants, by the way, it would help at least 10x as much. That the republicans completely ignore this and don’t even speak about it shows that they are dishonest and do not have the people’s best interest at heart.

if companies actually did share 5 numbers with each piece of clothing (notice that that actually wouldn’t work since each piece of clothing is a bit different since they’re still largely hand-sown and measuring each piece of clothing is unpayably expensive) it would lead to a bureaucracy hell. businesses in europe already complain about too much bureaucracy, because they have to document a lot of things, and this would make the outcry a lot worse.

on top of that most customers wouldn’t actually bother reading a datasheet of 5 numbers and instead just try them on. so it’s not even a big advantage.

where it ends up making the clothes fit poorly

a.k.a makes the clothes fit anything but skin-tight because the pockets need space so the clothes have to be wider-cut

I suppose one of the many reasons why there are no consistent clothing sizes is because it’s so difficult to agree on a way to measure things. What parts do you measure? The lower leg thickness? the upper leg thickness? the waist circumference? The leg’s length? What if these numbers are all independent of each other and can’t be reduced to a single number?

universally understood across language barriers

but oh boy is so so soooooo much better than the one of most humans on earth

that’s mostly because the US wouldn’t stop bombing and overthrowing democratically elected governments in the rest of the world, tbh though

It’s not a function of space, but of time. Work load used to be significantly less in the medieval ages.

Modern work load is caused by progress and the high demand for human workforce that it brings with it.

lemmy has 30 K users by now worldwide btw, it started in late 2019 iirc. maybe we can get a million by 2030.

i think lemmy skews older because of the more complicated sign-up process and people being more tech-inclined around here and a bit more mature than the general public. and i love that, btw. less shallow “entertainment” and more memes and especially based arguments about things.

i wish there was a useable german instance for the general public.

discuss.tchncs.de is great but as the name says, rather for techy people

feddit.org is borderline unusable garbage between political shit-takes (constant bickering and non-constructive arguments) and generally a very non-open mood, it feels to me.

it’s called “unwinding” and also staring into the abyss hoping to find answers about the future there to cure the mental depression and anxiety that dwells in us all (or most of us) since we don’t know what the future will look like

if you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you

i think every somewhat sane person sees it that way. trump and the oligarchs are just grifters

Also that sugar isn’t good for the body, at least not for mine. I get rashes and a dry throat when i eat too much sugar. Fruit and vegetables put me in a good mood, but i try to reduce my unnecessary sugar intake anyways.

well then it’s good that Trump always adheres to the law

I guess the dollar might need to end, but for different reasons.

As long as Trump is in power, he can in principle just print as many dollars as he wants to and spend them on what he likes.

The mechanism is by (ab-)using the Federal Reserve bank. It hands out “loans” to the government, the government never really has to pay them back. (it’s called national debt)

Ending the existence of the dollar seems to be the only real way to take a money-printing machine out of Trump’s hands.

I’m not saying this lightheartedly, just considering the options.

it kinda confuses me that china couldn’t restrict VPN and Tor if it wanted to. i rather suspect they turn a blind eye, for some reason.

wealth inequality is unavoidable, but excessive wealth inequality is a disease on the society

this piques my interest

imagine: you get a dollar but so does elon musk. what would you do?

if everybody presses the button, we end up with a massive wealth inequality problem

and that’s actually how companies operate: the employees work for the company (akin to pressing buttons, just more tedious), and for that they get wages, but the company’s owners also get money that way. repeat the process and the company’s owners end up being massively wealthy, which leads to massive wealth inequality.