I’m sure you are having trouble keeping track, you keep putting words in my mouth and ignoring what I type.

Have a good day.

I think this is where this thread is getting stuck - they did NOT just study “that duck”. They studied multiple ducks. They found that no matter what kind of duck it is, it eats bread. The commentor above that I’m replying to said “why are they afraid to name the duck?”. I said “it’s about more than just that one type of duck, actually - the paper studies a bunch of ducks, and has found that all forms of ducks eat bread”.

Somehow they’ve taken this to mean I think that duck doesn’t eat bread.

We overcome this obstacle by building on recent developments in the measurement of democratic erosion. Doing so allows us to conduct a large, cross-national quantitative study of democratic erosion and economic distribution. Our key conclusion is that income inequality is a strong and highly robust predictor of democratic erosion. This basic result is stunningly robust. In all, we find a consistent, positive association between income or wealth gaps and democratic erosion across more than 100 distinct statistical models.

They studied multiple ducks. My point is that they studied multiple ducks, and getting mad at the paper for not focusing just on one duck is dumb.

Where did I say “it’s not neoliberalism”? I said “inequality can come in multiple forms, one of which is neoliberal corporatocracy”. Not every country is getting ruined by the same thing you’re currently experiencing. Saying the authors “are afraid to say it” is dumb when the authors also studied economies who’s inequality is coming from non neoliberal sources.

That’s true. Perhaps my comment should read “not everything is about Western corporatocracies.” Inequality can come in many forms, and pretending inequality cannot come from anything other than corporate control is misguided at best.

Depends on the economy. You, the American, should blame corporatocracy and private interests. Other economies may blame government corruption or government enforced inequality. Aparthied South Africa, for example, may want to blame the government for their inequality.

The paper is just “economic inequality begets democratic backsliding” and is not prescriptive about where that inequality and backsliding comes from.

Again, the world is not the US, and going after these authors for discussing the general case and not staying US-focused is pretty dumb.

Buddy not everything is about the US. They studied multiple economies. Just because the US is devolving into a corporate hellscape doesn’t mean other countries aren’t devolving into an auth-right government hellscape.

It’s not cognitive dissonance if they’re discussing a situation other than your personal perspective and experience.

Isolated economies perform worse in the long run, usually by a lot. Fair and open trade is almost always a net benefit for both parties. What Canada needs is a diverse portfolio of trading partners, not 70% of our exports going to the US.

The Liberal party’s funding of Export Development Canada is an important cornerstone of this that we should not forget come election season.

Costco has a great Colombian whole bean that they sail from Colombia to Quebec where it’s roasted and packaged. Cafe William’s Sailboat coffee. We love it. We’ll be buying it exclusively now!

Right? But no Jagmeet’s gonna do the Conservative team up no one asked for and vote no confidence! PP’s ideas are just dumb and the Liberals seem hell bent on ignoring the monopolistic cancer that’s finally metastasized over the past 5 years after lurking for the past 30.

I’d vote for anyone that said they’d force a breakup of Loblaws, Safeway and others.

Eh, I’d have voted for him again over Singh or PPboi but between the blackface thing, the SNC affair, etc. he’s definitely had his fair share of indirectly political scandals over basically his entire tenure.

He didn’t do everything he promised, played some net-zero impact political games but also accomplished some meaningfully positive things (childcare, forced rezoning, carbon tax, etc.) that people seem to totally ignore. My only meaningful complaint with him is the electoral reform and the lack of antitrust action, but I otherwise think he did “fine” over his tenure.

Unfortunately a 100% accurate reflection of Canadian politics. So dumb that basically everyone other than Alberta agrees that Trudeau did some good stuff that didn’t get advertised, some dumb fuck political games that did nothing of value but also no damage, and our complete monopoly of basically every industry is cucking micro and macro economic growth and yet we’re here blaming Trudeau and not fronting any anti-monopolist parties.

PP will win and Jagmeet will continue to fail to capitalize on the popular anti corporate sentiments while the Liberals will ban the guns they just unbanned in the meantime.

100% true, and the fact that Shaw just got rolled into Rogers in the middle of anti-monopolist popular fervor is pretty depressing. The grocery industry is absolutely vile. Trudeau was acceptable and mostly made reasonable choices but my God I’d vote for anyone who forwarded stronger antitrust legislation and rulings.

Fucking Pierre ain’t gonna do it, the Cons always end up pushing legislation to get cushy megacorp board positions after their terms are up. Jagmeet seems more interested in fucking around than doing anything, and Trudeau was palatable but failed to tackle the monopolists at all.

Insanity to me how much the corpos own our country and how none of the parties seem to care.

Yeeep. My boss was an engineering exec at Twitter for 8 years, he quit when Musky was an asshole to him in a meeting. Pretty unreal some of the stories he had.

Re: H-1B, the data is all available for everyone seeing this: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub

Go make yourselves sad.

Tesla’s H1-B employees are public knowledge - he’s paying H1-B senior engineers 70k a year, which is a pittance compared to market rates. He’s also hiring entry level engineers and claiming they’re “highly paid specialists he couldn’t hire domestically”, which is hilarious given the number of layoffs in tech recently - the candidates are clearly there.

Tesla and SpaceX are famous for being low paid sweatshops in the engineering world, and H1-B labor is helping lower those wages and QoL for workers. Fuck Musky.

Definitely! Union membership is in decline and so are wages. The boomer generation seems to think the government is the largest negative impact on our lives when it’s actually the corporate suits.

You an FPV guy or a cinematic guy?

Costco’s whole thing is that they have a flat markup on all their goods. It’s static - price goes down for them, they lower their retail.

They also pay a reasonable wage - my buddy works there and is clearing 31.50/hr + voluntary OT + 6k bonus/yr. Regularly makes 80k a year, just floor staff not management/supervisor.

And they pay their upstream and logistics providers 2-3x market rates as well- my girlfriend works for a major trucking company doing pricing and Costco voluntarily overpays for their lanes so they have more reliable deliveries.

Many many companies price-gouge and underpay their employees or steal wages. Costco doesn’t. Fuck Walmart, Safeway, Amazon, etc.

Thanks, I know how to use markdown, I just can’t get my lemmy client to upload an image to my instance to get the URL to begin with.

Pretty sure the headline was changed by USA Today, based on the page title. Once I figure out how to include an image I’ll add it, but I think when the OP posted this, that was the headline.

There’s also just a fundamental problem with planned economies from a purely economic standpoint: they are much less efficient at actually providing the minimum set of goods and services required by a population, and they’re worse at achieving growth. See the most recent Nobel Prize in economics for a citation. Funnily enough, the same paper’s arguments apply equally to oligarchic economies and crony capitalist economies, which are semi-planned economies by a small group of the ultra wealthy.

More specifically to the OP, communist countries have planned economies, which by nature requires a strong authority to tightly control production. Hence why communist states always have very consolidated political power structures. And once the power is consolidated, all it takes is one bad actor to get that power and ruin everything.