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Tarn - mutual eye-rolling's avatar

Thirty dollars an hour sounds crazy high to me.

The only businesses with plenty staff are the op shops staffed by volunteers.

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Stegiel's avatar

Urban cost of living.

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Dingbat's avatar

During the Biden regime, thanks to an emormous and growing US budget deficit, corporate profits have soared and real wages have lagged. This is where the drive for a higher minimum wage comes from. Capital's share of national income has gone exponential.

The value of the dollar against real goods and services (otherwise known as inflation) has fallen precipitously.

Many small businesses cannot afford higher wages or the capital cost of machines to replace people.

Large companies can afford to pay more but can afford to replace their people with machines.

The answer? No deficits. A stable currency. No inflation. A tax on labor-replacing machines as if they were people.

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Stegiel's avatar

No Capitalist reform is possible since unfair and unequal are why Capitalism is praised as a boon for all. Sacred Capitalist investment grows more money to invest as it dumbs people down, rapes the environment, and decimates manunkind. Investing in labor is investing in expense. A necessary evil, slightly superior to slavery, but machine labor this is not and a machine worker seemingly costly is the best labor money can buy.

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JS's avatar
Dec 14Edited

Maybe fewer humans should be going as many places as they go? It wasn't long ago, my lifetime, when a trip to Ohio was something, an adventure, for someone living in southern Michigan. An airline trip to Florida to visit my grandparents at Easter seemed like the event of a lifetime. I know my mother could not afford it. I had to get dressed up to fly. We took Merriman Road to DTW, not the interstate. Fifteen or twenty years after that, a young adult with no money could fly anywhere in the world on a promise, so could the rest of the poor slobs, and so they did. Now look at the remote places, the inaccessible places, the special places, like Iceland, Greenland, Antarctica, Easter Island, Azores, you name it. The bucket list places that should be bucket list places. They are overrun with morons, half of whom went there to demonstrate to the rest of us why we need to save the planet. Maybe, just maybe most of the worlds problems are because people don't just stay the F home.

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Dingbat's avatar

agreed. I stopped travelling when it was democratized.

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Stegiel's avatar

I still ride MUNI and use BART. Amtrak every couple years. I ditched car and DMV over 20 years ago. I have no money anyhow so my time in the sun is long ago.

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Dingbat's avatar

Not being in Cali, a car is needed here but it is 16 years old and still runs beautifully. All my neighbors think I am eccentric.

As we age, we need so much less. To have a heart is the greatest wealth, painful though it can be. Working on it. My dog is my tutor.

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Stegiel's avatar

Wordsworth writing about the Lake District and the railroad created Britsh tourism as recreation. So one could say yes to your point about remote Nature and Eco Tourism and say if travel is affordable people frequently do.

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