Drinniol
6d ago
Well, if it was written before the effects of the plaza accords kneecapped japan's economy, it's understandable.
Arguing about trees when the forest is burning down, or are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?
And yes, the fact is that US companies using offshored sweatshop slavery destroyed much of the US factory labor class. This is terrible in its own right -I shouldn't need to connect it to coders for you to care - but yes, this depresses coding wages too. The economy is interconnected and the general state of labor prices affects wages everywhere.
The indian coder in SF sends back remittances to his family to live like kings and has the full possibility of returning with whatever savings they have which will go far further in India than the US. It's not a different situation at all. Yes, I too would be willing to work for less if I knew it was purchasing my family a mansion back in my hometown that I can return to as a conquering hero.
Also, yeah, before you even bring it up - people are also willing to work for less in worse conditions when they have a deportation hanging over their head. For that matter, they'd probably be willing to work for even less if we pointed a gun at their head and told em to get cracking or else. I don't want to compete with slaves for wages either - guess I need to adjust my salary expectations.
When you allow people with massively different and negative externalities driving their wage acceptance criteria down to compete with people who don't have the same externalities hanging over their head, you are transferring the consequences of those horsehair swords onto others. Surely the people who didn't previously have to compete with the sword of damocles can at least ask you to stop doing that?
Stop, please.
Drinniol
18d ago
Bro if I paid indian prices for housing and every other good and indian tax rates I could afford to work for indian wages too.
You seem to fail to understand that american companies make america-sized profits by selling in america at american prices - prices that are only affordable to americans because of america-sized wages. If no company pays american wages anymore the whole edifice collapses. It's literally textbook tragedy of the commons here. An individual company thinks they're super smart offshoring, but if every company does it congrats we've achieved total parity with the indian standard of living.
Well first off the best way to make people want to talk about something is to tell them they can't talk about it. And that happened a lot with hbd, the ssc mods literally banned discussion of it for a while.
To be fair, you do have to keep in mind that on reddit having your entire community summarily banned because people are making cogent, well-reasoned, and factually grounded arguments that reddit admins don't like, as opposed to merely posting acceptable content like rape fantasies, is an everpresent threat. So it was understandable.
Hbd is an annoying topic too because it was just constant ping ponging between, "No populations can't possibly differ on genetically derived mental traits even though they are no different genetically than height or skin color or hirsuteness which clearly and measurably differ the average brain is identical between every single human population no matter how you divide them because it just is ok you nazi?" and, "Ok now that we've agreed races differ in intelligence let me explain why every other race but mine are all untermensch and need to be confined to ghettos and we shouldn't waste time educating them."
Well I majored in mathematics and I can't say I exactly recall the long division algorithm I was taught in high school either. I'm sure I could recreate it or something similar if I needed to. But that's the point - any time I've needed to divide two large digit numbers in the past 15 or so years I've used a calculator or computer because not only is it faster, it's also easier to verify correctness. People forgetting things they don't use isn't a bug of the brain, it's a feature (ugh, and now any time I use a "it isn't x, it's y" construction I worry about sounding like chatgpt). I'd only really be worried if I thought I'd lost the capacity to relearn long division. I haven't yet, have you?
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