hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
2d ago
This is a reasonable factor, but I think you’re significantly underrating how bad fruit-picking is. Getting college kids to do it is a no go when you can’t get ex-cons to do it.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.
The difference in prevailing lower blue collar wages between the parts of Mexico and Honduras which still have subsistence agriculture and even the poorest parts of the U.S. are vast, even if purchasing power in rural Mississippi and Monterrey or the DF is closer than you might think. And people who are willing to pick strawberries for a living are also willing to walk thousands of miles. There will always be someone willing to pay cash under the table for a slight discount to clean toilets or do temporary construction work or whatever at a daily rate greater than the typical unskilled laborer weekly salary in Guatemala or Chiapas. There will always be someone willing to rent out a spare bedroom for a week’s day laborer pay, in cash. I have heard illegal immigrants speak about this- o, so and so went home to Oaxaca, when he runs out of money he’ll walk back, and this time he’ll learn his lesson and stay. I kept his number in case there’s a big job after he comes back. And even with the difference in costs, those Oaxaca laborers are eating rice and beans and wearing rags at home, and hamburgers with jeans in good repair here.
In contrast Nigerians have little choice but to wait in line to do it legally if they want US wages again.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
No, that was a twitter commie. Decker is an ancap who throws out spicy takes.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Also while her rates are high, isn't her fan club by and large very high income? They could afford her if they wanted.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Prostitution as a spot(often quite literally, in the sense of a geographically contained thing. Ancient law codes were big into defining where the red light district could be) in society probably isn't horrible; it's the spreading out from this little niche that tends to be the problem.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
It's pretty rare that male golddiggers were kept men, though. Usually dashing young military officers marrying much older widows and the like.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Mildly coercive labor practices+pay well above the going rate for unskilled labor has historically failed at staffing American farms with native workers. You could fly in a different set of third worlders, hold their pay in arrears until they get on the plane to go home- but you can't replace the need for migrants from shithole countries.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
When Georgia the state had a program to replace migrant farm workers with parolees, the produce rotted in the fields. Parolees almost by definition are more used to crappy, unpleasant conditions than the general public(they had after all just been in prison) and they stand a good chance of being imprisoned if they don't hold down a job- meatpacking plants, low level manufacturing, other big employers in shitty jobs love them for that reason.
Getting first worlders to do heavy agricultural labour is clearly an extremely difficult problem which has not yet been solved. In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
You can have some empathy for her(it does seem like her childhood was pretty bad) without approving of any of her decisions, or even refraining from judging her choices.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Aella grew up very Christian, albeit under the thumb of mentally ill calvinists. I'm doubting it would have helped.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
This is your brain on utilitarianism.
Sometimes it just doesn't matter what the cost/benefit tradeoff is, it's still wrong.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Catholic schoolgirls are probably a teen fetish as much as anything else, and lesbians are a threesome fantasy, right?
Nuns maybe, but it seems far less widespread than the other two.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
The red tribe isn't a super-coherent group, it's a loose coalition of groups that feel mistreated by the blue tribe(which seems like it is a group). Your Cajun and your UAW worker have barely more in common than either of them do with a NYC girlboss. Hence it can't have a single status hierarchy.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But no one thinks that being single, or having a series of different monogamous partners, is morally blameworthy in the same way that prostitution is.
Yes they do. Lots of criticisms of serial monogamy to be had and it's actually a historical outlier that the modern west doesn't publicly worry about the plight of men not being interested in marriage.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
For landscaping you can absolutely hire high schoolers. They just have lower flexibility.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Farms are one of those things where you just can't get Americans to do it. You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it. You can hire out of the parole office, they'll still quit knowing they stand a good chance of going to jail for it.
Like duh, Trump was never going to crack down on fruitpickers and no one really wanted him to.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
While fair, the actual homeless receive a higher standard of living than the average person in 1800 by some measures(they probably eat a better diet, for example); ‘premodern charity cases’ are a dumb comparison.
Disability cases have a standard of living that’s pretty low by North American standards. There’s probably some room to cut it, but asking them to live like homeless tramps from the Middle Ages isn’t something our society is prepared to do- of anyone.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Most promiscuous women seem to draw a hard line between themselves and actual sex workers, even if broader society often doesn’t.
Like, nobody sees Anna-Nicole Smith, (briefly)successful though she might be, in a positive light- including women who sleep around and show their tits to strange men for free.
The negative stereotype of whores may not revolve about their promiscuity, but it is still there.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Disability is not exactly a high standard of living.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
It doesn’t take that much to live if you have your house paid off. Even in the Bay Area she almost certainly could retire.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
All three are true. A former prostitute/stripper/camgirl would be seen as unmarriageable by the vast majority of Americans, to say nothing or the population in general. Trophy wives are not viewed kindly, either.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
She could easily find a rationalist eligible bachelor to have kids with in her stated lifestyle. She’d just have to settle for ‘eligible’ rather than ‘attractive’(in the broad sense, rather than just a synonym for handsome).
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Or, more relevantly, most people in therapy don’t need to be there, and doing therapy on a healthy person can’t help, might hurt.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Uh, did she really believe harlots are going to be well liked or have a good reputation in the public sphere?
My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China. None of them wealthy, all of them with near-third-world-poor hinterlands that make the only difference here the ‘foreign’ part. Working in say, Chihuahua or Baja California Dei Sur is a much better deal than in Chiapas even if they’re technically the same country. Likewise why import workers from Laos when guizhao is right there.
I’ve heard that even Lebanon doesn’t have native Lebanese working the fields, Syrian refugees do it for Pennies. Even Iran seems to, de facto, make use of much poorer Afghanis and Tajiks for stuff like that.
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