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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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There is a farm near me that a lot of kids wanted to work at because they hired 14 year olds. Few lasted. You don't get paid by the hour, you get paid by the bushel, and it's well under a dollar per bushel. You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation. And this was a family farm with a grocery store and a pumpkin patch with hayrides, not some agribusiness with thousands of acres.

"Not paid enough" and "doesn't have good working conditions" are in the same category and both can be improved. They could allow talking (especially if they pay by the bushel so talking wasting time won't hurt them), they just didn't.

Also, people think of family businesses too favorably. Family businesses are often inefficient, and their owners vary much more in pettiness than big businesses.

You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation.

This is all stuff that can be changed.

The American people famously never get extremely mad about the cost of living.

I'm sure there will be absolutely 0 societal backlash from the resulting increase in prices when farm worker pay goes up and productivity goes down.

If food spending goes up by $300 per year, the media will have an amazingly hypocritical freakout about it. But if, at the same time, rents drop by 10%, ER wait times go down, and many common areas feel less crowded by people who don't share a common culture or language, I think the American people would be quite happy with the outcome.

Yeah that feels like a fairly safe bet. Timing of effect impacts becomes very important though.

We shall see! Or I guess we won't, given Trump gave up

What year was this?

Late 90s early 2000s

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