It is a situation where after the pin drops, everything explodes. Exceedingly rare will become common, simply because law and norms no longer has enough belief to sustain the status quo.
The America we knew is running on inertia alone. That ride is coming to an end.
ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. We can have a body of researchers study each occupation, and assign it a rank according to what is required for the task. Provided the standards are objective - the amount of hours, the physical conditions a worker has to undergo, how much education is required to do a good job, and so forth are fairly consistent, we can fairly designate the rank of a job.
Garbage men don’t require nearly as much training as a doctor, otherwise people die. In any case, a garbage man would likely be at the $60k rank, because it is harder than being a waiter. Lots of sitting and driving, with the odd garbage handling in person if something comes up. The biggest source of danger comes from crashes. Far as education goes, not much, I expect - mostly cartography of the route, scheduling, and so forth.
An immigrant worker would probably have their job class at $80k annual payout if they picked food. There is lots of exertion, sun, inclement weather, and so forth. The work itself isn’t dangerous nor requires an education, it is simply exhausting. Provided that 4 or so hours of a six hour shift are done before a hour-long noon lunch, the danger of heat exhaustion from the sun can be mitigated, especially if workers are given hats, water, and 5 minute breaks for each hour to recuperate. Hazard pay can be in effect during significant levels of rain, and appropriate gear mandated for those conditions.
As to STEM being oversaturated, I think that is incorrect. Rather, it is because corporations are hyper-fixated on crushing blood out of a stone to maximize perceived profit. Everyone in every working profession has to work longer and are paid less, because the companies force that to be the case. By deliberately creating ghost jobs, using maladjusted interviews, coercion, and so on, companies can artificially force workers to come to the table to beg for scraps. If there was a 6-hour workday, mandated vacations, and other ethical standards that are enforced, companies would have to employ many more STEM students to fill out the daily roster.
The Trump Regime is basically Caesar’s Legion, but dumber. NCR all the way!
It isn’t a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn’t a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn’t even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.
What makes you believe that they aren’t employing bounties? The Trump Regime hasn’t demonstrated anything resembling ethics - for example, Elon has at least twice tried to buy votes for elections. It is only yesterday that the Hatch Act was violated, when assorted federal websites blamed Democrats for the government shutdown. Or those 500 children who almost got sent to Guatemala?
It has been mentioned in various spots on Blue Sky and so forth. Remember, ICE doesn’t have formalized uniforms nor training, nor do they offer ID, and their vehicles often lack registries. The odds of them being genuine officers of any kind is low.
ICE largely consists of bounty hunters. It is about $1,500 a head. Assuming you got rich asswipes like Elon funding the bounties, the ICE can keep doing their thing.
Some are saying the landowner wanted a excuse to sell the property, sans tenants and obligations. They might have collaborated with ICE.
They are thinking about having an island vacation while doing so. Those children will also be the star attraction.
…no /s. I am expecting the Trump Regime to use child slaves at Mar-a-Lago and other venues, and post-war documentaries will have many adults describing their abuse. They are the ones that lived.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter’s income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
The big problem is that there IS law: the kind that favors the government. As of right now, people can’t go out and crush some ICE without the courts and police doing something about it.
Blocs, probably. A Canadian Bloc, a Mexican Bloc, Conservative Bloc, and a West Coast bloc, maybe? They would all have leanings and eventually end up becoming their own nations or joining Mexico-Canada…though I expect the conservative bloc to be mostly eaten by the others. Largely because Conservatives are shitty neighbors by default.
Those who are inclined to accept bribery, are not people we want to be leaders. They should be leaders because they find it interesting or want to help their communities, not to become rich.
What I proposed is part of an economic UBI concept that I put together, where incomes from jobs are fixed and rank based, with the rank based on the effort, risk, and knowledge that a job entails. IMO, that would make it harder for employers to commit wage theft, because everyone knows how much money their job should bring in, nation-wide. That makes it easier to diagnose corruption, because outliers have less camouflage of ‘circumstances’ to hide behind. All leadership roles in companies and politics have employees and voters voting for the employment and pay rank of their respective critters.
It is through complicated rules, exploits, and obscuration that the wealthy retain their wealth by being selfish jerks. If the Constitution is replaced by a newer model, economics deserves a section of its own.
Among many overhauls that I would like to see, I would like political critters to have limited income, with it based on popular votes held every half-year of their term. Wiping away current standards of income, it would be four brackets for politicians: $40k, $60k, $80k, and $100k annually, initially starting their term at the lowest level. People vote for one of these four, and that is the politician’s pay until the next pay vote.
This would allow voters to tangibly voice their (dis)approval of a politico throughout their term, which incentivizes the critter to actually pay attention to their constitute’s interests. If a politician seems strangely wealthy despite not having high approval pay, that would make it easier to spot corruption as well.
I don’t view Democrat leadership as moderate at all. “Centrist”, just means Republican policies that boil the frog.
Funny. I think the same thing would happen to MAGATs, Klanners, and the 1%.
As ever, I won’t start the fight, but I intend to be the one who walks away from it. Preferably with other minorities.
We owe Benedict Arnold an apology. He had way better reasons for defecting, and was a legitimate soldier and commander before then.
I can’t say the same of any member of the Trump Regime.
I am guessing it is because he actually participated in warfare with his own flesh. That sort of thing makes it clear what happens if things go badly. The likes of Trump never truly experienced the possibility of dying horribly.*
That is probably a good thing in our situation: however aggressive they may be, MAGATs are not hardened by suffering and mutual bloodshed. In a war, it will be easier to break their spirit. Unlike minorities, they haven’t undergone genuine abuse. Be it black, autistic, or trans, the good guys knows what it means to lose to fascists, because they had to live with evil people who tried to strip away their humanity.
*That assassination attempt probably didn’t really register. I have the impression that age has made Trump’s brain into a soup that cannot learn.