The paleo/anthopological data currently held by the scientific consensus puts the life expectancy of neolithic hunter gatherers as equivalent to pre-20th century medicine life expectancy. Around 50 years old.
Current hunter gatherer societies live on marginal land due to colonization and other factors, and thus have a much lower life expectancy.
The average life expectancy of human beings has been found mostly constant throughout history except it took a huge dive in Europe (to the 30 years-old numbers you're trotting about) during the European Dark Ages, and took centuries to recover from there. Then it plateau'd, up to modern medicine's ascendency, which was able to push us above the 50 y-o mark up to the current 70/80 years-old mark.
Where hunting-gathering continued for a long time, it was a better, more productive lifestyle than agriculture. Numerous societies tried agriculture and returned to hunting-gathering because under certain circumstances of land quality, availability of animals for pasturalism, or which plants are available, agriculture can be less productive than hunting-gathering. People did not stick to hunting-gathering because they were stupid, but because it was a better lifestyle for their local conditions. ("Guns, Germs and Steel", by Jared Diamond).
Of course, where agriculture flourishes, it is mostly impossible to go back. Where agriculture is more productive, there is a population spike to take advantage of all the surplus food, and the lifestyle of each individual returns to equilibrium with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as the surplus is divided between more and more mouths. To go back to hunting-gathering at that point would mean starvation for most people as a new equilibrium emerges.
You'll note my hunter-gatherer didn't die of starvation, old age or disease. I was addressing the social conditions of the society, not its economic conditions.
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bunch of market liberals who actually condone making conditions for workers worse by decreasing compensation for both unemployment and sickness and who have voted against making the public sector more robust
By reducing unemployeement and decreasing compensation for not doing anything it makes people goo hmm if i want to live better maybe i should get a job.
by introducing competition you actually lower prices which means more wealth for everyone. it also means more jobs for all those unemployeed people now looking for work.
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bad example to use. putting people that already know what they are doing in a situation is very bad to use.
we are talking about a general group of people here not a group of people specialized in a task.
if you take a random group of people and throw them into a pizza palor without telling them what needs done then yes you will have chaos on your hands.
Eventually they'll get hungry and just want to make pizzas because they're locked up in a pizza building for the rest of their lives lol. its really state of mind and a leader is used. as long as someone basically says "i'm hungry now. anyone want to help me?". they must democratically agree on rules of how pizza should be spilit and then begin working on the pizza. if someone in the group is hungry they must all agree to work on the pizza would be a rule. another rule would be they don't feed people who don't work. hopefully rule no. 2 would fix itself if they keep making different pizzas (say new jobs and skills for different pizzas i mean).
No, it does not. Giving business greater freedom only increases the wealth of those who own business. Companies aren't specifically interested in creating jobs, either, they exist to turn a profit.
That and poor business practices such as "downsizing" and increasing workloads on especially salary workers. From what most of us have probably seen in the work place when this happens productivity decreases ironically.
People are therefore more likely to call in sick, become sick (stress decreases immune system->chain reaction of infection), as well as look for ways to make shortcuts as well as make more mistakes.
To be honest right now, we have a trend towards too much compensation at the upper eschelons of our companies and bureacracies rather than having the proper amount of lower scale workers to properly execute workloads. Basically, it's the Wal-Mart ethos of efficiency which is a myth. Companies have to zerg through workforces or return to "normal function" after the business cycle troughs (eases stress to "work more for the bottum line") or rises.
In short, for profit businesses are short sighted and often make stupid mistakes. More often ones like Google or Craig's List are the ones that maintain true expansionary power and focus on the true bottum line: a more perfect product line.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
You don't understand how people work, you just do not understand. People were looking for jobs just fine before reduced unemployment and with the economy being as it is it's not going to be much of an incentive.
Actually i do know how people work very well. If they can get away with not doing anything and still collect money and other benefits they are going to do it. Yes it will be an incentive as now instead of getting 80% of what you were making you are now getting 60%. there is a much bigger incentive to go out and find something.
You can't live a king's life on unemployment anyway because it's at most 80% of your previous salary but most often nearer 60% and you don't get it unconditionally either! You have to demonstrate that you are searching for a new job by filling in and mailing a form every two weeks to the appropriate authority. The carrot of a full salary and employment is much better than the whip of greatly reduced quality of life.
It depends on your salary. 80% of 100K is quite livable. 80% of 20K isn't. How hard it is to mail in a form every two week? you aren't doing anything so yes it is that simple.
Most people don't start looking for work till their unemployeement gets ready to run out.
Yes a full salary is better, However sitting back and collecting money for nothing is very simple and easy as well. depending on your lifestyle and your salary you can easily live on 80%. You might have to cut back on certain things but you could do it.
No, it does not. Giving business greater freedom only increases the wealth of those who own business. Companies aren't specifically interested in creating jobs, either, they exist to turn a profit.
you finally get it. companies exist to make profit. in order to make profit they must grow. when companies grow they have to hire more people.
if companies don't make a profit then they don't grow, they don't hire people, if the trend continues to far then they close up shop.
The person that starts the business accepts all the risk involved in the business. most people put their livelyhoods on the line to create a business. they work 60-80 hours a week sometimes without taking a paycheck.
so yes they should get most of the reward they took the risk of doing it.
you don't create a company to hire people. you create a company to make a profit..
any good decent economics or even business course will teach you this.
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It depends on your salary. 80% of 100K is quite livable. 80% of 20K isn't. How hard it is to mail in a form every two week? you aren't doing anything so yes it is that simple.
Most people don't start looking for work till their unemployeement gets ready to run out.
Yes a full salary is better, However sitting back and collecting money for nothing is very simple and easy as well. depending on your lifestyle and your salary you can easily live on 80%. You might have to cut back on certain things but you could do it.
In order to even have a CHANCE at getting 80% you need to be in the sub-$50k range for starters - at my $60k I wasn't even getting close to 80% once I dropped off disability and onto unemployment comparing the before and after stubs with a near $900 dropoff (bi-weekly) - FAR more than 20% drop off.
Not to mention part of the stipulation to unemployment is that you show active interest in looking for work - if you don't fill out the forms which include receipts from applying for work - you get knocked off of unemployment in about 4 weeks from my experience. (Of course I was surprised they even gave me the first authorization to even draw any based on my HR education they shouldn't have)
so yes they should get most of the reward they took the risk of doing it.
you don't create a company to hire people. you create a company to make a profit..
any good decent economics or even business course will teach you this.
It depends entirely on the size of the business - small businesses I don't think anyone would disagree with you on - corporations and other investment backed properties have no intrinsic risk since they buoy themselves with the investments of others and they themselves risk nothing.
$1 of every $100 the business earns is completely reasonable for one, but ridiculously excessive for the other - and of course the one it's excessive for is the one that has basically no risk involved.
Black and white arguments are foolish - reality proves nearly every case beyond the extremes to be some degree of gray however.
I
It depends entirely on the size of the business - small businesses I don't think anyone would disagree with you on - corporations and other investment backed properties have no intrinsic risk since they buoy themselves with the investments of others and they themselves risk nothing.
Didn't some of the largest businesses in the world just fail a few months back?
Didn't some of the largest businesses in the world just fail a few months back?
And the risks to those running the businesses? Still basically zero. There's a reason why their contract clauses are called golden parachutes after all....
Small business owners don't walk away with millions to billions when they run it into the ground, they declare personal bankruptcy quite often.
The only people that get completely screwed in a large company are those holding the investments, generally speaking the stockholders. Those that make up the corporate executive structure have themselves covered even if they fail - which is ridiculous.
Yeah, companies don't care about whether people are employed or not. If they can make a better profit by firing some people then they will do that. Rich companies do not necessarily translate to a healthy workforce.
But usually, they're rich because the economy is expanding, in which case they're likely to be hiring, not firing. When the economy is shrinking, there are often layoffs, yes - but really, what would you want to happen? Should the company be forced to keep everyone on the payroll until it goes under completely?
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I think one of the first things people would want to happen is a drastic decrease in the pay check of the managers.
That would be nice, but it's been tried. Those zeroes really do seem to be necessary to attract talent. Making it more contingent on the success of the company to ensure that you actually get talent would probably be a better idea, but there, too, are complications; after all, you don't want to screw a good manager after he made the best of bad events beyond his control.
The key is to somehow kill the sense of entitlement found in some sectors of corporate culture. This is just as pernicious as the sense of entitlement found in some labor unions, or in the world of celebrities, or in 18th-Century French aristocrats. Entitlement is pretty much universally harmful.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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you don't create a company to hire people. you create a company to make a profit..
any good decent economics or even business course will teach you this.
People also create companies in order to do something like create a certain product or service with a higher calling or because they're intrinsically motivated to create things or help people. The "creativity" and higher order thinking translates into a better product when you manage money properly.
Purely for profit companies such as the banks that were retooled into usuary machines are the ones that are feeling the pinch. The banks that played conservatively (and are doing fine right now) did so to preserve the company and their "coorporate legacy."
Companies are supposed to do something for society that's useful and secondly make money, when it loses sight of it's original goals. The company suffers.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Nothing is perfect, and it hardly seems a logical thing to make the manager earn a lot regardless of how he's doing. Even if things are beyond his control.
People are risk-averse. Good managers will look for positions where they're not going to get totally hosed if things go south. People are also good at gaming the system. If you set up certain performance benchmarks for pay, managers will focus on hitting those benchmarks at the expense of everything else - even, sometimes, to the extent of cooking the books. This is why it is imperative to get the structure of incentive pay right, and it is not an easy task.
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Does that mean you agree golden parachutes should be abolished?
I'm exploring the hypothetical with an open mind, and seeing certain competitive obstacles which must be overcome if such a change is to be productive.
There's also the question of how golden parachutes would be abolished. I'm pretty sure Congress doesn't have the Constitutional power to pass a law like that - not that this has ever stopped progressives (or conservatives, for that matter) in the past.
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Does that mean you agree golden parachutes should be abolished?
Why would you want to do this? These are necessary tools to attract and retain management in most cases. If they weren't offered, or were abolished, do you really think another similar benefit wouldn't replace it?
In that case, the risk is still quite small. Those men (rarely women) earn enough for me to live on a lifetime every year.
Yeah, thats you. You value your free time. Most corporate exec's sleep, eat, and breathe the companies they work for. It take a completely different person to be at the top of a large company. Due to the multitude of stress and anxiety these people endure in the form of higher divorce, less free time, etc. They deserve more money.
Something ive noticed in this forum and several others bothers me. I want to understand why there is a pervasive hatred(pick your word for it) of anyone with wealth. I just notice anytime we discuss tax codes and bring up any changes for or against the wealthy a lot of people seem to just act irrational saying that how can you "defend the wealthy" as though they have done something contemptible.
Thoughts?
Most people have stereotyped wealthy people to lazy, greedy devil-spawn whose sole goal in life is to make more money, no matter who they hurt. I don't beleive this, but it's what some people think.
However, in today's culture of Justin Bieber, Jersey Shore, and Twilight, where every song on the radio, every program on television and every site on the internet is just another monument to the pinnacle of human stupidity, it's certainly not the worst thing that people could be watching.
It is the simple case of the have's and have not's. the people that have not feel that the have's shouldn't.
Dr. Suess did a great book on this.
In a big company, how do managers ever get hosed?
Yes if they did something criminal to cause the company to go under they go to jail not the employee.
I know a CEO right now and his son that is sitting in the slammer for exactly that. you can't just embezle 4 billion dollars and get away with it.
the risk is still quite small.
You obviously have not been in charge of thousands of people or have thousands of people depending on you to make the correct decision because their lively hood rests in your hands. it is no small risk that ceo's and other managers take.
one bad decision or a series of bad decisions can cause them to go under.
i do think however that companies should have escape clauses that if the company fails as a result of bad decisions then the ceo forfeits their rights to compensation other than their salary.
IE the guy from WAMU was in charge 14 days and recieved millions in bonuses even though the company went under.
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The Have Nots don't want the Haves to join them. They just want to be "Have Enoughs," or they've bought into the ridiculous idea that its wrong to be anything but a Have.
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Everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true, false, and meaningless in some sense. Repeat this 666 times and you will reach enlightenment.
In some sense. The only good fnord is a dead fnord.
The WEALTHY people hardly are unethical or evil. If someone has frauded (fraud in a broad meaning), then he's not wealthy; like possessing blood money. You'll never be comfortable with blood money. You can have things, but the law or police will catch you eventually. So, for me, wealth means money with honesty. Just one opinion.
The Have Nots don't want the Haves to join them. They just want to be "Have Enoughs," or they've bought into the ridiculous idea that its wrong to be anything but a Have.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. I'd wager there are plenty* of people who know they'll never be a 'have', are mad about it, and since they feel as though that can't do anything to improve their situation, they'd rather see others suffer to make them feel better.
* I don't know how many "plenty" of people acutally is, its just a guess that there are more than a few of these types of people who are vindictive.
I think that would put them in that second class of people, then. I don't think that would be the majority of that group at all, but sure, there's some. Most people I have encountered that aren't part of some alternative group (anarchists, starving artist types or whatever) from the lower middle class (my people!) just seem like figuring out a way to do something they love and get paid ENOUGH for it has never even occurred to them.
Eternal drudgery and the rat race could make anybody spiteful, I suppose.
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Everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true, false, and meaningless in some sense. Repeat this 666 times and you will reach enlightenment.
In some sense. The only good fnord is a dead fnord.
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You'll note my hunter-gatherer didn't die of starvation, old age or disease. I was addressing the social conditions of the society, not its economic conditions.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
But if a socialist government were nationalizing property, that wouldn't be motivated purely by ideology, would it?
(Hint: a "sense of real necessity or benefit" is what an ideology is. Well, unless it's a Stalinesque facade of some sort.)
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
By reducing unemployeement and decreasing compensation for not doing anything it makes people goo hmm if i want to live better maybe i should get a job.
by introducing competition you actually lower prices which means more wealth for everyone. it also means more jobs for all those unemployeed people now looking for work.
Thanks to Epic Graphics the best around.
Thanks to Nex3 for the avatar visit ye old sig and avatar forum
Eventually they'll get hungry and just want to make pizzas because they're locked up in a pizza building for the rest of their lives lol. its really state of mind and a leader is used. as long as someone basically says "i'm hungry now. anyone want to help me?". they must democratically agree on rules of how pizza should be spilit and then begin working on the pizza. if someone in the group is hungry they must all agree to work on the pizza would be a rule. another rule would be they don't feed people who don't work. hopefully rule no. 2 would fix itself if they keep making different pizzas (say new jobs and skills for different pizzas i mean).
That and poor business practices such as "downsizing" and increasing workloads on especially salary workers. From what most of us have probably seen in the work place when this happens productivity decreases ironically.
People are therefore more likely to call in sick, become sick (stress decreases immune system->chain reaction of infection), as well as look for ways to make shortcuts as well as make more mistakes.
To be honest right now, we have a trend towards too much compensation at the upper eschelons of our companies and bureacracies rather than having the proper amount of lower scale workers to properly execute workloads. Basically, it's the Wal-Mart ethos of efficiency which is a myth. Companies have to zerg through workforces or return to "normal function" after the business cycle troughs (eases stress to "work more for the bottum line") or rises.
In short, for profit businesses are short sighted and often make stupid mistakes. More often ones like Google or Craig's List are the ones that maintain true expansionary power and focus on the true bottum line: a more perfect product line.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Actually i do know how people work very well. If they can get away with not doing anything and still collect money and other benefits they are going to do it. Yes it will be an incentive as now instead of getting 80% of what you were making you are now getting 60%. there is a much bigger incentive to go out and find something.
It depends on your salary. 80% of 100K is quite livable. 80% of 20K isn't. How hard it is to mail in a form every two week? you aren't doing anything so yes it is that simple.
Most people don't start looking for work till their unemployeement gets ready to run out.
Yes a full salary is better, However sitting back and collecting money for nothing is very simple and easy as well. depending on your lifestyle and your salary you can easily live on 80%. You might have to cut back on certain things but you could do it.
you finally get it. companies exist to make profit. in order to make profit they must grow. when companies grow they have to hire more people.
if companies don't make a profit then they don't grow, they don't hire people, if the trend continues to far then they close up shop.
The person that starts the business accepts all the risk involved in the business. most people put their livelyhoods on the line to create a business. they work 60-80 hours a week sometimes without taking a paycheck.
so yes they should get most of the reward they took the risk of doing it.
you don't create a company to hire people. you create a company to make a profit..
any good decent economics or even business course will teach you this.
Thanks to Epic Graphics the best around.
Thanks to Nex3 for the avatar visit ye old sig and avatar forum
In order to even have a CHANCE at getting 80% you need to be in the sub-$50k range for starters - at my $60k I wasn't even getting close to 80% once I dropped off disability and onto unemployment comparing the before and after stubs with a near $900 dropoff (bi-weekly) - FAR more than 20% drop off.
Not to mention part of the stipulation to unemployment is that you show active interest in looking for work - if you don't fill out the forms which include receipts from applying for work - you get knocked off of unemployment in about 4 weeks from my experience. (Of course I was surprised they even gave me the first authorization to even draw any based on my HR education they shouldn't have)
It depends entirely on the size of the business - small businesses I don't think anyone would disagree with you on - corporations and other investment backed properties have no intrinsic risk since they buoy themselves with the investments of others and they themselves risk nothing.
$1 of every $100 the business earns is completely reasonable for one, but ridiculously excessive for the other - and of course the one it's excessive for is the one that has basically no risk involved.
Black and white arguments are foolish - reality proves nearly every case beyond the extremes to be some degree of gray however.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
Didn't some of the largest businesses in the world just fail a few months back?
And the risks to those running the businesses? Still basically zero. There's a reason why their contract clauses are called golden parachutes after all....
Small business owners don't walk away with millions to billions when they run it into the ground, they declare personal bankruptcy quite often.
The only people that get completely screwed in a large company are those holding the investments, generally speaking the stockholders. Those that make up the corporate executive structure have themselves covered even if they fail - which is ridiculous.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
But usually, they're rich because the economy is expanding, in which case they're likely to be hiring, not firing. When the economy is shrinking, there are often layoffs, yes - but really, what would you want to happen? Should the company be forced to keep everyone on the payroll until it goes under completely?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
That would be nice, but it's been tried. Those zeroes really do seem to be necessary to attract talent. Making it more contingent on the success of the company to ensure that you actually get talent would probably be a better idea, but there, too, are complications; after all, you don't want to screw a good manager after he made the best of bad events beyond his control.
The key is to somehow kill the sense of entitlement found in some sectors of corporate culture. This is just as pernicious as the sense of entitlement found in some labor unions, or in the world of celebrities, or in 18th-Century French aristocrats. Entitlement is pretty much universally harmful.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
People also create companies in order to do something like create a certain product or service with a higher calling or because they're intrinsically motivated to create things or help people. The "creativity" and higher order thinking translates into a better product when you manage money properly.
Purely for profit companies such as the banks that were retooled into usuary machines are the ones that are feeling the pinch. The banks that played conservatively (and are doing fine right now) did so to preserve the company and their "coorporate legacy."
Companies are supposed to do something for society that's useful and secondly make money, when it loses sight of it's original goals. The company suffers.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
He's more likely to be retained than the bad one.
People are risk-averse. Good managers will look for positions where they're not going to get totally hosed if things go south. People are also good at gaming the system. If you set up certain performance benchmarks for pay, managers will focus on hitting those benchmarks at the expense of everything else - even, sometimes, to the extent of cooking the books. This is why it is imperative to get the structure of incentive pay right, and it is not an easy task.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
We're talking about a hypothetical company without golden parachutes and whatnot, right?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'm exploring the hypothetical with an open mind, and seeing certain competitive obstacles which must be overcome if such a change is to be productive.
There's also the question of how golden parachutes would be abolished. I'm pretty sure Congress doesn't have the Constitutional power to pass a law like that - not that this has ever stopped progressives (or conservatives, for that matter) in the past.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Why would you want to do this? These are necessary tools to attract and retain management in most cases. If they weren't offered, or were abolished, do you really think another similar benefit wouldn't replace it?
Yeah, thats you. You value your free time. Most corporate exec's sleep, eat, and breathe the companies they work for. It take a completely different person to be at the top of a large company. Due to the multitude of stress and anxiety these people endure in the form of higher divorce, less free time, etc. They deserve more money.
Most people have stereotyped wealthy people to lazy, greedy devil-spawn whose sole goal in life is to make more money, no matter who they hurt. I don't beleive this, but it's what some people think.
I'm Da_Man on Cockatrice
Dr. Suess did a great book on this.
Yes if they did something criminal to cause the company to go under they go to jail not the employee.
I know a CEO right now and his son that is sitting in the slammer for exactly that. you can't just embezle 4 billion dollars and get away with it.
You obviously have not been in charge of thousands of people or have thousands of people depending on you to make the correct decision because their lively hood rests in your hands. it is no small risk that ceo's and other managers take.
one bad decision or a series of bad decisions can cause them to go under.
i do think however that companies should have escape clauses that if the company fails as a result of bad decisions then the ceo forfeits their rights to compensation other than their salary.
IE the guy from WAMU was in charge 14 days and recieved millions in bonuses even though the company went under.
Thanks to Epic Graphics the best around.
Thanks to Nex3 for the avatar visit ye old sig and avatar forum
In some sense. The only good fnord is a dead fnord.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. I'd wager there are plenty* of people who know they'll never be a 'have', are mad about it, and since they feel as though that can't do anything to improve their situation, they'd rather see others suffer to make them feel better.
* I don't know how many "plenty" of people acutally is, its just a guess that there are more than a few of these types of people who are vindictive.
Eternal drudgery and the rat race could make anybody spiteful, I suppose.
In some sense. The only good fnord is a dead fnord.