Text: Without robust and effective organizations and institutions to cultivate and maintain solidarity, it weakens and democracy falters. We become more atomized and isolated, suspicious and susceptible to misinformation, more disengaged and cynical, and easily pitted against one another. Democracy’s opponents know this. That’s why they invest huge amounts of energy and resources to sabotage transformative, democratic solidarity and to nurture exclusionary and reactionary forms of group identity. Enraged at a decade of social movements and the long-overdue revival of organized labor, right-wing strategists and their corporate backers have redoubled their efforts to divide and conquer the American public, inflaming group resentments in order to restore traditional social hierarchies and ensure that plutocrats maintain their hold on wealth and power. In white papers, stump speeches and podcasts, conservative ideologues have laid out their vision for capturing the state and using it as a tool to remake our country in their image.
We can't have more immigrants. They're taking all of our kids' jobs!
From #JohnFry https://onlabor.org/march-26-2024/
Text: Florida relaxed its child labor laws on Friday, as Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work longer hours. While these teens will still be subject to a default maximum workweek of 30 hours during the school year, the new bill allows this limit to be waived with the consent of “parents, guardians or school superintendents.” The bill also allows these teens to work more than eight hours on a Sunday or holiday, even if they have school the next day. ‘While violations of child labor laws have skyrocketed nationwide since 2019, states are not stepping up their enforcement to tackle the problem—across the country, they are loosening their child labor protections instead.
Interchange (credit-card-swipe) "fees will go down from 2% to 1.96%. Booyah! In Europe swipe fees are capped at 0.3% and credit card companies have remained thriving and profitable. Draw your own conclusions." #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/credit-card-companies-agree-to-lower-swipe-fees-by-0-04/
It'd be cool if there were a federated stack-exchange like infrastructure (very friendly to search and indexing).
“Approximately 2/3 of the initiating parties in cases going to arbitration are private equity-backed… These…have a strong incentive to add revenue to pay down debt quickly and…resources to pay administrative fees and argue their case. While some PE-backed firms credit the NSA with pushing them into bankruptcy, the data indicates that some large PE-backed provider groups are taking advantage of the arbitration system to extract high payments from insurers.” #LawsonMansell https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-no-surprises-act-is-protecting-patients-but-not-containing-health-care-costs/
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard NYC did provide universal pre-K. In US red states, localities try to do locally popular progressive things, and state govts shut them down. In blue states, localities try to do NIMBY things + states are increasingly find it necessary to supervene. Whether that's a "democratic deficit" becomes a complicated argument over differential enfranchisement and the views of different groups. (Is it just "old rich white ppl"?) It's arguably a democratic surfeit.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard However a state organizes its governance, regulating the scale and provenance of market participants is within its legitimate purview. That might (perhaps US style) mean localities making choices, it might mean a national policy, it might mean a national policy of classifying places differently and applying different policies. All of those, and whatever choice are made, are legitimate (whether we think they are wise or unwise).
@luis_in_brief Thanks!
So, mastodon.social and other instances ought to get together and say we're defederating for now (or will defederate in 90 days, to be less disruptive), UNLESS threads supports actual migration as well as Mastodon (and any other reasonable asks).
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Right. It's a debate in the UBI community. I'm sharply on the other side of it. "Basic" to me just means "base". To others it implies "covers basic costs where you live", which then implies adjustment. I support the former, pretty much oppose the latter.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Oh I know. It's a debate very much with two sides, and I am very, very familiar with both sides. If you think it's an easy question, the only easy answer is that you are wrong. But some localities may well choose to keep them out, and that's a perfectly legitimate choice, a navigation of trade-offs.
Maybe instead of an acrimonious should-we or shouldn't-we debate over federating with threads, instances should discuss and come to some consensus on terms threads would have to meet as a precondition to federation. Call it a union. I'd say migratability from threads to other instances would be one crucial prerequisite.
(I have no idea whether threads currently supports this.)
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard I favor UBI without regional adjustments. I'm interested in winning the support of broad publics, not local elites, which UBI does. Thinking about how programs politically survive the opposition of threatened elites is important, of course. It's also important to think about what's good in what is threatened and how one might preserve that. Maybe big-box chains aren't permitted to be drawn to compete for that now dispersed purchasing power.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard I argue that we should think of UBI as place-based policy, because cost-of-living means a UBI equal in nominal terms is much more valuable in rural and exurban places. Like social security, it would leave places in some sense "less competitive" — less desperate people won't compete to wages as low — but I think that's a plus, not a minus, in welfare as well as social and political health.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Sure. There's not anything so surprising there I think. In growth terms there has been convergence towards in the East, the faster growth of still developing economies. But they are far from converged, and the social stresses of the way they are converging (or just the way the whole is arranged, as the west similarly suffers) is leading to political instability rather than the stability we imagine with convergence.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Some states have converged more, some states less. Overall I'd agree the EU is doing better on convergence than, say, the globe. (Less well than the United States, but that's not a fair comparison.) Nevertheless, assuming urban-centered growth policy will yield convergence to a broadly shared prosperity has been tried and failed, both across and within polities. That's not to say that urban-centered growth is bad, but more than that is needed.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard That depends on the form of the subsidy. My favorite place-based policy is just a UBI, which disintermediates local elites. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6674.html
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Place-based bourgeoisie is reactionary. Urban plutocracy is socially liberal but economically predatory. I want to improve people's welfare + build an economically cohesive society in which shared fates mean we can agree on the big things and tolerate one another's idiosyncracies. I'm neither on team urban nor team rural. I like cities, freaks, and queers, but wish my rodeo-going co-citizens only the best and would love to share an afternoon with them.
