this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian. Its more salary then back where they're from - and it has interesting cultural changes in their socities.
In the philippines, these are called "OFW" families. daddy is never home, but because he works "abroad" his family can have newer stuff, be in a better neighborhood, etc.
> this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
> Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian.
Merchant marine, sure, but naval? Wouldn’t both officers and crew be the nationality of the force in the vast majority of cases?
Directly, it usually it leads to poor working conditions when you have non-residential workers, especially ones in a quasi-legal status.
For factories, you sometimes have the problem of the factory shutting down after the locals become dependent on it.
For migrant working, it's hard on the children of the family and it causes tension between the families not participating.
Philosophically, one could argue it's exploitation and is very close to slavery except the small amount of pay. Until this type of work is extinct I don't think one can morally campaign for UBI can you?
Currently this type of work is apparently necessary so we've accepted that the system cannot either pay the more wealthy citizen's wage nor up the wage of the foreign workers.
Is there a demand to up the wage of these non-represented workers that make far below minimum wage?
Is there a demand to up the wage of minimal wage for citizens and are the foreign workers mentioned?
Is there a demand for UBI for citizens to not work at all while foreign workers pick up the slack?
UBI is income redistribution. It will always be immoral for those paying to support others who are not working.
What you describe is not exploitation, people are working of their own will and that's the best deal they can have.
When you'll eliminate those jobs with income redistribution and minimum wage those people (especially if they're coming in from a different, poorer country) will just be out of a job.
Our government has bailed out banks multiple times, injected money into the stock market, the airlines, a constant state of war that has lasted since Bush one that has cost trillions of dollars... but UBI that can have its cost reduced by drawing its budget from social security, disability and welfare, that's the one that makes your blood boil?
Some of it is whataboutism, sure. A direct line can be drawn to bank bailouts, airline bailouts, no bid government contracts, military spending and UBI. Our government has decided to supplement the income of some and not others and expected something in return. UBI can be viewed in the same light. You can deduct that much from social security, welfare and government college programs. Those are easy ones, right there. Now it gets more difficult, but that's no small amount - and I'm only talking about the proposed 12K per year UBI. You seem to be under the assumption that people are just going to kick back and retire in Cabo on this, for some reason. You can cut some treatment subsidy programs, because at that point, if a junkie wants to get clean that's where that money should go. Prisoner's payouts get cut, and in America that's not a small amount.
This is a 5 minute budget analysis and not even a real thought process, but people get so emotional about these things that all rational thought goes by the wayside of any benefits that might occur. People might not have so much worry about job insecurity of being one bill away from homelessness. Higher education would be more attainable for so many people. A single income family might be able to take care of a child while one of the parents focused on educating and helping the child become a decent member of society.
If you don't want to help fix the present and the future then you shouldn't complain about it. If you're fine with the direction everything is going, then that's great.
One thing that I've always been curious about with UBI is why not aim to self-sufficiency?
In that, say the US pays UBI, which people use to purchase basic goods, which come from non-US manufacturers.
(and I realize this next flies in the face of 200 years of economic theory)
... But if UBI is a bridge to a post-scarcity society, then shouldn't the emphasis be on post-scarcity? Not just redirecting funds? Which is to say, funding highly automated manufacturing of basic, non-customized, functional good to zero?
You'll never get the prices of food, warmth and shelter down to zero, even if these commodities are no longer scarce.
The present system requires you to have active hands in the creation of these commodities or you don't get a share. In the face of increasing efficiencies, offshoring, etc. people's offer of labor may not find a buyer, making them unemployable. That's where UBI comes in, to assure that post-scarcity is enjoyed by all, not just those that have marketable labor.
Where this gets complicated is the moralizing. But it's not the moral thing to let your neighbor starve when you've got surplus food, even if there's some game theory that you will generate free riders, or some of these people aren't "deserving", or working folks divert a little bit more of the fruits of their labor than they already do, or other societies that are a race to the bottom of human welfare will out-compete us.
It would be immoral to redistribute the real property someone worked on.
I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to be monopolized to prop up the value of a minority rich, to let millions starve, or die of preventable disease is immoral and violent.
I don’t believe Elon Musk is worth billions. I just can’t take his real stuff.
Letting our social value store be co-opted by a handful of memes isn’t exactly free agency, speech, or market of ideas. When “get job, buy stuff” is the one true sentence, why believe ideas like freedom matter?
Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade.
We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis)
We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return.
Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing).
Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy
I'm not sure exactly which ideas the other commenter was referring to, but of course currency is affected by memes. Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
> Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
It would be nice if people spent just a tiny amount of time studying economics before pronouncing on it.
A US dollar, for example, is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States Government", and this has an objectively measurable value (because there are pairs of almost identical securities where one has "full faith and credit" and the other doesn't).
Unless your argument is "all securities and currencies are imaginary," of course, which has no practical value.
Please note that I'm a far-left socialist and I consider capitalism destructive to the planet. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in economics.
Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement).
What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy.
The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big.
Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before.
Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
It's not a matter of supporting hiring people of different nationalities. It's supporting the current conditions surrounding these employees. If these workers are not of a legal status, then they are easily abused (working conditions/below minimum pay/etc). These workers are more fearful of being deported than the abuse which means they do not report any of the wrongs that may be occurring. To me, this says much more about the employer.
I’m 100% against having a ruling upper class and hard labor lower class, especially one determined by nationality. It’s disgusting and something we left behind in the 19th century until international capitalism reinvented it.
Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian. Its more salary then back where they're from - and it has interesting cultural changes in their socities.
In the philippines, these are called "OFW" families. daddy is never home, but because he works "abroad" his family can have newer stuff, be in a better neighborhood, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Filipino_Worker