lunatic_lobster

@lunatic_lobster@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the legalization of drugs reduces crime, why can't the same be said about the legalization of guns?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is kind of an interesting thought experiment around laws in general. If you made guns illegal tomorrow you would certainly increase guns crimes because anyone who doesn’t give up their guns is now committing a crime. Similarly all sales of guns would now be illegal and the demand for illegal guns would go way up resulting in more black market trade.

  But the framing of the question leads to that conclusion. If what you are actually after is something more akin to “if legalizing drugs decreases violent crime then shouldn’t legalizing guns also decrease violent crime?” This is more interesting in my opinion.

  Now let’s assume for a second that legalizing drugs does decrease violent crime (I do believe there I’d research that supports this). What crime is reduced? It is likely that crime around the drug trade itself is what is mostly reduced: you do not have as much cartel, gang, mob, and other organized crime entities around who are committing much of the violent crime. Drug users themselves are probably committing less of the crime than the actual distribution as using drugs is often times not an inherently violent act.

  For guns the gun itself is a tool of violence. You cannot use a gun without committing a violent act. Now not all violent acts are violent crime, as target practice is not exactly illegal, but it is still violent. If you make manufacturing of guns illegal less will be manufactured which means less will be in existence therefore there is inherently less access to tools of violence. I’m sure the drug smuggling trade would introduce more violence as it would increase drastically. However the increase there may be smaller than the decrease of just having less guns in the world.

  I guess the key difference is that guns are a tool of violence much more frequently than the use of an illicit substance is most likely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Workers’ Leverage Over Employers Is Shifting⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This was not the spirit of the article. It made clear that a problem that has faced tech all along is unclear leverage. A factory worker stops working and nothing gets built so no profit. A R&D tech worker stops working and that just means some potential future technology that may or may not exist doesn’t get built which doesn’t immediately hit profits and may not at all.

  They were trying to explain the struggles of union drives in tech that have been here all along. The “worse deals” it attributes to the increased interest rates of 2022 and cracking down on “woke” workers.

  On AI they were saying that tech workers may now see themselves more like traditional workers rather than artisinal coding masters with low unemployment. This shift could cause a greater incentive to tech workers to discover their specific leverage to push for more security.

  It also highlighted how campaigns about specific demands (ie not working with military) are much easier to push than pushing for unionization which is more abstract and controversial.

  Very good read, lots of nuance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's rigged⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While this is certainly technically true most modern economists believe that companies compensate for this by offering lower wages, so it’s kinds 6 of 1, half dozen of the other.

  Maybe put this way, if I didn’t work at my company they wouldn’t pay either half of the social security and medicare. So its mostly me who’s bringing that money to the government since I’m the catalyst.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's rigged⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is mostly right but I think missing the point. It’s not 12.2% on the first bracket and 2.2% on the second. It’s 12.4% on the first $184,000 and ZERO On the rest. The 2.2% is not the marginal rate they are currently paying, it is the effective rate if you add up all the the paid divided by all the income. It’s so low because people with salaries beyond 184k stop having to pay any of this tax on their next marginal dollar.

  And the reason this is a big deal is because this tax revenue is what is used to fund social security payments for older folks. The social security reserve fund that is running out (which will result in a significant run reduction in payment to these old folks) could possibly be all or mostly funded if we made people making more than $184,000 pay the same rate as everyone else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I would make the argument that it could actually be a means to align with affordable housing (although that would likely be very difficult in this current housing market). Managing a property is a service, you have to manage vacancies, repairs, rent collection, etc.

  If you don’t offload this to a management company and do it all yourself it is technically feasible to make a profit from the labor of managing the property even when charging below market rate for the property (difficult to do right now, but after owning the property for a period of time definitely possible).

  If you were to do this you would be directly combatting the affordable housing problem by introducing competition at a lower price (it would be a drop in the ocean, but it would be fighting for affordable housing).