Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[belsarius]

Originally Posted by GGG

But exploitation is the first step in raising standards of living. It would be nice to have international standards to prevent it and redistribute wealth but in the absense of that structural change exporting of labour is the starting point. Once there is money to be fought over labour can organize to fight for their piece of the money. When the pie doesn’t exist at all there is no opportunity.

Spoken like a true colonizer.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Jason14h

The key is certainly sitting at home and posting on message boards about how humanity is doomed and the world has never been a worse place and how they have given up though !

Humans are fixated on our demise dating back to the very early days of man. It's just something that humans have been infatuated with. There's hundreds of predicted apocalyptic events going back to the early days of man and here we are today. Heck Y2K was going to be the end according to some.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

Humans are fixated on our demise dating back to the very early days of man. It's just something that humans have been infatuated with. There's hundreds of predicted apocalyptic events going back to the early days of man and here we are today. Heck Y2K was going to be the end according to some.

Y2K also happens to serve as yet another example of a problem that was greatly minimized by purposeful human intervention.

There is a distinct difference between “the rapture is coming at the end of the Mayan calendar” and “life on earth could be destroyed if we don’t fix the atmosphere.” One is science-based, one is make-belief, but because humans have a really strong history for identifying problems and then actually putting in the effort to fix them, a lot of the ones we successfully avoid get lumped in with the ones we never had to worry about in the first place.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

Heck Y2K was going to be the end according to some.

This is such a terrible example. The Y2K computer issue was very much real. The only reason it didn't result in catastrophic consequences was specifically because people trusted the experts (computer scientists, electrical engineers, and IT professionals) and invested large amounts of money and effort into fixing it before December 31, 1999.

And now, because all that effort successfully averted a major crisis, people who don't have a freaking clue about Y2K use it as a punchline and a counter point to say we shouldn't treat other preventable catastrophes like climate change or COVID-19 seriously.

[Cube Inmate]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

... The only reason it didn't result in catastrophic consequences was specifically because people trusted the experts (computer scientists, electrical engineers, and IT professionals) and invested large amounts of money and effort into fixing it before December 31, 1999.

People didn't have to trust the experts. It wasn't John Q. Public who was actively creating the risk, and there was no action expected of JQP to mitigate it. He went about his day just using Windows 98 same as he always did.

The change happened because Y2K failure would have been catastrophic for the engineers & programmers responsible for the systems, and for the businesses trying to make money with them. It was self- preservation by a small minority that prevented crashes, not the fact that people trusted in experts.

Edit: imagine if the only fix for Y2K had been to get everyone worldwide to agree on a date format. We would have been soooooo screwed.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Cube Inmate

People didn't have to trust the experts. It wasn't John Q. Public who was actively creating the risk, and there was no action expected of JQP to mitigate it. He went about his day just using Windows 98 same as he always did.

The change happened because Y2K failure would have been catastrophic for the engineers & programmers responsible for the systems, and for the businesses trying to make money with them. It was self- preservation by a small minority that prevented crashes, not the fact that people trusted in experts.

Edit: imagine if the only fix for Y2K had been to get everyone worldwide to agree on a date format. We would have been soooooo screwed.

When I said "people trusted the experts", I wasn't referring to John Q. Public but rather private business leaders and directors of various government agencies. You're right that it was self-preservation that motivated these individuals to collectively spend hundreds of billions on Y2K mitigation, but they could have chosen to keep their heads in the sand and say, "You computer nerds are just being alarmist. We don't need to go to all this trouble and spend all this money. It will hurt shareholder value. We can't have that."

[Brendone]

Originally Posted by Cube Inmate

Edit: imagine if the only fix for Y2K had been to get everyone worldwide to agree on a date format. We would have been soooooo screwed.

Anything but yyyy-mm-dd should result in the end of days

[GGG]

Originally Posted by belsarius

Spoken like a true colonizer.

If we were in a world where the damage from colonization hasn’t already occurred and outside of very few places can nomadic populations survive I would absolutely agree with you.

Your company sending work to Eastern Europe is not colonization. Now there is a balance and Canada certainly needs to do a better job of enforcing workplace safety standards on all goods sold here but in general workers can’t own the means of production if there is no production.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

TFW program is definitely a downside for low wage labour in Canada. It's basically the same idea (outsourcing) but bringing the low wage foreigners to Canada instead of sending the work there. I think it's probably over-used.

While I’m sure there are many companies that use the program legitimately, in a number of cases it’s essentially modern day slavery and it’s definitely overused.

Giant boost is absolutely a matter of perspective. I think the difference between being a starvation level subsistence farmer going to a low-wage factory job is bigger than the difference from going from a high-wage factory job to a minimum wage service industry job, but that's just my opinion.

That’s a fair perspective, though I think we’d both agree that without the actual hard numbers on what was paid before outsourcing compared to what is being paid after outsourcing and how that impacts the individual’s life we’re both just speculating. There’s no guarantee that their new low wage is above starvation level.

This is objectively wrong. I've made equipment vs labour decisions in a large business before, and we always did it exactly the same way. "Which of these choices is cheaper considering cost of capital and cost of labour". Labour at $2/hour gets replaced with machines a lot slower than labour that is $25/hour. Machines aren't free, and while businesses aren't benevolent giving jobs for no reason, they also aren't vile destroying jobs when it would be cheaper to keep people vs machines just so they can twirl their mustaches and cackle.

You may have misinterpreted what I was saying. To clarify, no a company won’t be paying more for machines just to eliminate jobs in some fiendish plot to stick it to the working class, but they will absolutely use machines over human labour when they feel it is cost effective. It’s difficult to guess whether or not they’d be twirling their moustaches at the time but let’s just assume that they would be.

100% that's a n=1 observation on my part, anecdotal. I think my financial position is probably similar to my parents at the same ages, but my financial attitudes are different, so maybe not a good comparison.

But you can absolutely find actual data to support my contention that clothing prices are relatively lower than they were when I was a kid. I have a 7 year old and a 9 year old kid getting those new jeans, and I turned 8 in Feb 1994. In Feb 1994, the CPI reading for Clothing and Footwear was 97.6. As of April 2023 (most recent available) CPI for Clothing and Footwear was 97.5. No inflation in the last nearly 30 years.

Total all-items CPI over that time period is 83%, so the 0% for clothing and footwear is a huge outlier. I'm pretty confident lower labour rates in developing countries is the primary cause of that - if you have a different opinion on the cause of that I'd be interested to hear it.

A lot of clothing items went up in price this past year alone so zero inflation seems off, but I won’t split hairs here because the overall point you’re making is reasonable and historically clothing has definitely been less affected by inflation compared to many necessities. I don’t think this is the result of the outsourcing of labour alone though, automation and using cheaper materials almost certainly played a big part in that.

This kind of got me wondering how many parents nowadays don’t sew their kids’ ripped jeans because they don’t actually know how to do it.

I'm 100% not making a value judgement that buying stuff from poor people at low wages is a "good" thing. Every economic choice has winners and losers, and there should definitely be good safety standards everywhere, not just in the west. But the topic was about how has standard of living changed for the 95% of people in the world, and for the global poor globalization has moved many people from food-insecure subsistence farming with little access to education/healthcare to paid factory work with low-but-stable wages. That is far, far from ideal but a big improvement nonetheless.

Some of those wages are so low though that even if there is a minuscule benefit for the worker in a developing nation I’m not sure that benefit outweighs the loss to the other worker. A person going from struggling to put food on the table to struggling slightly less to put food on the table with no other added benefits is a small improvement to standard of living when compared to the decline in standard of living suffered by someone no longer being able to afford to own their home or send their kids to college and now finds themselves struggling to put food on the table. In any event to me nearly every case of outsourcing that I’ve ever heard of just seems like exploitation.

But the topic was about how has standard of living changed for the 95% of people in the world

Originally Posted by Jason14h

The world is the best it’s ever been and getting better for 95% of people on the planet

I thought that this was the topic.

Even without factoring in the number of people who have a worse standard of living today than they had before the pandemic it’s pretty obvious that regardless of the cause the standard of living is not the best it’s ever been and is actually in decline for much more than 5% of the global population(~400M).

[GGG]

https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions

In 1820 90% lived in extreme poverty, 1950 2/3rds of the world lived in extreme poverty, 42% did in 1982, 10% do today.

So using 1982 as a defence point we know at least 32% are significantly better off.

Literacy 1950 around 60% today 86%
Child mortality 1950 around 20%, 4% today



The world is a better place for most people. Many of these people would cease to exist were the world not a better place.

I’d also challange 400 million as the correct number for this debate as the total world population wouldn’t be what it is today if we hadn’t solved nitrogen fixing. So if people weren’t better off we wouldn’t see the growth. So if you look at 1982 world pop of say 4.6 billion we’d really be evaluating 230 million people for which the world was worse because 100% of the people who didn’t exist previously the world is certainly a better place.

What year are you measuring against. When was the world great again?

[Jason14h]

Canadian minimum wage earners having lost buying power is the only measurement that matters globally

[iggy_oi]

GGG you do understand that there is a big difference between saying the world isn’t better than it ever has been and getting better for 95% of the population and saying that the world hasn’t gotten better at all in any areas, right?

Even the data you’ve provided doesn’t support the 95% figure.

Why are you challenging that 400 million isn’t 5% of 8 billion? How is 5% of 1982’s population relevant to determining whether or not life is getting better for all but 5% of 2023’s poplulation?

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Jason14h

Canadian minimum wage earners having lost buying power is the only measurement that matters globally

If that were the case your original statement would have been more accurate but good zinger, I guess.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

GGG you do understand that there is a big difference between saying the world isn’t better than it ever has been and getting better for 95% of the population and saying that the world hasn’t gotten better at all in any areas, right?

Even the data you’ve provided doesn’t support the 95% figure.

Why are you challenging that 400 million isn’t 5% of 8 billion? How is 5% of 1982’s population relevant to determining whether or not life is getting better for all but 5% of 2023’s poplulation?

What year is your comparison year. I can’t really prove you are wrong until you pick the year we are comparing to. Also in general we don’t have reliable post Covid data so if you want to speculate there I would say we don’t have the data. So which year was better than 2019 for 6% of people?

But the first chart does support the world getting better for most people as if you look at that chart and then you imagine the bins of poverty being smaller each with their own line you can see the trend lines working. Now eventually they will flatten as shown by how much faster we are moving the bottom out of poverty. But that chart shows at least 90% of the world is better off since 1980. And that’s withou considering population has doubled. So the % of people demonstrated to be better off than in 1980 is around 93/94%.

So it’s time for you to show some work or at least pick a year.

Also if people would like to move on here I can just stop posting as well.

[Fuzz]

Well, we could always check back on how doctors feel about our dear leader...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1673430793035878400

Mmm, "fear of retribution" is always a key feature fo a well run health system.

When Premier Danielle Smith was asked about the situation during her weekly radio phone-in — Your Province. Your Premier — over the weekend, she said that was a question for AHS.

"I guess you'd have to ask Dr. John Cowell about that," she said.

"These are decisions that are made internally. I was briefed as it was unfolding and it does seem to me that one of the things you would observe about our government is how much we care about Indigenous health."
When asked a second time, Smith gave a similar answer.

"I'm sure that AHS has their own answers. ... They told me when the process was underway, I got briefed on it and ... I'm going to leave it at that. I don't want to be involved in operational decisions. I want to focus on outcomes."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...889361?cmp=rss

Sorry, wtf? Why is the premier being briefed on a hiring decision of a private citizen in some lower rank at AHS? What kind of banana republic #### is going on here? UCP voters, is this the kind of freedom you expected? Your job offer can be revoked because the premier holds a grudge against you for saving lives?

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

This is such a terrible example. The Y2K computer issue was very much real. The only reason it didn't result in catastrophic consequences was specifically because people trusted the experts (computer scientists, electrical engineers, and IT professionals) and invested large amounts of money and effort into fixing it before December 31, 1999.

And now, because all that effort successfully averted a major crisis, people who don't have a freaking clue about Y2K use it as a punchline and a counter point to say we shouldn't treat other preventable catastrophes like climate change or COVID-19 seriously.

You just confirmed why it was an excellent example. As you say the issue was very much real and as I said it wasn't the end. What is it with this thread and people jumping off the deep end?

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

You just confirmed why it was an excellent example. As you say the issue was very much real and as I said it wasn't the end. What is it with this thread and people jumping off the deep end?

No normal person would read your post the way you’re pretending it was supposed to be read. Nobody jumped off the deep end, you just said something dumb and got immediately corrected. Happens to the best of us.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

No normal person would read your post the way you’re pretending it was supposed to be read. Nobody jumped off the deep end, you just said something dumb and got immediately corrected. Happens to the best of us.

I don't recall this ever happening to sureloss. But the other 99.9%, sure.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Well, we could always check back on how doctors feel about our dear leader...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1673430793035878400

Mmm, "fear of retribution" is always a key feature fo a well run health system.


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...889361?cmp=rss

Sorry, wtf? Why is the premier being briefed on a hiring decision of a private citizen in some lower rank at AHS? What kind of banana republic #### is going on here? UCP voters, is this the kind of freedom you expected? Your job offer can be revoked because the premier holds a grudge against you for saving lives?

In a world where we trusted put politicians I think the premier being briefed would make sense. Simply because you are choosing not to hire a person and there will be political questions asked. Is the better answer I have no idea what you are taking about? I don’t know.

Do I think that is what happened here? No this appears to be politically motivated. There just an exists a reasonable set of circumstances that could explain why the premier was briefed. If anything it shows Smith has learned to lie better.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by GGG

What year is your comparison year. I can’t really prove you are wrong until you pick the year we are comparing to. Also in general we don’t have reliable post Covid data so if you want to speculate there I would say we don’t have the data.

The most recent data on global inflation and wage stagnation is unreliable and doesn’t count? You couldn’t even prove me wrong in this post using your own handpicked year.

So which year was better than 2019 for 6% of people?

What are you going on about now? Oh still only one half of the statement I said was debatable as if debunking that portion in isolation will somehow make me wrong for questioning the statement as a whole. Nice.

But the first chart does support the world getting better for most people as if you look at that chart and then you imagine the bins of poverty being smaller each with their own line you can see the trend lines working. Now eventually they will flatten as shown by how much faster we are moving the bottom out of poverty. But that chart shows at least 90% of the world is better off since 1980. And that’s withou considering population has doubled. So the % of people demonstrated to be better off than in 1980 is around 93/94%.

You keep trying to frame what I’m saying as life hasn’t gotten better at all for anyone and that simply isn’t what I’m saying. Again, the original comment that I referred to as highly debatable was “The world is the best it’s ever been and getting better for 95% of the population” and that statement as written is not proven by the limited data you’ve provided. You’re trying to argue that the average life for that group has gotten better, and that may be the case but stating that is a far cry from saying things have never been better and continue to get better for all of them because there is clearly a segment within that group who are either worse off than they were before or treading water. Neither of which qualifies as getting better.

I’m not sitting here saying it’s gotten worse for everyone or that it hasn’t improved for anyone, or even that it hasn’t gotten better on average for the majority of the population but the data you are using is too simplistic as things like poverty rates are based on fairly arbitrary metrics that once passed don’t measure improvements, just that they’ve remained above the arbitrary line. We don’t have data to demonstrate that someone who just barely got out of poverty 40 years ago isn’t still living just barely out of poverty. Yet you claim that each individual in that group’s life is without question “getting better” since then?

What’s their secret? There’s a lot of people living above the poverty line who can’t even manage continual growth like that who would probably like to know.

So it’s time for you to show some work or at least pick a year.

It wouldn’t matter which year I pick if you’re going to continue ignoring the getting better for 95% part. Even using your own handpicked year and misleading metrics you haven’t been able to prove that number yourself(you’ve “proven” 93/94% over a specific period) but I’m wrong here for saying that 95% is too high?

Let’s call the original statement what it was, a classic example of using a questionable argument based on misrepresented data to convince people who are struggling not to complain.

Also if people would like to move on here I can just stop posting as well.

If you want to continue moving the goalposts I’m good with stopping here.

I made a comment on someone else’s statement that you’re clearly not interested in discussing and then you’ve tried to spin that into me disagreeing with you on your more vague statement(things are better for most people) when I’m not even saying your statement is wrong.

Read what Jason14h actually wrote and what I actually wrote in response instead reading both as what you wanted either of us to have written.