Best we can do is 1099 with pre-ACA "swiss cheese" cover healthcare including pre-existing conditions. As for retirement savings, we'll place 1% of your salary into our the trump memecoin, but it doesn't actually vest until you turn 65 so you can't sell it before hand. How does that sound?

This is the first post you haven’t been praising the 1950s as a better time for workers.

Isn’t at all, but you’re reading whatever you want into my posts. So keep on keeping on. 👍

Do I need to quote you back to yourself? Okay, these are your words:

"If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a 'company man' was a celebrated one"

"but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age."

I think we've hit the end of productive conversation between the two of us on this subject. I appreciate your conversation up to now. You're welcome to keep going, but I won't be responding on this thread anymore. I hope you have a great day!

Remember in the first trump term when he assigned Jared Kushner the job of implementing peace in the Middle East? How's the Middle East peace these days?

I don’t understand what you’re trying to prove here to be honest. Of course there’s been shitty behavior all along.

This is the first post you haven't been praising the 1950s as a better time for workers. Thats what I was trying to prove. All your prior posts were speaking nostalgically about the "better time" for workers in the 1950s. Besides a small set, it wasn't better, and many times worse. Thats all.

My point is simple: corporations are a made-up concept and one of the main things people are supposed to get in the deal to allow them to exist in the first place is efficient allocation and utilization of human resources.

Efficient for the corporations. Not efficient for an individual.

It seems to me they are admitting that they cannot do that. In which case, the deal should be renegotiated.

Their goal isn't your goal. There can be an argument made whether capitalism should exist, but under the current system they are behaving as capitalists. Workers welfare isn't their primary goal, and in fact, only a goal at all as required by law (OSHA, DoL rules).

It wasn’t a utopia by any stretch, but in today’s economy Intel will openly celebrate laying people off and having less employees.

...and...

The wealth distribution wasn’t perfect, great, utopian, or even good during the entire history of the US, but it’s worse now than it was in the – what I’m now calling the first – gilded age.

You're painting the 1950s as a better time for workers than today, and except for the white, male, white collar workers, I think your position is just fiction.

There were some bad things that were even worse in some cases happening back to lots of other groups (again besides white, male, white collar workers).

Things like:

• 1952 President Truman using the power of government to suppress wages of workers to keep the price of steel lower to fund the Korean war effort. source
• 1950, a record (for the time) 4843 work stoppages PDF source
• 1956 Whirlpool Tracking workers and firing any the exhibited "pro union" ideas source
• 1951 police jailing children of workers that were on a strike picket line source

I'm not defending corporations of today, I'm pointing out that there's been shitty behavior all along. The 1950s were not a pro-worker era as you're trying to paint it as...unless you were white, male, and white collared worker. If so, then yes, it was great.

"Max, box box. Box box. DRS available for entering the pitlane"

In theory, it would allow them to reduce costs to compete better with rivals and sell more.

Selling more could mean lower profits over all. If you have to build out extra production capacity (new fixed costs) to create more product that you're receiving a lower price on, then it could have been more profitable to sell fewer units but at a higher cost creating more profit.

Example: If you're at 90% capacity on your $1 billion factory selling your product for high price/high profit, and you lower your price which increase sales by 20%, you now have to another $1 billion factory to product the 8% of product not producible at your first factory. You've now lost nearly $1 billon from your larger sales.

I blame bitlocker.

If you look at what many consider to be the golden age of American corporations after the second world war, the notion of a “company man” was a celebrated one, and companies bragged about how they treated their employees. In that era, unlike today’s, shedding employees was not seen as an achievement but rather either a necessary evil, or a sign that the company was going down the tubes.

You've got rose colored glasses on. This was only true if you were white, male, and a white collar worker.

At the same time for everyone else, employers were increasing working hours, reducing workplace safety, in exchange for higher worker wages:

"During the years when wages were rising, working conditions were deteriorating. Employers made up for higher wages by negotiating higher levels of output into union contracts. And the labor leaders--seasoned veterans of business unionism by the 1960s--were all too willing to comply. Time off in the form of vacations, coffee breaks and sick leave all fell victim to new work standards negotiated in the 1950s and 1960s, while automation, forced overtime and speedups allowed management to more than compensate for high wages. During the period from 1955 to 1967, non-farm employees' average work hours rose by 18 percent, while manufacturing workers' increased by 14 percent. In the same period, labor costs in non-farm business rose 26 percent, while after-tax corporate profits soared 108 percent. And during the period between 1950 and 1968, while the number of manufacturing workers grew by 28.8 percent, manufacturing output increased by some 91 percent."

source

Thats a plot point in the Foundation series. The empire enslaves jumpship pilots "spacers" with consumable biologicals/chemicals. The "spacers" can't revolt because the empire would withhold these and spacers would die. Another team makes a better formula and gives it to spacers for free releasing the spacers from slavery, and the empire loses its jumpship pilots.

I can see the terrans making an improved drug, and convincing the Jimmies to swap sides for a more enhanced version of Ket White.

Terran approach would be more of engineering a bio weapon that alters Jem'Hadar biology to be allergic to Ketracel White, and suddenly need some new formula...Ketracel...Green? And only Terrans would have Ketracel Green.

A buddy of mine bought an N64 with Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 on launch day. We didn't know that it would sell out so quickly. He worked at a retail store and got into talking to a customer about him having the N64. Apparently the guy was a father that was desperate to get an N64 for his kid. He offered to pay 4x what my buddy paid at retail. It was a lot of money for a young guy in his late teens. He sold it to the guy out of his trunk the next day for the cash. It would be 6 months before inventory returned in stores and he was able to rebuy an N64.

I still don’t understand how that worked. At the time I thought it was “getting your eyes used to the bright light so they wouldn’t turn red with the big flash,” but that definitely doesn’t make sense.

I understood it as the red eyes you see in photos is the wide open iris of an eye you're photographing zooming in on the blood vessels in the back of the eye. Flashing bright light before the photo makes the iris of the person you're photographing contract significantly, so you can't see the blood vessels in the back of the eye anymore.

Atari Star Wars arcade game came out in 1983. One year prior to Elite in 1984:

Vectrex Starhawk was 1979

Here's Mario at nearly 30 years ago (29 years):

Mario 64

These were horrible cameras that sold like crazy back then. Because a diskette only held 1.44MB and the write speed of floppies was so slow, Sony compresses the hell out of the images to that you can fit a higher number of images on a diskette and so that they write to the diskette quick enough to take the next picture.

The result was really poor quality images out of these on the settings that everyone used.

Like the example you gave for the UK, even though I have never lived there for a long period, I’ve been there many times and I’ve never seen anyone mentioning the societal class.

Perhaps you have experienced it and didn't realize it. The upper house of Parliament (House of Lords) is unelected by the people of the UK. Many of its members got their seat by hereditary (as in they inherited it from because of their high class lineage) others are high ranking members from the Church of England. These seats are held for life of all members. Replacement members are elected by the existing members. This is an example of class based discrimination.

I don’t wanna hate on America at all (I think it’s an awesome country in many ways), I think this is just important constructive criticism because I’ve experienced so many times that Americans called people black or white and made a stereotyping/discriminating thing out of it, said the N word etc.

I have no problem talking about it. We certainly have a problem with discrimination here. If we can't talk about it, we can't improve our situation and oppose this bigotry. Our current president is one of its offenders enabling the racism and discrimination as are the people under him he put in charge.

I think in France it’s because they enforce French-ness, right? They make laws against wearing religious dress in school, they push for conformity, they teach kids to be French. It’s almost like a religion. We don’t have the same homogenous culture here, not that it’s any sort of excuse for bigotry.

We, in the USA, did that here too to children of tribes of Native Americans. source

Canada did the same to the First Nations people. source

It was brutal and cruel to erase the cultures of the many tribes living in both countries. Many children were killed and their bodies buried on site of the schools. Its part our dark history of our two nations.

I'm in the demographic you're looking for. It went something like this:

• End of WWI with the Treaty of Versailles
• Massive war repayment debts placed on Weimar Republic
• Beer Hall Putsch
• The Weimar Republic falling because of disenfranchised German citizens
• Nazi party rising in power in the Reichstag
• Brown shirts (SA)
• Burning of the Reichstag
• Hitler seizing power
• Night of the Long Knives
• The west ignoring military limits on German military expansion (aircraft, Panzer 1)
• Annexation of Austria
• Talk of leibenstrom

etc

Thats from memory. Apologies for butchering any spelling or some of those events out of order.

So, yes, lots and LOTS of things in the USA government right now are ringing alarm bells like crazy. Executive orders just this week of military support for local police "to root out immigrants" sound close to creation of the Brownshirts (SA). The villainization of immigrants sound disgustingly close to the targeting of various minority groups that Hitler targeted (Roma, Jews, gays, Poles).

But what’s even harder for me to understand is why so many Americans seem to exclude and racially stereotype other Americans solely based on their appearance that has nothing to do with their personality.

You likely know the USA's checkered past with human slavery of Africans, so I won't go into that, but thats great example of what I'll cover.

Besides the tribes of Native Americans that have been here for millennia, all of us are immigrants or the product of immigrants past. Each subsequent wave of migration has had a semi-dominant culture that then worked to "fuck you, I got mine" to immigrants from later arriving groups. Historically while we absolutely discriminated against people of color, its not just skin color that we did this too. We did this to the Irish. You can see here that by this time German immigrants were acceptable and even preferred at the same time Irish were discriminated against:

source NYT 1854

Then 50 or so years later we did this to Italians, and some of that discrimination came from Irish were faced much of the same hate years earlier.

...and on and on.

Its not just race though. Even in USA women didn't have the right to vote until 1920 with the passage of the 19th amendment. Homosexuals couldn't even marry until 2015.

In short, most of us are dragging the least of us to a position of understanding of equality and equal treatment to all Americans evenly. While I'm very happy about the key pieces of progress we've made (Civil Rights act of 1964 being one), We have a long way to go yet. Discrimination in the USA is still a huge problem we need to fix.

Other nations may not discriminant based on race, but on other things.

• UK has a history of discrimination based on societal class
• Canada has a history of discrimination based on preferred language
• India has a history of a caste system

Other countries yet discriminate on religion. Humans have a habit of choosing in-groups and out-groups, and then centralizing power to the in-groups to the detriment of the out-groups.