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Richard Stallman's Political Notes

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Labor Day 2050

mardi 8 septembre 2015 à 02:00

Labor Day 2050: How Unchecked Global Warming Threatens Labor Productivity.

The companies that are making us roast the Earth are probably connected with those that want to replace these workers with robots. The robots won't slow down, so the unemployed humans can lie down and survive on less food.

Permanent income in Alaska

mardi 8 septembre 2015 à 02:00

Alaska has invested income from oil leases in an endowment to permanently provide a basic income.

The funds for this don't have to come from oil leases.

Israeli demolition orders

mardi 8 septembre 2015 à 02:00

Israeli demolition orders cover 17,000 Arab buildings in West Bank.

Income profile of US families

mardi 8 septembre 2015 à 02:00

A new, clever, but perhaps misleading way of studying the income profile of society, based on comparing the income of the mass of families over time, shows that under presidents Reagan and Clinton, the incomes of most individual American families rose steadily. Under Bush I, and since 2001, incomes have fallen for most families.

This is interesting, but it is the wrong way to measure how the economy is treating workers. It opens the way to an illusion comparable to the Shepard tone, in which each worker's income rises all the time, but the overall income profile of society does not change at all (or even goes down). Based on the article, it seems that this is what happened to the US economy under Reagan and Clinton: almost everyone's individual income slowly rose as the income profile of society fell.

The customary measurement of income profile is done by comparing workers of any given age group in different periods — for instance, workers of age 25 today with workers of age 25 in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The result shows how society's treatment of people in a certain situation has changed over time. That is what matters for public policy.

British Airways' pay cut

mardi 8 septembre 2015 à 02:00

British Airways is making huge profits but just imposed a 25% pay cut on flight attendants.

BA says it will fire them all, then rehire them for a "new job" with a different name and lower pay.

I hope workers shut down the whole line, but it is hard to do this when the government is anti-worker.