World Bank recommends that countries eliminate minimum wage, dismantle wrongful dismissal rules and contractual protections for workers

Also recommended: Eliminating bathroom breaks, and reinstating “Whipping Wednesdays”.

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Roger your That!

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A “creditor” is someone to whom money is owed. The article should be calling the poor countries “debtor states;” as is it’s bass-ackwards.

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Where is my World Labor and their recommendations for what we do with or to bankers ?

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1

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giphy%20(4)

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Your response does nothing to address my point.

The unfortunate reality is that too much worker protection leads to unemployed workers rather than better off workers.

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This is true. I know a businessman who has owned and operated niche businesses his entire career. If his employees unionized, he’d dump it and go into another type of sales faster than you can blink.

Late stage? You wish. This is still the warm-up lap.

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A full-on Culture Special Circumstances team with drones and a Ship mind as backup would have a job with these fuckers, never mind Leon.

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There’s a balance to be had for sure. We’re talking about developing countries, though, where workers can only dream of the meagre protections afforded to their counterparts in the most backwards “right to work” state in the U.S. The World Bank is saying here that these countries need to afford their workers fewer protections than the little they already have.

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The only way they are able to do all this bad stuff, is by assuming their clients (workers, consumers, investors) will cooperate. Challenge that assumption, and it’s a whole different ball game. (the question remains of, ‘who will bell the cat?’)

Whetting hoe. Lighting up torch. Thinking the lamp posts are ugly by themselves and need some decoration.

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I’m sorry that you don’t see it.

While unreasonably high worker expectations work against small businesses run by the middle class, the World Bank tends to fund colonial extraction economies that benefit a few rich oligarchs, who control of the resource being exploited, and the World Bank. That also works against the development of a healthy middle class economy, sometimes actively because anything that might offer a better life than as a wage-slave is going to be seen as a disruptive influence by the oligarchs.

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http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/816281518818814423/2019-WDR-Draft-Report.pdf

did no one else read the draft report

Save your pitchforks

The report actually recommends 4 tiers, lowest is guaranteed social minimums (Universal basic Income) then Mandated Social insurance, Incentivized voluntary insurance, then labor market flexibility

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Huh. Okay, you’re right. That’s not what I expected.

There’s even a poke at Equifax.

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It occurs to me that we don’t know how to live. Humans, I mean. We have all these cultures, some old and some new, and live in this huge interlinked worldwide civil society, where they do things one way over here and another way over there, and a slightly different way over yonder. And sometimes there are wars and revolutions because someone gets convinced that their way is the best and only way.

But then the war is over or the revolution is concluded, and it’s time to get shit done rather than tear stuff down, and … nobody has a clue. Today’s revolutionaries are tomorrow’s hidebound conservatives.

We can’t manage ourselves, in the aggregate. We don’t know how to behave in large groups in order to make things “fair and equitable” for more people than not. Even if we do know to some extent how it might be done, we botch the execution every single time. You could design out a perfect society, down to the tiniest detail, but the instant you introduce living, breathing humans into it, things invariably fly apart. Greed, corruption, incompetence, well-intentioned idiots, sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity, as the great man said.

So, more wars, more rebellions, more cultures collapsing under their own unworkable bulks. They shrivel under the heel of austerity, they collapse into hedonism and decadence. Thousands of years of experimenting and we just don’t get it. Maybe we won’t ever. Maybe we can’t.

Meanwhile, we shit where we sleep and foul the only nest we have, and half of us contribute readily to the problem each and ever day while pretending to be deeply concerned about it, because, shit, you have to live your life, and the other half simply decides to believe the problem doesn’t exist and to mock and berate those who do, and we don’t know how to manage that, either. Nature has a way of dealing with insane species though, eventually.

You’d think we’d be able to figure it out, something as simple as “what’s fair?”, but I’m starting to think that unless and until we finally invent a true god to save us from ourselves, we’ll just continue to flail and foul our nest until it’s too late. And by true god I mean, of course, a general purpose strong AI that can take a holistic view of the species and give us what so many of us seem to crave right down to our bone marrow: the answers to simple questions like, “What should I do today?”

But maybe high intelligence and sanity are mutually exclusive at the species level, and maybe general purpose strong AI isn’t a thing that could ever truly exist, and maybe that’s the answer to Fermi’s question right there.

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And say hello to the USMC.

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So you’re saying you’re…disappointed…in humans? :grinning:

Right there with ya, unfortunately. :weary:

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