Interesting Links for 11-01-2017

[andrewducker]

On Maximum Wages and Inequality (tags: wages inequality economics income ) Do any other nations enjoy understatement as much as the British do? (tags: uk language society funny ) This pretty-much sums up my position on philosophy and meaning (tags: philosophy life ) A lot of well-meaning people don’t understand single-payer healthcare (tags:

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Straight up Roland Barthes stuff - we build our own narrative and for us it has the meaning we assign it, though our narrative may have a different meaning for others. And other people do the same and we are free to interpret their narratives as we see fit and all that really matters to any of us are our own interpretations.

[danieldwilliam]

On the subject of maximum wages or maximum incomes I think another difficulty is around extra-terratoriality and unearned income and perhaps enforcement more generally

[andrewducker]

Yup. International cooperation is definitely the way to go to tackle this stuff. And I agree that the rich will simply find ways around caps, particularly if they're working for international companies.

Equivocating feels less bad than lying but will cost yo

[cartesiandaemon]

It's funny, I do *feel* that, and I love the idea of twisting literally worded statements (in fantasy bargaining etc). But as long as I remember, I remember thinking "if you're going to lie, you might well just lie properly". It's just as morally culpable and not usually less deniable. (I rarely ever did, I was way too honest)

RE: Equivocating feels less bad than lying but will cost yo

[andrewducker]

Yeah. People feel better when they can have a twisted excuse for themselves, but it really doesn't actually help.

Bosses' bizarre excuses for failing to pay minimum wage

[cartesiandaemon]

I was going to say, do they do this for other laws? Oh, but I had a good reason for breaking the law, so that must make it ok, right? But obviously, yes, they actually DO do that. Right up to, "but it wasn't murder, he had it coming!"

RE: Bosses' bizarre excuses for failing to pay minimum wage

[andrewducker]

And now I have Chicago playing in my head...

RE: Bosses' bizarre excuses for failing to pay minimum wage

[danieldwilliam]

I watched the film with BB whilst she was up. She seemed to like it. It's perhaps my favourite musical.

they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have

[cartesiandaemon]

I did wonder, if anyone said, "they're all human", the experimenter would have said, "yes, well done, good guess" and stopped, or gone on till they guessed "white".

I'm a bit torn, because it really really is a very big problem that people treat what's common as an unmarked default, and it does cause problems in all sorts of ways. But if some people genuinely ARE in a majority, it IS much less notable if you see three of them at once.

It's more blatant when a privileged group is thought of as unmarked default when they're NOT in a majority.

Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have

[nancylebov]

I would like to see how that experiment works out if the subjects are black people.

RE: Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have

[cartesiandaemon]

Indeed.

Although I remember from similar experiments (eg. assuming the race of a doctor when you're only told they're a doctor, etc), people who are not white usually having the same assumptions as white people, but not quite as strong, so while I can't know, I would guess something similar would happen here.

RE: Re: they're rubbish at noticing how many legs they have

[andrewducker]

Me too. They test against the participants being black, but not the subjects, which is a shame.