jadero

How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?

Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn't even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I'd like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into "full time equivalent" for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into "unemployment equivalent" for inclusion in our statistics.

How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?

Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.

Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.

It's obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it's being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.

I have no idea, but I'd like the powers that be to recognize that there are two economies and to prioritize the lived economy.

I first became aware of the difference when "the economy" was starting to boom in the 1980s even as we were busy returning to breadlines under the name of food banks.

I'm not sure we even need the finance economy. A pure stock market is one thing, but by the time you get to rents over profit on actual production, the financialization of housing, derivatives of derivatives and all the other distancing from actual production, it's just shell games with no benefit to society.

Which economy? The lived economy of the general public or the artificial economy of finance?

On the other hand, the only reason this is being debated is because someone chose to make it debatable. People wear the poppy or not, the various ribbons or not, all without comment or concern. All they had to do to keep it from being distracting was to ignore it. Hell, they could have even acknowledged it and moved on without distracting from any other business.

Politicians are already on social media. What we need are government departments on social media. CRA and justice, at a bare minimum, should be on social media.

It also wouldn't hurt my feelings to have a "lemmy.gov.ca" instance with communities for parties, politicians, and every government department and ministry.

The rulings against exclusion zones need to start including fines, remedial training for all staff from administrators to front-line enforcers, and easy access to fast-tracked injunctions.

I did not. I did only single-tie systems for mathematical purity. (Just kidding. I might have tried it if I had thought to!)

No problem! I was once at a place that imposed a mandatory necktie policy. I hate neckties, so I thought I'd at least have fun with it. I wore ties as silly and varied as I could get away with and tied them different every day. That book was a boon.

It seems to me that if you are going to include 4-in-hand, a traditional necktie knot, then you should include these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie (at a minimum) and possibly reference this: https://phys.org/news/2014-02-mathematicians-ways.html (177,147 ways). 😀

When I think about all the truly public services we should have and the level of service that should be available, it makes me think that the public sector should be the largest single employer at every level. Sure, maybe you end up with an auto factory or an Amazon warehouse in a specific location, but on average, there should be more public works employees, bus drivers, nurses, care workers, and policy experts than pretty much any other single industry sector. And probably by a large margin.

They're called "dessert forks" in the same way that some people call the small spoons "dessert spoons".

Everything I've read makes me think that a scam is obvious only to those not taken in and those who get the benefit of reading a news story.

This particular scam is a relatively minor variation on the "bank examiner" scam that has been successfully operating pretty much since the invention of banking. With the right play, even people familiar with the scam can be taken in.