In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimpering fool in front of a ton of people. As far as I know he didn't try to get back at the victim.

In the second it was I that flipped out and had some luck. I didn't seriously hurt him but he realized the blind intent in the moment was there. He just seemed shocked and no longer bothered

The 3rd guy had some Moroccan machismo thing going and kept picking on people he couldn't beat and it always happened fairly conventionally without suprise.

What i'm advocating for is simply internal child related distribution. You don't take it from the states coffers. You for example simply carefully raise the taxes of the childless and lower the taxes of those with kids (probably not directly proportionally to the number of kids) in the process retaining your original government revenue.

You don't have to go overboard with it because realistically any effect drags drastically but you do slowly keep upping the difference in benefits untill you reach either replacement rate or something slightly below replacement in a way that doesn't constitute an outright crisis.

I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.

They marvel at the fact I have an office job and insist that I must dress very properly. I think one should question that and why their job (which they were proud of) no longer exists here and the ones that do exist don't employ locals. The result is that many of my generation are competing for those "prestigious" "high earning" carreers.

And for an outsourcing contract to be that way there's a certain intent that needs to exist.

For a lot of the jobs described that really isn't the big factor.

>It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.

Again more of a consequence of the "elite overproduction" and policy than anything else. I'm sure that earlier mentioned callcenter job could happen without a social sciences degree as can myriads of jobs i supported in factories.

>You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap >Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.

a) Stop projecting

b) I'm not arguing against what individuals want when spending. Americans such as you wanted cheaper and better cars and electronics and..... Japan provided those but not because japan was a libertarian paradise. America strongarmed them out of that position not because it is some kind of libertarian paradise. Same with the new competition in some fields from China.

> So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.

PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants. I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me. At some point you'll just end up arguing for the relative competitive advantage of places with slavery.

And I'm suggesting wage bargaining power has affected that. Not on it's own. But it has had notable effect.

>By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.

I am as are you but I think I am far from alone. After all the big societal issues that spark these discussions aren't sparked by a few cents of lipstick and somewhat cheaper screens.

>Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive.

Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc

And I don't think anyone can argue it stopped japan, china, etc from innovating.

Show me the ultraliberal free for all that did well and isn't super financialized.

"drive" on the other hand is an ephemeral thing that starts falling apart when it is more clearly defined. I can just as easily argue that my drive is hampered because there's no reason for me to attempt to enter plenty of conceivable fields (and even begin to innovate) where i would compete with a multinational utilizing sweatshop workers in Mali. I can also point at the various industries that got internationally more and more consolidated into fewer and fewer players leading to less innovation and "drive".

>This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.

I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur, etc and any attempt to would be radically more involved costly and far beyond my small countries scope than simply affecting what companies do locally. It is defending a situation with hypotheticals that rarely happen and when they happen they have often happened badly or shift the problem further.

>The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.

I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and this striving towards it is also self defeating. You argue about this from a global perspective but also as if it would be good locally in a more developed place if only those with "less desired jobs" could properly retrain and such as if these same reasonings wouldn't apply there. Those jobs that are leaving are desired to me even if I don't do them all. Those wage setting mechanics for jobs in mining, at a call center, assembling components on an assembly line also indirectly affect those wage setting pressures/purchasing power of the software dev, marketing person, etc

>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.

The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.

>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,

You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.

Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?

Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.

Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing. The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.

No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.

>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.

My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.

Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.

I'm trying to convey that the moment i hear that i am speaking to a foreign contractor i know that they won't tell me "oh thomas from the dev team will probably know who worked on that part." For people who make such calls a lot it becomes an incredibly frustrating experience and I get why they immediately try to get escalated.

>Are you Canadian or something? Your entire comment is just tantamount to a defence of racism.

What pray tell was racist about it. Sorry but your insults don't work as deflections. You're the only one that immediately has race on their mind.

It doesn't even work either when we have plenty of people living here locally of african descent.

>White first world workers doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than overseas workers,is the definition of structural racism and white privilege.

And Philipinos doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than people in Burundi ,is the definition of what?

>If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas,

Why the fuck do you assume I'm canadian? I'm Belgian. Flemish to be specific.

>that just means Canadians are not competitive in the labour market.

That just means the labour market expands but only towards the lowest common denominator to undercut wages and no not just the ones of those jobs being outsourced. It has wider effects.

> Any attempt to correct this fact is artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.

That has nothing to do with racism. That's just....not globalism which has absolutely nothing at all to do with racism. You might not believe it but not everyone is a proponent of unfetered hypercapitalism and rapidly growing inequality in the way that you are.

And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this. My grandma tells with pride of the work they used to do and they did quite well for themselves.

It was things like rolling cigars and soldering on an assembly line. Stuff that now would be described as sweatshop work that nobody would expect to happen locally.

I now do far "higher status" work in the eyes of the classists that think all of this is fine but still don't get close to their wealth.

And workers that don't get what you're on about because they only have the script for a regular customers with regular issues become often incredibly frustrating when you have a more complicated issue that would be immediately resolved by someone at a helpdesk locally that immediately knows what internal niche department and person you should be redirected to.

Are they adjusting their tagalog accent too or so?

Either way. Consider how it feels elsewhere where the majority of such calls are not anywhere close to "native proficiency" English,...or Dutch or German or what have you and it's instead thick accents to the point you end up making your grandparents calls for them. It also doesn't help when they don't understand already suppressed and half erased local dialects/accents of the region they're servicing. Which indeed contributes to "erasure of an entire people's way of speech"

It also doesn't help that these people are often on the other side of the goddamn world and have usually a lot lot less tie-in to the company (if they even work directly for it) than when you get someone local on the line. I remember having to call one such company half a dozen times to get someone to understand that: no i was not the 1000th regular customer using one of their devices but wanted to make software that connects to it and had questions about their dev kit. It was the most infuriating experience figuring out again and again whether they couldn't understand the words i was using or just couldn't grasp that someone had a question that was unusual and didn't fit the scripts that they seemed to try to pull back to. In the end i had to weasel my way into the dm's of someone i once met working there who then immediately connected me to someone at the right department.

And everyone is abjectly aware that all this is just local companies outsourcing and suppressing wages.

The population has not shrunk a single year since the world wars but the natality has been below replacement since the start of the 70's if you take the colloquial replacement natality rate and since the world wars if you take the more realistic one.

I think just about every surrounding country is similar.

That growth is indeed slowing down but that has more to do with the natality continuing to drop.

There are indeed eastern european countries with far less migration which saw declines pulling the average down.

If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.

>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.

You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.