Trumid | Front End React/Redux Developer | Full-Time | REMOTE or ONSITE in New York, NY | $120-150k
We’re a Wall Street startup founded in 2014 and backed by Peter Thiel and George Soros, seeking an experienced React developer. Our institutional credit trading platform has a Scala microservices architecture with multiple Electron-based frontend applications.
The UI team currently consists of 4 developers in South Florida, Pittsburg, Brooklyn, and Oregon. There is an expectation of working New York business hours.
What definition of "capitalism" are you using to refer to this as a "capitalist endeavor"? The "return on investment" (as you put it) aspect? Wouldn't, say, a communist make similar justifications? For example: "we provided your education as a child so you'll abide by our directives as an adult."
I don't think buying/selling women was a communist cornerstone.
The reason I say this is a capitalist endeavor is the recognition of an asset (the daughter), the want to see the most return (as large of a bride price as possible), and then seeking to improve the asset through education, travel, and competition to lead to a better selling price.
> I don't think buying/selling women was a communist cornerstone
By default in communist regimes women are by default the regime's means of prosuction, destined to a life of work while kept on a maintenance plan by their masters. So whether they aren't being sold, they are managed like an asset, where low upkeep abd high output is favoured while high maintenance and problematic/opinionated individuals are destined to be written-off sue to their impact on production.
Sorry, I'm not an economist but I'm not seeing a connection. It seems like you just may not like the idea of capitalism and are trying to connect it to something else which you consider to be bad.
Turkmenistan's recent history is as a (Soviet) socialist republic and it ranks very, very low on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom. I'd need further convincing that this practice is reflective of a culture which embraces capitalistic ideals like free markets and voluntary exchange.
I took the comment to mean that some marriages are an economic exchange, a trade of money for goods, as opposed to an emotional bond of love between people. The specific economic system mentioned isn't super relevant, I'd guess he didn't mean to fit such a literal definition of capitalism.
Surely the attempt to elicit a higher price via marketing is indicative of a capitalist ideal. Under a communist ideal (ie not necessarily a real system that's ever existed on Earth, AFAICT there has yet to be a state that's fully embraced communism; dictatorships don't count) improvement would be sought in order to better the collective good, rather than elicit a particular family's profit.
That a transactional system exists in a dictatorial regime that bears some communistic characteristics doesn't mean that transactional system (bride price) isn't "Capitalist".
> AFAICT there has yet to be a state that's fully embraced communism; dictatorships don't count)
Ah, the classical "no true scotsman" that pops up in every discussion on the virtues of communism.
It's weird how people praising or arguing in favour of communism repeatedly claim that communism never existed, particularly unsavoury and atrocious communist regimes, but somehow every single far-fetched example involving some kind of transaction that has a negative connotation is somehow a prime candidate to represent capitalism.
Agreed. In a communist society you would look out for the greater comunal interest. For example, family would be expected to let their marry to have more children, without expecting anything directly in return, but for the greater good of the people.
I wonder if the intent is to compare their outputs directly, or to point out that China has its history of great writers just like the West. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_classics is a nice list.)
If a politician promises to take ALL of the rich people's money and give it to me, would I be voting "against my own interests" if I thought that was a stupid idea which would result in more problems for myself and others? Adjust "ALL" to some other high percentage and it's the same idea.
I suppose I should expect this from the NYT but they really managed to spin this one.
They bemoan that "the rich" "save" money from the deduction. Isn't it relevant that in order to get a significant discount on taxes, they'd have to be taxed a much larger amount too?
Furthermore, an home-owning couple doesn't realize a single dollar of benefit until after the first $12,600 because of the standard deduction. A renting couple gets all $12,600 for free PLUS they benefit from lower rent because their landlord can deduct not only their own interest and property taxes but other expenses which an occupying homeowner could not (association fees, repairs, etc).
I took NYT's examples and plugged them into the tax calculator to see how much they are paying, including the itemized deductions for the wealthier family:
Unless one supposes Asare's family is using 20+ times more shared resources than Diaz's, one could come up with a different notion of who the beneficiaries of tax policy may be.
Wouldn't many such shareholders be Americans as well? Americans who could do something more productive with these payouts than the government might with taxes?
(Non-American shareholders could similarly reinvest these payouts in things which improve the global economy and, by extension, the livelihoods of Americans.)
Everyone throwing around "free" healthcare as a valid explanation for this wage gap needs to account for taxation levels too.
using estimates via Google:
"average programmer salary usa" -> $84,360
"average programmer salary in sweden" -> $54,264
According to http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/10/focus-4, average effective taxes in the USA (including social security) are 25%... but 35% in Sweden. Even if those particular numbers are off, the point is that higher taxes may further expand the gap with lower pre-tax foreign salaries.
So the Swede keeps $35k and gets state-sponsored healthcare. The American keeps $63k and probably has decent health coverage from his employer. I'm not sure about this but I suspect that the American can use a fraction of that $28,000 difference to upgrade the health insurance to Swedish levels or better.
(There are also smaller but still significant expenses like housing, affected by property taxes, and consumption taxes like New York City's 8.875% relatively-high-for-the-USA sales tax vs Sweden's 25% VAT.)
Your number for Sweden is (sadly :)) incorrect. This site (http://www.lonestatistik.se/loner.asp/yrke/Systemutvecklare-...) puts the median at 396,000 kr -> $44,800. But unless the site adjusts for salary increases, the estimate is probably on the lower side.
Salary also depends on your title. So web developers earn less than system developers who in turn earn less than system architects even though they may all do essentially the same work.
Healthcare is not just having an insurance. It's about keeping your job/pay when your sick for a longer time, maternity/paternity leave, pensions (also if you have to quit the work force early because you can't perform your job anymore), etc.
That's true. I didn't look into how exactly Swedish rates are computed. A 25% effective rate sounded about right to me for a single-filer US salary in that range in most states which have income taxes on top of the federal+FICA. A Nordic country having 10+% higher effective rates likewise seemed reasonable but I certainly don't know for sure.
Some "left-leaning" stances they take where I'm hard-pressed to see how they are defending civil rights, if not outright violating those of one party for the benefit of another:
religious liberty (an employer engages in voluntary exchange... not much of a stretch to see it as a violation of rights to force them to pay for something which they consider blasphemous): https://action.aclu.org/secure/your-boss-has-no-business-you...
abortion (Roe v Wade federal overreach vs States' Rights... this and other issues like marijuana laws can be left to the States but "leftists" generally prefer a stronger central government over States as "laboratories of democracy"): https://www.aclu.org/issues/reproductive-freedom/abortion
ACA/"Obamacare": I couldn't find anything about their position on this issue but, if they were only defending civil rights rather than also being a "left-leaning political organization", I think they'd actively oppose forcing people to pay corporations for products they don't want.
Regarding voter ID. "All those other countries" generally uniformly issue IDs to everyone, so there's no issue like there is here in US, where there are significant minorities that don't have any form of ID. For example, I'm from Russia, and I have the government-issued ID that I need to show to vote; but that ID was issued to me for free (and is in fact mandatory to have).
A voter ID is not discriminatory in principle, provided that it's free (since otherwise it'd be a poll tax), and does not place undue burden on the citizen to obtain - like, say, traveling several hours to the only nearby place that issues them, and then waiting for several more hours in a line because it's understaffed to serve all the people that need to get their IDs from it.
The problem is that pretty much all voter ID laws promoted or passed in US to date fail these requirements, and thus effectively constitute voter suppression.
I feel like you could have a good argument about most of those, but the affirmative action one is pretty damning. That's blatantly political and in no way related to constitutional protections.
There are plenty of good civil liberties related ways to look at race, but affirmative action is not one of them.
I agree that "a good argument" can be made about some of them but it appears to me that ACLU always goes "left" with such nuanced issues. If I knew of examples of them going "right" to balance things out, I'd see them differently.
For example, I tried to find out if they took a position in Kelo v City of New London to defend property rights but my searches came up empty.
The supreme court agrees that affirmative action is constitutional (within certain bounds), see the recent Fisher v. UT case, or Bakke for the original example.
I'm not saying it's not constitutional, just that it is unrelated to civil liberties and should probably be outside their purview if they're to be a politically neutral organization.
On the subject of abortion and drugs, it's fairly straightforward. ACLU is not a "states' rights" organization. It is an "individual rights" organization. It sues states for infringing people's rights as much as it sues the feds. So from their perspective, if they can enshrine the protection of a right at a federal level, they'll go for it, because it's easier than forcing all 50 states to do the same.
Yes, it may be "easier" for the ACLU to abuse/"reinterpret" the Constitution rather than work to amend it or work within its strict framework... but doing so makes things worse for more people in the longterm.
States' Rights limit the Federal Government from being so powerful that it can more easily violate civil rights... a bigger picture which ACLU should take into account.
Likewise, "legislating from the bench" may have protected some rights of individuals... but, far more often, it has "enshrined", as you say, new Federal powers at the cost of individual liberties.
Most work that ACLU does on the federal level involves strengthening the 14th Amendment, such that it is the judicial branch of the federal government that grows stronger, specifically with respect to its power to limit infringement of individual rights by the states. That's narrow enough in scope to not be worrisome.
Cause states rights weren't used to shield Jim Crow for a hundred years... oh, right. States just as easily trample individual rights as the federal government.
We’re a Wall Street startup founded in 2014 and backed by Peter Thiel and George Soros, seeking an experienced React developer. Our institutional credit trading platform has a Scala microservices architecture with multiple Electron-based frontend applications.
The UI team currently consists of 4 developers in South Florida, Pittsburg, Brooklyn, and Oregon. There is an expectation of working New York business hours.
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/193804/front-end-engineer-tru...
We are also looking to fill a React+Node Full Stack position.
Please apply through Stack or email jason@trumidtech.com