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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • We are contemplating compulsory service by all Americans. “Free Market” is not a factor here. Against that alternative, we can consider a wide variety of non-free options for influencing market behavior.

    You describe workers exploiting themselves: being willing to “do it for less” than a living wage. Correcting minimum wage to be a living wage keeps their slave-like desperation from influencing the labor market.

    Beyond that, directly subsidizing American ag laborers corrects the follow-on market effects of anti-famine subsidies on agriculture. Ag subsidies depress food prices and tank farm revenue, forcing farmers to exploit workers. Ag subsidies directly to ag laborers corrects that undue influence on the labor market.



  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todaytoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world*squints*
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    16 hours ago

    Or, and hear me out here: We could pay people a competitive wage for their labor.

    I understand the need for agricultural subsidies. The government inserts itself into the normal supply/demand process to protect the general public against a famine.

    What I don’t understand is why those subsidies don’t seem to be flowing past the greedy hands of corporate farmers and into the pockets of farm laborers.












  • Geometry.

    The first clocks were sundials, which worked by putting a line on the ground. As soon as you comparing two different lines on the ground, you are doing geometry to represent time.

    When you start messing around with geometry, you need an easy way to describe the angle of an equilateral triangle. 1/6th of a circle, or 1/3rd of a line. Trying to represent 1/3 or 1/6th in base 10 is fugly. Trying to divide a circle into 10 equal sections is just as fugly.

    Dividing a circle into 6 equal sections is trivial: after you draw the circle with your compass, walk the compass around the perimeter. You have just inscribed a hexagon.

    You’re still missing the angle of 1/4 of a circle: the angles of a square. Those are pretty important in geometry as well. It’s fairly trivial to draw another 6 points between the first 6 on your circle.

    We use a 12-hour clock because of basic geometry. The 360-degree circle is the bastard child of basic geometry and a base-10 number system.