awnfuron

Fair enough. Thank you.

Not trying to be rude, but you will get more applicants if people feel that they aren't going to be wasting their time to apply for the position. Hiding pay starts the employment relationship off on the wrong foot at best, and at worst signals that there is something to hide.

Can you elaborate on this? Does it mean to position yourself as a person who can solve the problems that your business is throwing lots of money at? Or to avoid the problems that are being tossed to contractors since the business might not see them as long-enough term issues to hire employees to solve them?

Calling areas that can't afford the construction of sea barriers unimportant is a very cavalier approach. Maybe "human ingenuity will pull through" but how long will it take, and how many "unimportant" people will die or experience extreme hardship first?

This maybe isn't the place to get super political but I'll give it a shot.

The systems of production aren't optimized for worker or human happiness, they are optimized for profit making. That is certainly a design choice, at least on a firm-by-firm level. Maybe nobody sat down and said, "how can I make my workers miserable today?" but they have certainly sat down and said, "how can I profit more today?" And typically, when there is a choice between that profit and workers' happiness, profit wins.

Once all or most firms start operating by this logic, the exploitation becomes inescapable. If the firms are smart, they will band together to use some of their profit to influence politics, shaping systems that enable them to make more profits.

"Live with it and treat the worst of the systems" would be sort of like the American Democratic party: enact reforms and put restrictions on what firms can do so that they can't exploit so much. This rarely seems to work, first because firms find a way around restrictions, second because the restrictions are often shaped or even written by the firms that are to be regulated. (If you're going to be regulated, you might as well make it happen on your terms.) As you said, it treats the symptoms but not the cause.

I don't know about "wait for someone else to be less evil", but I suppose that would be people who can see the problems with the current system but propose no solution. Also, you might have some people in this category who do think that the system could work, if only people were nicer to each other. But again, the problem isn't a lack of niceness, it's that the system is optimized for profit at all costs; given a choice between niceness or profit, profit usually wins.

An alternative would be to actually treat the cause of the problem. Have a system where firms are optimized for human needs rather than for profit.

Are you saying that China was not a victim? They literally had millions of civilian deaths in WWII. I've seen figures from 14 million to 20 million. Never mind the destructive effects of western imperialism up to that point.

As for Mao holding back China, no doubt there were big problems. But the greatest increases in life expectancy at birth came under Mao [1] and his push to greatly expand access to medical care and education in rural areas. That was itself an investment which set the stage for future growth. (It's a lot easier to get things done when your people aren't dying at age 45.)

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...