[benreesman]

They’ve been doing this for years. It costs less to pay the fines than the loss in productivity would be, the robots didn’t pan out in the timeframe advertised and driving human labor to subsistence level (“loose labor markets”) is both policy and incidentally the reason why all the polls say “the economy is terrible” and all the pundits say “how do we convince the public that the metrics show they should be happy”.

[tomoyoirl]

The pundits say the economy is fine, and that the labor market is still really tight (but slackening gradually). They do note that economic sentiment is really, really bad, and it seems to be for non-economic reasons (residual inflation shock, mostly). Avoiding further inflation is the key reason that policy is leaning on the labor market at all.

[benreesman]

There is a general consensus that real wages after accounting for the realities around things like health care have been flat or declined for coming up on 45 years.

It’s a quiet consensus, but few are claiming that Gen Z is just crushing it on home ownership or any other credible proxy for doing as well as the baby boomers.

Cheap consumer electronics are not substantially wealth! High-fructose corn syrup might be cheaper than ever, but anything north of that is rapidly becoming a boutique luxury. A public university education is triple what it was 20 years ago.

Hacker News is in many ways the best thing on the Internet, but people trying to finely parse this and that nitpick under a headline “Amazon Pays The Fines So They Can Continue to Exploit Workers with Impunity” makes me embarrassed to hang out here.

[eru]

How do you 'drive human labour to subsistence level'? Surely not by widening their job options?