[satvikpendem]

If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much a dollar is worth elsewhere in the world, because purchasing power parity exists. It's like me being mad that on a hypothetical Mars people make a million dollars a day, that does not affect me whatsoever.

[GTP]

Let's make a concrete example. I'm from Italy, currently living abroad. The salary I was getting where I am now, was almost double what I was offered in my home country. We're told that the cost of living in Italy is also lower than other EU countries. While this is true, it isn't half of the rest of the EU.

I'm now in a situation where I could go back to Italy, but the above is one of the reasons that makes me doubt wheter it would be a good outcome or not.

This is to answer your point about purchasing power. With an Italian salary (considering the same tech job), my purchasing power there would still be lower than my purchasing power here with a local salary.

[satvikpendem]

Yes, it can go both ways depending on the specific purchasing power, I never said otherwise, just my point that in many areas of Asia where factories are, people make way more than their local economy even if it might be less than the US.

[ceejayoz]

> If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else.

Sure. The kapos at concentration camps got better food and treatment, too.

That doesn't make it a fair, happy, or good arrangement.

[satvikpendem]

I'm not going to continue with someone like you who'd equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory. It is simply highly disrespectful to those who've actually lived through or died in them. Have a good day.

[ceejayoz]

> equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory

Oh no, not accurately stating history!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rul...

> The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe.

Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has.

[satvikpendem]

Not sure what you're talking about, I explicitly said those are concentration camp conditions, so obviously yes Nazis murdered many people while making them work in factories. Seems like you think I think they didn't.

But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory.

[inigyou]

Do modern factories hire enough people to absorb the whole population as workers?

[ceejayoz]

> But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253

> Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap.

> China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education.

[satvikpendem]

China is a different story altogether. They're not democratic so of course you'd expect to see things like that.

[ToValueFunfetti]

You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler.

[ceejayoz]

> The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor

This was also bad, yes.

> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler

Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.

A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.

[ToValueFunfetti]

This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal.

Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.

[miyoji]

This isn't the question.

The question is how much value do they add? If it's more than the money they're making, the people paying them are stealing. You don't like this because it makes it impossible to make money as a capitalist, but that's the entire argument. Making money as a capitalist is always unethical, because it necessarily involves stealing the value of someone else's labor.

Just because you can pay someone $1 to do something that makes you $10 doesn't mean it's ethical. It isn't, ever.

[satvikpendem]

Not everyone subscribes to the labor theory of value, so I question your premise fundamentally.

[miyoji]

There is no labor theory of value, only a value theory of labor.

It's funny though, I hadn't read a word of Marx but the first time I understood that I was being paid $15/hr to make websites for a guy who was charging his clients $100 for that same hour of my work, I immediately understood everything about it and its innate truth. I got into the business myself and figured out exactly what value the CEO and the salespeople were bringing, and let me tell you, brother, it wasn't $85. It wasn't even $15. You can call it whatever you want, but you will never convince me that guy wasn't stealing money from me.

[satvikpendem]

It is an economic term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

> I got into the business myself

Exactly, as capitalism intends. If you don't want to make employee wages then you take on the risk and capital and do it yourself, and are thus rewarded for it. Ironic, if you were actually a socialist you would've tried to help your fellow workers but you instead are the capitalist now.

[miyoji]

No, I've never been a capitalist. I don't make money on speculation or other passive deployment of capital. I work for my money. I am no longer in business as a solo operative, but I was never interested in hiring other people to exploit and I don't think I ever will be. But at the time it made more sense to remove the useless leech from the equation because that asshole didn't add any value, and none of the owners of any of the businesses I've worked at since have, either. They've destroyed plenty with idiotic decisions, though.

[satvikpendem]

You went into business as you yourself said. Therefore you are a capitalist. That you didn't hire or "leech" doesn't make you less of one, as you were literally the capital class in your company.