[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[PseudoStupidity]

A very normal dead response, one where he pretends people who said true things somehow did not, and then defends something that is absolutely disgusting (in this case, forcing old people to work into their late 60s under threat of poverty). Dead, why the fuck should we force 66-year-old to work? It's bad that we make really old people work! Please tell me why it's important we force old people to work under the threat of poverty.

I mean, it's bad to force anyone to work, but fuck why are you coming after old people like that? Let them enjoy feeding ducks from park benches, pickleball, and having weirdly high amounts of STIs.


Edit: Also, fuck Macron. Best of luck to the French with their upcoming civil unrest, and worst of luck to Macron & his fascist buddies with escaping said unrest.

[Kaelik]

Nationally, Macron raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. The United States changed Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67. That is most assuredly a good thing,

I think this about sums up everything anyone needs to know about deaddm.

Also I'll just add for anyone who cares, in the US "raising the retirement age" is just a global benefits cut to everyone on social security.

Social security allows you to start withdrawing EARLY by taking a benefits cut. It also lets you keep working LONGER in return for a benefit increase.

So litearlly every single person who wants to retire at 65 still can, and just gets less money. Including the poor people! Every single person who wanted to retire at 67, has always been able to do so! Raising the age just means they don't get a benefit increase for postponing.

Raising the age is just a flat benefit cut to every single person no matter what age they retire.

Deaddm wants you to know it's most assuredly a good thing to cut social security benefits.

Social Security does not have one retirement age. It has 96 retirement ages, one for each month between age 62 and 70. What people call the “full retirement age” (FRA) is just a placeholder in a formula that determines the benefit level at all 96 retirement ages.

People who retire at the FRA receive 100 percent of the “primary insurance amount” (PIA), which is a dollar figure derived from a formula applied to each individual’s earnings record. People who retire before or after the FRA receive less or more than 100 percent of the PIA based on how far away from the FRA they are when they retire.

In the below graph, we can see what these percentages are at all 96 retirement ages when the FRA is set at age 67 (the current FRA), age 68, age 69, and age 70.

When someone proposes increasing the retirement age to 68, all they are really proposing is to cut monthly Social Security benefits by around 7 percent at all 96 retirement ages. A proposal to raise the retirement age to 70 is just a proposal to cut monthly benefits by around 23 percent at all 96 retirement ages. None of this is about when you retire. It’s just a straightforward benefit reduction being expressed in an opaque way.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/20 ... ement-age/

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Raising the retirement age is also objectively a bad thing for the economy if you care about people in their prime working ages having jobs. But liberals do not understand that because they have the depth of understanding of economics equal to that of a baby chicken.

It is also especially cruel to working class poors with jobs that involve actual physical labor that leave you physically ruined at or often before 60. But liberals do not understand that because they work at desks with computers doing "email jobs", or even when they don't for some reason inside their minds think that they somehow do and everyone else definitely does as well. And again, the idea that somewhere in the economy someone has to put actual bricks on top of other bricks is outside of their baby chicken economic models.

Still it works for my joke. Being against raising the retirement age is a very mild very middle ground very sensible policy. Western nations have hard objective economic motivations, as well as good subjective moral motivations, to LOWER the fucking retirement age. But, to a liberal it is common sense that anything but crashing the economy into a wall of all your boomer workers dying at once and causing unemployment and suffering in the mean time is OBVIOUSLY impossible pie in the sky far left tankie communism that must be opposed to the point of putting actual fascists in power.

[Thaluikhain]

but raising the retirement age is something that happened in the United States and it has been and remains higher than in France.

Not sure why "the US does it even more" is really a defence of anything.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Not sure why "the US does it even more" is really a defence of anything.

But it really is. For your local DeadDM liberal moron. We have them here in Australia. They WERE a dominant voting block, before they basically handed the country to fascism. (Some delays have occurred as various parties have fought over who will get to be overrun by fascists, but that seems to be likely to shake out in an election or two now).

But CONSTANTLY in Australia we have been pushed to fucking stupid policy "Because the USA does it". We had THE BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM ON THE FUCKING PLANET. Everyone. EVERYONE sent their delegations HERE to study OUR success, but us? We said "what can we do to make our system more like the one they use in the USA? And now the delegations do not come here anymore.

And the only argument our DeadDMs needed was "but the USA does it and they are always right, right?"

[MGuy]

It's just as NPP says. Liberal morons always think that way. There's a system in place and, because they are morons that lack any moral convictions, if they are told it is good and right nothing should be changed. This also fits with dead's view on everything else. It's ok that poor people can't get healthcare cause m4a sounds like communism. It's ok that people are poor and getting poorer he just wants them to not be so pessimistic about it. So it fits that he would think its ok to drive people to working for even longer because I guess being a boomer means you should work yourself to death.

[Kaelik]

It's just as NPP says. Liberal morons always think that way. There's a system in place and, because they are morons that lack any moral convictions, if they are told it is good and right nothing should be changed. This also fits with dead's view on everything else. It's ok that poor people can't get healthcare cause m4a sounds like communism. It's ok that people are poor and getting poorer he just wants them to not be so pessimistic about it. So it fits that he would think its ok to drive people to working for even longer because I guess being a boomer means you should work yourself to death.

It doesn't even effect Boomers that much! The age increase only effects people born 1960 and after, baby boomers are born 1946-1964. 4 Years of baby boomers get the shaft.

Meanwhile, it will effect 100% of gen x and millenials!

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Meanwhile, it will effect 100% of gen x and millenials!

It's probably worse than that.

Because moron liberals adhere to one size fits all policy measures and try to roll them out in every country they get their hands on I can pretty much guarantee you the current French retirement ages are the thin end of the wedge.

They will spread them to effect ALL workers (even police) they will keep raising the age until at least 70. AND they will do it in age groups and eventually the youngest will either retire at 70+ or NEVER.

Have they done that here? No, they stalled hard after the first raise. Have they done that in France, no, they stalled hard after the first raise, have they done that anywhere? Not to my knowledge, maybe a couple of south american countries post coup and before an economic collapse triggered (for some unknown reason certainly not related to extremist liberal policies) on top of an existing economic collapse.

So how do I know these fuckers are thin end of wedging and think they are boiling a frog so the public won't notice?

Because liberals are so fucking bad at basic politicking THAT THEY TOLD US THE PLAN all smug like on TV. Something I might note, they do all the time with deeply unwise and unpopular policy. Why? Well it makes sense to them, it plays well with the DeadDM demographic, so why would telegraphing your evil ass plans hurt you and your evil ass plans?

[Kaelik]

It's certainly possible any number of things might change in the future.

I'm just saying factually the change from 65 to 67 in the US is a benefit cut on like one fourth of boomers, but 100% of every post boomer generation, so it's very funny to sell it as a way for the millenials to get it over on the boomers.

No doubt they will try 35 more times to raise the retirement age and never once to simply tax rich people and deaddm will thank them every single time.

I remember in college... uh a lot of years ago, in my intro economic course watching a 70+ year old economic progressor lecture to a hall of hundreds of students that of course the solution to the evil social security surplus running low was to raise the retirement age, without even mentioning the cap on taxes for the rich, because he was a rich guy who's job was to give 3 lectures a week and then spend the rest of his time writing books, and he couldn't even imagine a job you couldn't do for 40 years straight.

The people constantly trying to raise the retirement age are just that guy on steriods, guys who's job is to have a meeting where they tell everyone else what to do because they were fast tracked past all the actual doing work jobs.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Sounds like a pretty shit economic professor, I mean most of them are. The field is rife with charlatans little better than DeadDM.

Ignoring the pensions bit, because the pensions bit is a giant lie fabricated to attack pensions as a concept, which were paid for by the labor of the people due to receive them.

If the economy has a productivity problem due to an aging population the potential solutions do NOT include shuffling the deck chairs on your pension system. You need to get more young productive people with a long future of productivity into the work force earlier and into entry level positions and up the ladder of promotions as soon as you can.

By, for instance, opening up more employment from the top down by you know, having old people retire.

Or maybe NOT having a 3-8% unemployment TARGET "to stop the workers getting upitty" and actually returning to full employment policy for the good of economic efficiency.

Honestly, OUR neo-liberal idiots rolled out our version of raising the retirement age in the middle of an unprecedented youth unemployment crisis. Everyone was like "uh oh a lost generation that may now never enter the workplace" and neo-liberalism fed that into their galaxy brain and spat out "bbzzzt click wir, input not acceptable, because of aging population raise retirement age and add additional pressure preventing youth from working, will save pensions... next policy, plan to cut pensions anyway bzzt click wir".

[deaddmwalking]

You'll of course note that I pointed out that issues with fairness with Social Security included not fully taxing earned income (the cap) and paying people who had higher incomes more in Social Security benefits than people with lower incomes.

That said, Social Security is a good program and I don't want to eliminate it!

In 1935, Life Expectancy in the United States was 60.7. In 2020 it was 78.8. This is a real improvement in public health. Now, not everyone lives to age 65 or 67 - some people die during their prime working ages due to accidents or disease - but when the program was created the expectation was that MOST PEOPLE wouldn't benefit.

If you retire at 65 and live until age 78, you'll collect 13 years of retirement benefits. On average, your Social Security benefit will pay you 40% of your pre-retirement earnings (from the Social Security Administration). With your tax payment of 6.20%, you 'earn' 6x more each month of retirement than you paid while working. There's some things we could really explore like how your earnings when you're young are lower (on average) than when you're older, but for the sake of simplicity we'll pretend that you earn the same wage your entire working career of ~42 years. As a result, you'll have 'received' as much as you paid in in 7 years. But you're projected to be retired for 11.8 years. Now your employer also pays, so if you count that, you 'earn' 3x more each moth of retirement than the combined amount contributed to toward retired workers while you were working. With that more generous figure your expected benefit is less than your total contribution - your payments equal 36 years of work and we assumed you worked 42. But once we figure in that your salary increased over time, that value erodes as well.

Since Social Security is a good program, minor fixes like charging SS taxes on all earned income instead of capping it at less than $200k would help. Likewise providing a fixed benefit independent of earnings would also help ensure that the poorest workers receive at least as much as people who don't even need the money. As much as I respect Warren Buffett, it's pretty clear that he doesn't need $3k/month (or whatever) from the Social Security Administration when he's frequently the world's richest man.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

paying people who had higher incomes more in Social Security benefits than people with lower incomes.

If you want to argue for a full communist flat pension go ahead, you won't and you aren't, you are just trying to wedge in a blatant argument against pensions period.

Otherwise you are just butt fucking ignorant of what pensions even are. Routinely this "fairness" issue crops up world wide because routinely the way they work is they pay out based on what you PERSONALLY pay into them which is based on your fucking income you MORON.

And the neoliberal replacement for the pension. Which I have a deep and intimate relationship with, is Superannuation. Which is of course just Pensions again but privatized and financialized for maximum parasitism and minimum actual public utility. And it ALSO PAYS OUT ACCORDING TO WHAT YOU PERSONALLY PAY IN. Only, EVEN FUCKING MORE SO.

Oh and boohoo? Your liberal predecessors actually were running state pensions as a flat out scam with the intention of almost never paying out but NOW they have to pay out more because of the god damned social contract and now you want to alter the deal unilaterally so you don't actually have to pay out pensions that again, the recipients HAVE ALREADY PAID INTO AND FOR.

That isn't economic responsibility. That is the utter opposite. That is breaking the agreement, taking the money and fucking running. Did you and your allies trying to destroy a public good mismanage the funds? No? Then pay the fuck up like everyone signed up for. You claim you can't? Well then where the fuck is the money? Pensions schemes are pretty fucking simple, liberals CLAIM to have all the economic credentials, so where, the fuck, is the money you OWE your customers?

[Kaelik]

1) "we must step in to make sure that social security does not provide more assistance then it did in 1935. It would be terrible if the program was better then it was then!"

2) you can tell 100% of the time that someone says "we should not give [rich person] [small amount of benefits] because they are rich!" That is always 100% of the time because they want to deny that benefit to poor people. Because if you want to take money away from Warren buffet you do that through taxation.

We've been over this a million times "means tested benefits" are bad because they are more work to administer then universal benefits and they frequently (extremely intentionally) overlook poor people that should receive the benefit.

Social security does not need to be cut so that Warren buffet gets less money. It needs to be increased so that poor people get more money, and Warren buffet and every other rich person can just pay more in taxes.


But nope, deaddm wants to cut social security benefits so he supports a universal benefit cut on everyone born after 1960, and then makes up a pretend complaint about Warren buffet getting paid.

If you want to look at a real solution to fixing the welfare state it doesn't involve finding more places to impose cuts:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/pr ... are-state/

It involves lowering the retirement age back to 65, the same age as it is for other government programs and then creating a minimum social security allowance for everyone, including those whi have never paid in that is above the poverty line.

[MGuy]

Just going to say that no reason was given for why we should force people to work until they are older. It is implied that of course they should because people live longer but that doesn't tell me why I want people to work until they are older. Even if dead wasn't lying none of what he presented is a reason to push as many people as possible toward working even further into old age.

[Kaelik]

Looking around at a society were one hour of labor is like 30 times as productive as one hour of labor in 1935: What we really need to do is squeeze as much productivity out of people who are 69 years old as we can! What if we didn't get that extra hour of work from them!

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Also it is very good political instinct in the long term, for a liberal, to gloat about kicking voters in the nuts with higher retirement ages AND less jobs for the young, and only exclude the portion that is the very closest to dying.

This will surely ensure that young voters forming their political opinions will side with you and vote for you forever, and if they don't because you kicked them in the nuts instead of letting them enter the workforce, that's OK, the old people you kicked in the nuts are unthinkingly loyal, and if they don't vote for you either those few surviving 69 year olds you didn't kick in the nuts ARE SURELY IMMORTAL.

Liberals really need to work on their political instincts, and the ability to plan more than 5 years 1 year 6 months at all into the future.

[violence in the media]

This portion of the discussion reminds me of this engineer that I worked with for 15+ years. He finally retired at 80, and then died roughly 2 years later; about a year after his wife passed away. I think about him sometimes. There was no reason for him to have been here as long as he was; but I think this was just some place for him to go during the day and have something to do. But I also think about how, as a microcosm of larger society, he just took up space here for so long. We shouldn't be raising the retirement age, we should be enforcing it and compelling the people who refuse to retire to do so. Obviously, retirement should be sufficient that we aren't forcing them into poverty, but we're not doing ourselves any favors by not making way for younger workers to establish themselves and grow. I read articles and hear anecdotes about this in the trades. All the guys are getting old, and the knowledge and the workforce isn't being replaced. As Kaelik pointed out with the professor, and my aforementioned engineer coworker, it's even worse in knowledge-based jobs. A tradesperson will try not to work until they die; a professional sees no reason not to.

[Stahlseele]

Pensions are basically
"be poor now so you can be poor a few more years later"
because the wages today are not enough to make a decent living any more and we are still expected to put money away from that for later which will later not be enough to live on any more either because inflation keeps going up and up and up and there is no limit so even if you put in a good portion of your actual income, it will be worth fuck all when you actually need it.
that is why there was the housing bubble in the first place because people said:"nah fuck that, i want the security of not having to pay rent or mortgage when i do not have an income any more" and then inflation hit that market as well and it went pop.

[MGuy]

The reason there was/is a housing bubble is because of deregulation and the usual suspects that take advantage of deregulation/the market/etc deciding to create one. Pensions are tied to this very same markets but aren't the reason these bubbles keep popping up.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Also to the degree Pensions drive up housing prices it isn't by means of them being fundamentally inadequate because of inflation. Instead its because private pension funds are heavily financialized and sitting on vast pools of investment money which acts a lot like a mismanaged wrecking ball through basically all of the economy.

And again public pensions do not HAVE to work that way, but private ones pretty much DO, and when neoliberals like DeadDM advocated to destroy government run public pensions guess what they want to replace them with.

[Kaelik]

I mean mostly they want to replace it with starvation.

But also, Israel conducted a vast terrorist campaign to cause thousands of random explosions by infiltrating a supply chain and filling all the pagers of a specific make with bombs and then blowing up all those pagers whereever they were in Lebanon all at once.

This is another one of those things that if it didn't happen to brown people by white people would rightly be seen as a casus belli to invade and counquer Israel and also it's terrorist ally, the US.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I mean mostly they want to replace it with starvation.

You underestimate the evil. The over financialization of private pension funds does not exclude the starvation result. In fact it can and regularly does WORSEN the starvation result.

You are forced to hand your money to rich failsons to gamble and manipulate the market with, then they lose all your money and you have to starve.

I seriously have employed people who would have retired except exactly that happened to them.

My first experience with MY neoliberal forced private pension fund was having the entire fund bought by another fund which then started charging me huge fees AND losing money consistently on investment AND it instituted a GIGANTIC percentage of entire pension savings fee/penalty in order to transfer to any another fund that WASN'T just a front for straight up syphoning your pension savings.

Private pension funds under a neoliberal system are NOT a compromise solution for elder poverty, they are like everything else in a neoliberal system, raw ruthless capitalist rent seeking.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Oh yeah. And the pager thing, of course, had it been done TO Israel would be decried as the obvious terrorist act that it is and be used as an excuse to bomb...

*spins wheel*

...Egypt.

[Stahlseele]

Oh yeah. And the pager thing, of course, had it been done TO Israel would be decried as the obvious terrorist act that it is and be used as an excuse to bomb...

*spins wheel*

...Egypt.

Gives INFORMATION WARFARE a whole new meaning eh?

[MGuy]

What it shows is that Israel has reached cartoon villain levels of evil along with the Hitler level they've been on for a while. This is the kind of move that also implicates the supply chain around these devices and services. Whatever imagined secret Chinese tinkering people suspect is going on with tech, Israel is the one that has manifested the worst form of it. There is potentially spying on people vs these things being effectively bombs. There is a cost to committing these atrocities.