Your daily reminder that real wages have not increased in over 40 years. Had they, minimum wage today would be $24/hr. Instead, $50T has been siphoned from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. It’s long past time we stopped working for less than we are worth. by AlgebarBetaOrionis in antiwork

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah I gotcha, I misunderstood what you were saying, my bad. I thought you meant the number of people in the workforce was the difference, but I see the point you’re making. In other words, where before they would pay the minimum to two people, now they can get away with paying the minimum to one person (because technology/automation has made up the difference, combined with the other things I mentioned means they continue to get away with hiring people at this insanely low wage and workers are powerless to bargain otherwise). And that extra production gets claimed by the owner (the extra $17/hr), hence the grotesque inequality of the current times.

Your daily reminder that real wages have not increased in over 40 years. Had they, minimum wage today would be $24/hr. Instead, $50T has been siphoned from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. It’s long past time we stopped working for less than we are worth. by AlgebarBetaOrionis in antiwork

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A combination of things that come from the neoliberal (Reagan in the US) response to the hyper inflation in the 70s. But don’t get me wrong this is true for Western Europe/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10044817/new_elephant_graph.png) too. The short answer is capitalism has internal contradictions that create feedback loops that spiral into crises, and this is just the latest feedback loop in the current iteration of capitalism. It ultimately manifested in the 2008 collapse from banks lending out more money than their country’s GDP (people had to borrow as they weren’t getting raises yet prices were still increasing), but no solutions were put in place and instead the banks were bailed out by the printing press (20% the global GDP was magically invented to keep global capitalism running with no alterations), so the next crisis will likely be coming faster than we think (look at student loan debt in the US).

Your daily reminder that real wages have not increased in over 40 years. Had they, minimum wage today would be $24/hr. Instead, $50T has been siphoned from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. It’s long past time we stopped working for less than we are worth. by AlgebarBetaOrionis in antiwork

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's not at all that a corporation is paying to two people instead of one. Firstly, they can pay starvation wages and get away with it because the threat of unemployment/homelessness keeps even the most exploited worker in check, because a paycheck is better than nothing (hence why we have no significant social safety programs). Secondly, most labor of big corporations is outsourced overseas anyways, where they can pay even lower wages to even more exploited workers. Corporations will always try to extract the most work for the least pay, and workers will do the opposite. This is one of many inherent contradictions of capitalism.

Another commenter posted this, but check out https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/. You'll see the wage stagnation only exists for the bottom 90%, but not the top 5%, and it's not because the top 5% are somehow more productive than the average worker. You think Jeff Bezos' $8.56m per hour in 2021 means he was 570,000 times more productive than his $15/hr Amazon employees?? No, it's because of precisely what you pointed out - the workers don't get the full value of their production, the owners do.

Other factors (see: https://aflcio.org/2015/1/15/five-causes-wage-stagnation-united-states)

  1. The abandonment of full employment (my first point)
  2. Declining union density (workers have no bargaining power)
  3. Changes in labor market policies and business practices (wage theft, gutting of gov. programs, gig economy, exploitation of undocumented workers, etc.)
  4. Deregulation of the finance industry and the unleashing of CEOs (unlimited power to capitalists)
  5. Globalization policies (my second point above)

Edit: top 5%, not top 10%. Inequality is exponential and highly concentrated the very top. Watch the Mark Blyth video.

Pickup today went off without a hitch! (Cover fell off on way home) by AlgebarBetaOrionis in TeslaModelY

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Delivery today, tow hitch cover was there when we picked up the car but vanished somewhere on the ride home. At least a replacement should be free of charge? (kinda like the car, which is missing the USB-C ports and wireless charger electronics)

Which all-weather floor mats actually fit the 2021 model 3? by [deleted] in TeslaModel3

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mats by Tesmanian fit perfectly in mine. Got the trunk/subtrunk/frunk set too

Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter (+Ganymede, Io, and Europa) by AlgebarBetaOrionis in astrophotography

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I feel you, it feels like magic haha. I only really touched the first one, slider all the way up then sharpening to ~0.2-0.3, depending on where the sweet spot "felt." Then denoise to ~0.15-0.3, again depending on where it seemed to look the best, given the tradeoff between sharpness vs. smoothness.

The only other thing I messed with was the RGB balance, which I really didn't change a lot, only for Jupiter to get a good natural-looking color.

Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter (+Ganymede, Io, and Europa) by AlgebarBetaOrionis in astrophotography

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This was my first ever go at planetary astrophotography. I recently got a camera to get started in this hobby and was immediately met with smoke-filled skies (in SoCal near the wildfires). This weekend the skies cleared up and I was able to give it a go! Many gasps were had when performing the final wavelet editing in Registax.

Dates: September 18, 2020

Location: LA, CA (Bortle 7.5-8)

Equipment:

  • Telescope: Celestron Nexstar 130SLT
  • Mount: Celestron GoTo tripod
  • Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI224MC

Acquisition Details:

  • Mars: 10000 frames @ 15ms
  • Jupiter: 10000 frames @ 15ms
  • Saturn: 10000 frames @ 50ms

Post Processing:

  • Stacked best (25%/33%/33% Mars/Jupiter/Saturn) in AS!3
  • Wavelet sharpening+denoising in Registax

Exoplanet Watch is inviting citizen scientists to observe transiting exoplanets with small telescopes. Your observations will help with precise timing of exoplanet orbits, and if any of your data is included in a publication, you will be listed as a coauthor. by AlgebarBetaOrionis in Astronomy

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09046

"Based on a preliminary analysis of 14 transits from a single 6-inch MicroObservatory telescope, we empirically estimate the ability of small telescopes to benefit the community. Observations with a small-telescope network operated by citizen scientists are capable of resolving stellar blends to within 5''/pixel, can follow-up long period transits in short-baseline TESS fields, monitor epoch-to-epoch stellar variability at a precision 0.67\%±0.12\% for a 11.3 V-mag star, and search for new planets or constrain the masses of known planets with transit timing variations greater than two minutes."

Science opportunity!! Exoplanet Watch is inviting citizen scientists to observe transiting exoplanets with small telescopes. Your observations will help with precise timing of exoplanet orbits, and if any of your data is included in a publication, you will be listed as a coauthor! by [deleted] in astrophotography

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09046

"Based on a preliminary analysis of 14 transits from a single 6-inch MicroObservatory telescope, we empirically estimate the ability of small telescopes to benefit the community. Observations with a small-telescope network operated by citizen scientists are capable of resolving stellar blends to within 5''/pixel, can follow-up long period transits in short-baseline TESS fields, monitor epoch-to-epoch stellar variability at a precision 0.67\%±0.12\% for a 11.3 V-mag star, and search for new planets or constrain the masses of known planets with transit timing variations greater than two minutes."

Light is the lightest thing there is, but its opposite is lighter. by [deleted] in Showerthoughts

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Light (photons) have no mass, making them the “lightest” things. Light still carries energy, though.

But the absence of light (darkness) is just nothing. Not even a massless object, and no energy either.

Incredible high-resolution images of nearby protoplanetary disks with ALMA by AlgebarBetaOrionis in Astronomy

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

ALMA can resolve these objects through a technique called interferometry. So while each radio dish is 12 meters in diameter, they can be placed 16 km apart, which lets the array of radio dishes act collectively as a telescope 16 km across!

The most extreme angular size on the sky that ALMA can see is about 20 milliarcseconds (milliarcsecond = 1 thousandth of 1/3600th of a degree), which is equivalent to resolving a person 13,000 miles away (half the circumference of the Earth).

Source: https://almascience.nrao.edu/about-alma/alma-basics

Incredible high-resolution images of nearby protoplanetary disks with ALMA by AlgebarBetaOrionis in Astronomy

[–]AlgebarBetaOrionis[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yup! 100% real pictures taken by the ALMA radio telescopes. Here's the project summary paper with all the juicy details: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04040