Depository for off topic / political posts (NO brexit related posts please)

Peter wrote:

This is pure left/right wing politics. It’s pointless.

One last comment from me, too. There are, indeed, different values and ideologies underlying left and right wing policies, i.e. what society do we want. But the question of social mobility vs. income equality has nothing do to with ideologies. Just define “social mobility” and “income equality” and any (non)correlation between the two will be an empirical fact. (Whether you like that fact or not may very well depend on your ideology, though. )

The reason this is an intractable debate is that everybody will adjust the definitions to suit their views and ambitions.

Also, obviously, hard working people don’t want income equality anyway. That alone will always polarise things. Anybody who is starting or running a business absolutely does not want income equality – otherwise why bother to work extra?

And the majority of pilots are hard working people. They need to be! Come to a EuroGA fly-in and you meet all sorts, but professional/business people are pretty heavily represented among those who actually turn up. Even if the fly-in is to a place which is easy to get to for many, we still see the same pattern. That is GA.

And the hard working people are least likely to spend a lot of time on pilot forums. They merely close their browser tab when they see threads going off topic like this, and many disappear for ever.

“Income equality” in the sense it was used in this discussion does NOT mean that everybody should earn the same.

It means that the chances should be the same (equal) and that the pay should be fair. Just this morning I listened to a documentary from Bangladesh and I held my breath when the company owner of a textile firm (who likes to land his helicopter on top of his factory) explained that his typical worker can live “very well” from the $ 30 they make … per month … and that they can even “save some money for a car or a house”, because “life is so cheap in Bangladesh” and “because Muslims don’t drink or gamble”. (that’s really what he said).

Or take the $ 200 MN income of the Disney CEO (some years ago, 53 mn today) who let women in Honduras make their T-Shirts for 23 cents per hour. You do not have to be a communist to not like these things. Just a human beeing with values.

“Parental income is a better predictor of a child’s future in America than in much of Europe, implying that social mobility is less powerful. Different groups of Americans have different levels of opportunity. Those born to the middle class have about an equal chance of moving up or down the income ladder, according to the Economic Mobility Project. But those born to black middle-class families are much more likely than their white counterparts to fall in rank. The children of the rich and poor, meanwhile, are less mobile than the middle class’s. More than 40% of those Americans born in the bottom quintile remain stuck there as adults.” The Economist

The point as I indicated ealier is there are a number of factors that combine and it is doubtful if it is black or white.

Peter wrote:

And the hard working people are least likely to spend a lot of time on pilot forums. They merely close their browser tab when they see threads going off topic like this, and many disappear for ever.

Agreed, I like browsing between one section of work and another becasue the discussions are always interesting and this may be true of a few others working away at their desks but I prefer to see the debate remaining essentially on topic otherwise the interest diminishes.

The relevance to GA is 0.0000000, Alexis.

I can think of certain very good contributors who left, blaming the large quantity of your off topic posts.

To me the relevance is that Pilots are human beeings who (sometimes) like to discuss other things, that interest them.

But please, feel free to delete anything I write. Not a problem.

Peter wrote:

The relevance to GA is 0.0000000, Alexis.

Not entirely true. On my frequent visits to EDVE I can often admire the shiny Global Express – a GA plane! flown by GA pilots! – belonging to a textile company that does exactly that: Use slave labor (real hard working people – not some property brokers who work “hard” by sitting in their office for ten hours making phone calls) in some third world countries so that the owner can travel in style and luxury. One really must not be a communist to find this kind of business model disgusting – even if some well paid jobs in GA and in aircraft manufacturing depend on it.

It all depends on the volume of these posts.

Nobody cares about the odd one or two.

I have a customer who owns a bizjet while shafting small company suppliers into 120 day payment terms, but I don’t moan about it on here.

LeSving wrote:

In the USA nowadays, the average working class person have to have 2 or 3 jobs just to make the ends meet.

That’s funny, and it makes me think of a good friend who works as a audiovisual technician at a local hospital, and whose wife is a newly retired university secretary. They have three planes and a hangar to keep them, also with living quarters upstairs (for weekends) and a large shop. They had four but the J-3 restoration was finished, flown and sold. He’s also an A&P. Come in winter and I’ll show you.

The Ford Model T made cars available to everyone, circa 1920, about 15 million built and sold before 1927.