GrafZahl

In my experience, engineering is mostly preoccupied with teaching centuries of knowledge to students, who are then supposed to be able to reproduce it. I don't think that's wrong either. All that stuff that past engineers and scientists figured out remains true and usefull. Most engineers will never have to do something that hasn't been done before. But reproducing the past doesn't really involve much critical thinking at all. Only once people get to the tippity top of their field, they'll have to start figuring things out for themselves. The smugness of STEM is 100% based on the pure economic value.

I used to wear blue shirts sometimes, and I did have a green bag at some point, so actually pretty close.

I guess that would depend on how much access you have to the financial records of the organization you work at. Most companys are pretty open about their net profit. It varies depending on the industry. In some industries, a profit rate of 5% is good. Others might be looking at 20%. If the company has a profit rate of 5%, AFAIK that means that: sales volume divided by total costs equals 1.05. That 5% goes directly to the companies coffers, and is then divided between the owners or set aside for future investments.

Now of course the costs of the company are not only your wages. If that was the case, the surplus would be exactly those 5% of your time. The company has other obligations. They might have to pay off a loan for some investment they made in the past. This applies to almost any company. To pay off the loan, they have to extract that value from their workers, and it is of course not part of the 5% profit in their books. Maybe another 5% of what you produe belongs to the bank. The banks have costs too, but not very much. The same goes for the rent of the office space or production hall you work in. 5% of your time might be devoted to paying the landlord for doing nothing at all really. The company (and yourself for that matter) will have to pay taxes as well. Depending on where you live, some of the taxes might be redistributed to your class in the form of infrastructure/education/healthcare or other public insurances. Some of the taxes are likely subsidies to private companies. You will have to refer to the government budget.

Those kinds of costs, the ones that are not directly inputs to the production process, are all extraction of surplus value. If you add those up, including the profit rate, you get a percentage. That percentage is the average time that the workers do not work for themselves, but for private profiteers.

If your company makes some sort of machined steel parts, you might need steel as an input. The costs include the price of the steel of course. But naturally, that price is included in the sales as well. The value of the steel is not relevant to your production process. Also, the office needs heating, the vehicles need gas, and there are a trillion other costs like this, which are of course passed on to the customer, but are not extracted from you.

Especially if you consider taxes, I think it's pretty clear that answering this question on an individual level is very subjective. Some working people do not want to pay for a public unemployment insurance, even though the money goes back to their class. Do you consider the money that the state extracts from you and redistributes to working class people "surplus vlaue"? Do you think that it should belong to you? Or do you think that maybe the extracted value can only be calculated on the level of class war? Or maybe you have a different answer altogehter.

This is my current understanding at least, I'm not sure it's all correct tho.

Women really shouldn't have longer hair than me, it's just unnatural.

I contributed to Hexbear with like 5 (five) subpar original memes. I am still waiting for someone to pay up. I suggest reinstituting downbears on a Pay-Per-Bear model, it's just econ 101.

They stop producing money and think they'll end up with more money

Oh no! Mathematicians and mechanics are natural enemies. It will never work :(

Mafia says Mamdani isn't socialist IG

Not sure what I'm supposed to do with that, seems like people on that thread are implying that people without a job should just starve or something

More gross should always mean more net, unless income is below full time minimum wage. Academics in finance or engineering don't become rich from income, but tend to have a relatively care-free life. Minimum wage means constant struggle to pay bills and survive.

I'm not very familiar with the benefits for families. If you're comparing two identical families, one with a lower income, and one with a higher income, the benfits and tax breaks should be mostly the same. Unless we're talking about the very lower end, with one family having no income or below full time minimum wage - when benefits are the largest part of the income, the wage will be less important. Depending on what numbers you put in, it's not unlikely that around 40% of a raise of gross income goes to social insurances and tax. It does depend on the exact tax class of each income earner and the tax bracket.

The tax system is a straight forward progressive tax. BUT net income is generally calculated after the deductions of social insurances, which are all calculated as % of income. Social insurances are usually more than the effective income tax, unless income is very high.

Between minimum wage (full time ~22k€ per year) and about 70k€ the tax rate and insurance cost goes up a lot, which reduces the difference in net income considerably. Below minimum wage (not in full time or whatever), benefits make up the difference in part. Above 70k, you reach the highest marginal tax rate (42%), and the social insurance costs are capped.

From my very small sample size the main factors why people leave the job are 1. unreliable shift plans (having to fill in often and on short notice) 2. not enough time to take care of the patients needs (in other words too many patients per nurse) 3. harassment by male patients. I was kind of surprised that pay was not a complaint, but the money is apparently not that bad.

But I guess instead of quitting, some people just murder their patients, or give them saline injections instead of covid vaccines.

When kids burned their math notebook at the end of the year, there were always some teachers/parents who made the point "that's like the book burnings the Nazis did".