Fact: you will never change someone's mind unless they want to change their mind.

So don't waste your time. But what you can do is listen to them when they are trying to change your mind.

I had this born-again christian friend and she would often try changing my mind to become born-again and those of you who know me know I will never become a born-again christian. I am quite content with my beliefs. I am a quasi-Buddhist, Spinoza kinda person, more is another story altogether.

Anyway, for years she badgered me to convert telling me I was going to hell and that I was wrong and Satan and his minions would take up residence in me... yada yada... then one day she told me she became a Buddhist.

Imagine my shock. All her badgering me to change actually made her change her mind.

I never tried to make her change her mind. I just lent her the occasional book about the Dalai Lama or Buddhism when she said she was interested.

I often wondered whether she was listening to all the stuff she told me and realized it didn't make sense. Her talking about it made her reprocess her beliefs?

I am an avid believer in just listening to people. I believe there is a grain of truth in everything if we but listen.

Another person decided he was going to call me every name under the sun because he was sure climate change wasn't real. So while he was using the ad homs I patiently explained to him what concerned me about climate change. We went back and forth for several days. Then finally he changed his mind. He became quite enthusiastic with me and tweeted my praises for a number of days. I was asked if I got an apology for the ad homs. I didn't care about the ad homs, but I was elated this guy listened to me.

A friend on facebook pasted this today: Sometimes I think the only thing that really divides us is the labels we give ourselves.

I think this is right. I know when I met one of my best friends I was terrified of him. He wanted to talk to me and I was afraid he was going to badger me telling me I was wrong because he defined himself as a libertarian. I avoided talking to him for quite awhile because of this. But he asked me questions and we soon found we had commonground and then we became friends.

The other thing we can do is pretend we already know what the other person is saying and never really hear them at all. One day I was listening to someone say something that I'd heard him say 100times at least and then I finally heard what he said.

Listening to what someone says is actually one of the most difficult things we can actually do. Two people describing themselves as GOP or Democrat or left or conservative can feel radically different about things despite using the same label.

So perhaps the first lesson in changing someone's mind is to ignore the labels and agree to listen to their point of view and then you will see who's mind needs changing.

People I know constantly say they want to get rid of the minimum wage because it supposedly is keeping unemployed people out of a job.

Sure reintroduce legal slavery, if you want. And it will bring back slavery, because people will make promises to pay and then disappear or write you bad checks when its time to pay. At least when there was legal slavery, the owner was obliged to feed, clothe and lodge you.

When union's sprung up, it was agreed that 40 hours of work should be enough to support yourself on. These days you need 2 full time jobs to support yourself. If the minimum wage was increased you'd be able to support yourself with one job and then employment would increase because then an unemployed person would be able to take your job to support him/herself with.

Businesses still need to employ enough people to serve their customers and the ludicrous picture you see around of workers being replaced by machines is silly. People still prefer talking to a person rather than a machine.

So there is some propaganda on minimum wage. Lets take a look at their example.

For a start the profit on a burger is ludicrous at only 10c. Profit margins are usually at least 100% and labour costs would be included into overhead. Also included in the overhead are things like rent, the costs of the raw materials, like the bun, meat, lettuce, cheese, whatever, electricity etc.

This article better explains profit margins and how they are calculated. You'll see that the profit margins on a $4 burger is more likely to be 165%. And that 10c for the burger is really going to pay the worker. Imagine paying only 5c more for your burger so the worker could get 15c per burger - omg!

So now in the mythical example in our propaganda piece on burger prices,

Al flips 100 burgers an hour, Bob 120 and Carl 90. So when the minimum wage goes up Carl gets the chop because the owner because the owner sees Carl as making a loss for him.

But who the hell is serving the customers if Carl loses his job? Who is cleaning the toilets and taking orders? Carl may not be the fastest flipper but the customers liked his timely service and hate now that Bob dribbles drool out of the corner of his mouth. The lines are now much longer and people start to think they'll use the burger joint down the road where Carl now works.

The ridiculous rejoinder at the end is Carl gets offered more to flip burgers down the road. Why would they employ Carl for more when they can pay someone the minimum wage to flip burgers? The rejoinder is ridiculous.

What we are seeing more and more is how much contempt businesses have for their employees, which really tells me how irrelevant their customers are to them. Their employees are the people who interface to the world and their customers. The business the corporation does is just away of leveraging stock-market prices, nothing more.

We know raising minimum wage doesn't make burgers more expensive from the Australian model. There is no tipping in Australia and the tax the burger attracts is hidden in the price so in the end the burgers cost the same, the only difference is the owner makes less profit. When you consider corporations like Walmart, McDonalds and Peets are making huge profits, does it matter if they make a little less profit to pay their staff more? Is that such a bad thing when the owner doesn't care about either us or their staff and only really care about making major profit margins, not the ludicrous profit margins used in this ridiculous video.

Recently I discovered the concept of Ubuntu (oo-boon-too, n.) means, "I am because we are." Ubuntu is a Zulu or Xhosa word, and a traditional African concept. It's a term for humaneness, for caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation.

When I first read about the concept, it came with the story of the anthropologist who asked children to see who could get to a basket of fruit or sweets first so the children all locked hands and ran together. The anthropologist asked why they didn't run separately and the children answered "How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?"

I have recently heard this is actually a hoax, but you see I don't care. Its a common enough theme both in Buddhism and specifically Tibetan Buddhism where the Dalai Lama, the human embodiment of Chenrezig, repeats similar themes over and over again.

I heard a zen story once where hell is this massive pot in the centre of the room and everyone has long handled spoons and everyone served themselves. In heaven it was exactly the same except each would help the others.

Before Obamacare if one of our friends lost their health insurance and 1000 of our friends went to complain about it, health insurance corporations would not dare drop any of us. We ignore our politicians instead of harassing them with our 1000 best friends. We need to gather into groups, the 1% do with citizens united, the think tanks they fund, their lobbyists, their politics, they went to school together, they grew up together, the 1% protect each other, they are in bed with govt, they are in bed with each other. They are tribal and we are their enemy. Our only purpose is to be manipulated to manipulate their stock prices.

The 1% care so little about us that they treat their workers so badly and these are the people that represent their business to us. We are just pawns in the game to them, they really only care about their stock prices, because this is what measures their wealth. How much they sell and what they well is pretty much irrelevant, its all about the perception of the worth of their stock.

The 1% have so manipulated us into never forming communities because they prefer us isolated and alone or at most in tiny groups. This was why they waged a massive campaign against unions. This is why they polluted the political system of 'communism', this is why they have employed so much behavioural psychology on us via the TV to make us buy stuff. The people on TV are a substitute for real people in our lives and TV is more convenient than walking into the next door neighbours or meet with other friends.

However the 1% do form groups and communities that we are not invited to. They have always been organizing. We must do so to.

What I think we must do is form broader unions of people, not just worker unions, but with students, ordinary citizens and as many possible groups. I am not interested in playing partisan politics. GOP/Dems are just to divide us really into camps, men v women, tribe v tribe. Enough. We have to stop treating each other like the enemy because that is exactly what the 1% want us to do. Yes I like Democrat politics more in general, but both parties support corporations.

All would be required are really numbers and possibly some time and commitment. I don't want it to cost much or anything if possible. I am sick to death of getting requests from rich politicians asking me to donate money. Money is not the bottom line, our humanity is.

This is how TV works, I think. We need each other desperately, so much so that a babies subconscious is pre-wired to recognize faces. This is an extraordinary amount of per-programming in our natal development.

Our subconscious probably can't tell the difference between real people and people on TV. The actors in movies/shows never look at the camera so they appear to our subconscious that they are ignoring us, but the people in ads often do look directly at the camera, so when people in ads tell us to buy something we pay attention and are more likely to do what they say.

My advice is if you feel lonely or depressed turn off your TV. If you are depressed watching people ignore you all day will not help you. I suggest you go help a real person. We desperately need each other, both to feel useful and needed. Taking drugs to help with your depression won't help anyone but the pharmaceutical corporation.

TV is nothing but intravenous corporatist propaganda, please avoid it as much as possible.