I wonder... do you think the Foxxconn suicide rate will go down now ? Or do you think the execs of that evil company can even drive robots to suicidal depression ?
You've got cause and effect backwards. As fast food companies have been depressing wages (paying minimum wage which was stagnant while inflation wasn't) - the quality of people they can actually GET for that money has gone done. With each year, as the wage gets worth less - the level of idiot that can get something better goes up. It's a classic peanuts and monkeys problem. What's worse is that, as working conditions (of which pay is a major part) decline, worker turn-over goes up. You get fewer and fewer lifers, people have barely mastered the job and they move on to somewhere else. When you pay so little, competing with you for workers is also cheap. Plenty of restaurants figure out that paying 2c an hour more than you, they can steal all your best workers and still end up paying less in total since YOU paid for their basic training - giving them that nudge more to lift them up to the level of a slightly better restaurant is a lot cheaper when the basics were already paid for by you.
Now you would think this would incentivize MickeyD's to pay more, but there's two other forces at play. The first is shortsightedness. The wage bill every month is much more immediately visible than the total cost of labor turn-over per annum so the latter can often be underestimated by people whose jobs depend on the profits for the four months in the next quarterly report. The other is supply and demand. When there are so many people ready to step into a job as soon as it's vacated, having all your best workers poached doesn't appear to be a crisis because you're never short-staffed.
So of course, the service level your customers get goes down - but lets face it nobody goes to mcdonalds for the service anymore than they do for the food - they go there for speed and predictably getting a full stomach. Service declining is a small enough influence in customer decisions (those who would avoid mcd's over service have been avoiding it over crap food for decades anyway) that it doesn't matter.
But yeah - you got the cause and effect reversed. If anything, increasing the minimum wage will likely improve the service quality at your local mcd's significantly by slowing down turn-over and making it more expensive to poach any worker there who is actually good at the job.
>. To the average working class American, a price increase of that magnitude would make a McDonalds meal a rare luxury
Which is what it OUGHT to be and maybe if Americans figure that out, you wouldn't have such a major obesity problem anymore. Are you people allergic to the idea of a homecooked meal? People eating junk food because they don't have enough hours in the day from working 2 jobs with a 4 hour commute to somewhere they can afford to live may legitimately be able to say it's not practical, but the answer is not to make the junk food cheap - it's to make their income reflect hte actual profits it generates so that they can actually afford to work one job, get a car, and get home in time to cook food for themselves and their children.
You know, like on a stove. Homecooking will always be healthier, safer, and far far cheaper than any other alternative.
>who are no longer able to work their way through college can still afford to get the education
That is already everybody. In 1960 a person could pay a year's tuition at yale for just over 250 hours of work at minimum wage level. It was certainly possible to work enough hours in a year to be able to eat, wear clothes and cover other essentials and pay your tuition when only 250 hours were needed for tuition.
Today, tuition *alone* is more than the total number of working hours in a year - and that's before you subtract time to sleep, let alone time to actually go to classes and study for exams. It's not possible to work your way through college anymore, so nobody does. They all do it by going massively into debt, and a job if held is purely to provide pocket money while studying. People now work for college AFTER graduating, indeed for the next decade at least.
That trend is global actually. Study after study have confirmed that moderate increases in minimum wage have a nett-zero impact on employment rates. A few studies suggest a very, very minor *increase* in employment following them, but this is not happening enough, or to a sufficient degree, that we can rule it out as pure chance. If there is any truth to it the likely mechanism is that the small increase in spending power at the bottom of the income ladder creates an increase in demand, which new businesses arise to supply - and they employ people.
The main reason the predicted increase in inflation does not happen is because the potential profits from selling to all the people from all the companies earning the slightly higher wage far exceeds the potential increase in profit from raising prices to recoup the expense of paying your own (which would price you right back out of their range).
It's better to sell 50000 items at a 1c margine than 500 items at a 1$ margine.
>Very few people will need to work, but some number will want to work.
I actually think that number is higher than most people think. There's a reason hobby-shops is a multi-billion dollar global industry. People hate to be bored. The moment all basic needs are met (hobby shops cater to the middle class), free time is not long spent idly, people want to feel creative, they want to make something - even if what they make cannot be commercially sold, they do it for the love of creation. Lots of home-crafting skills that were all but lost as clothes got cheaper has seen a massive resurgence (knitting and crochet for example) in recent years, because even though you cannot possibly hand knit a sweater for the price of a factory made one - there's a joy and a value in creating a sweater with your hands. Similar trends even reach into high-tek - look at the maker movement, 3D-printing and the like.
Hell, have you ever seen a cosplayer show up with a commercially made costume ? Half the skill is handmaking everything and cosplay groups have maker-space like training sessions where members teach each other to work with various materials and what can be done with them.
The entire FOSS software space is critically dependent (and has been for decades) on the multitude of people who, after working all day, will get home and keep writing code just because they enjoy it and love getting to write code THEY chose to write for a purpose of their own choosing - not tied to some corporate bottom line.
The vast majority of people are never slackers for long, because we have an innate drive to be creative, that drive is what took us from hunter-gatherer into civilization and has driven progress for over 10-thousand years. It's not going to dissapear just because need gets removed, on the contrary, it will hugely expand. Historically - the greatest creative endeavours have not been driven by need but the absence of need. We achieve our greatest progress when needs are met. The driving force of all progress is boredom.
One of the earliest examples happened some ten-thousand years ago in the fertile crescent. The ruins we dig up there have grain stores - because farming had gotten good enough that our ancestors were producing excess food that needed to be stored. So nobody ever needed to be hungry... and then we see on those ruins something never seen anywhere earlier: the walls are plastered. Plastering walls have zero practical benefits, it's purely an aesthetic thing - and it's an expensive thing. To make limestone plaster you need to keep a fire going at high heat for many, many days. It's a lot of labor for something that contributes nothing to your chances of survival. So it never happened until there was a community that had achieved near perfect food security with very minimal effort. But the story doesn't end there. To keep those fires going to bake the limestone into plaster... they had to get good at controlling fire to a level never before achieved. Very high heat over extended periods, entirely new fire-management techniques were developed to pursue this "useless" creative endeavor. The same techniques that, not long afterwards, would allow humans to build smelters and turn the stone age into the bronze age (and later the iron and steel ages). The things we do when we are bored, even the useless things, are when we make the discoveries that will lift us up to the next level of progress in the near future. Maybe for every person who figures out a fire-management technique that will eventually drive smelting a thousand pursued something long forgotten that had no future uses, but that's an acceptable loss - because we NEED the firemaker, even if we have to carry a thousand other people to get him and there is no way to tell him apart from the others until centuries later.
There are other cases where that gets subverted however. McDonalds historically upon entering any country would put all local franchise fast-food businesses out of businesses very soon. In South Africa though, that did not happen. In fact, after about ten years the McDonalds corporation decided that South Africa will never be nearly as profitable a market as any of their other countries, and sold the local right to sell franchises to a local company under condition that they keep complying with McDonalds branding and the like. Basically McDonalds South Africa is not owned by the McD corporation at all, they simply have a trademark license with conditions.
The reason was - South Africa already had well established nationwide franchises (notably Nandos and Steers) which sold much better quality food with only slightly longer waits and for lower prices. So very soon the novelty of the new American company wore off and everybody who wanted a burger went to Steers instead where you would get a decent real-meat patty on a proper bun with a giant helping of nicely sized portion of chips (not those horrible, hard-boild stick things McDonalds sells) for rather less. Nearly everybody thought the 10 minute extra wait was bloody well worth it because it really was only ten minutes and the food actually tasted good.
Lots of small individual restaurants couldn't hold up to the onslaught anywhere -they simply lacked the funds to ride out the first few years of everybody grabbing mickey d's because it's quick and novel and has a massive marketing budget. But the franchises could, and because their quality was better, they not only survived but ultimately pushed mickey-D's into a niche for people who want some very fast hunger ending at 3am. There's money to be made in that niche, and they are marking it, but it's hardly a dominant position.
Ironically, it's not like McDonalds has ever even BEEN a food company. Ray Koch has given multiple talks in which he spelled it out: McDonald's is a property company. The whole restaurant schtick was just a way of acquiring valuable corner properties right outside city CBDs which would be IN those CBDs a few years later. McDonalds makes far more from renting out the properties where a restaurant stood decades ago than they have ever made from selling food. Hell the main corporation doesn't even sell any food at all. They sell franchises, and they allow you to buy one by signing over the deed for the place where the restaurant will go and paying the bond on the property. That's how they acquired such a massive supply of valuable properties. To quote Koch himself: "Every person I've ever met can make a better burger than McDonalds, but none of them are as rich as me, because McDonalds is not a company that makes money from selling burgers".
One side effect is that anything the McDonald's corporation says about labor should be treated as bullshit since they are not in a labor intensive industry at all - they are landlords. The franchise owners care about labor costs, but they are not part of the corporation and the corporation decidedly does not speak for them - they are merely tools the corporation uses to acquire more land.
McDonalds corporation has consistently insisted on that seperation when it came to any and all forms of liability. The case a few years ago in New York where thousands of workers were cheated out of their paychecks by outright fraud (altering their timesheets to lie about how much they worked) ended up having to be pursued against individual franchise owners as the corporation denied any involvement in the management of the franchises nor any liability for anything they do. Different courts have shown different levels of agreement with that argument (the famous coffee case - which everybody knows only the bullshit corporate-spin version off that has no resemblance to reality at all found the corporation liable for the fuckup at a particular franchise, most cases have not).
The irony is that the only reason this is even an issue is because, for some truly mindblowingly idiotic reason, minimum wage was not tied to inflation in the first place. If it had increased by the inflation rate every year since first instated - it would be at a decent rate today, with no risk of shocks to avoid in the first place.
Tech only gets cheaper. No matter what the minimum wage is, hell even if we bring back slavery and make it zero, sooner or later the robots would be cheaper than the workers. Companies around the world use the "we will automate" argument to suppress wages, but it's a bullshit argument because there is no way to escape the threat in it. They are GOING to automate everything that can be automated. At most the minimum wage change may accelerate it a little... so what ?
There is only two possible outcomes. 1) The one that has always happened in history repeats and the automation actually creates MORE jobs throughout the economy than it absorbs, including many new minimum wage jobs, the workers would then still benefit from the higher minimum wage (as would everybody else since taxpayers no longer have to subsidize company's wage bills by having workers that still need welfare to live). 2) This becomes the automation that changes the historical pattern, job after job dissapears - and we enter a world where everything can be and is automated. When that happens we will have to rethink the entire concept of wages and earning a living anyway. For starters, if we don't, all the rich people starve too - nobody will buy your products if nobody has money. The evidence suggests we're headed to that outcome, getting there a little faster or slower isn't going to change the scale of the transition. If that is where we go, then if anything, it happening a little faster may actually give it the force to overcome the legendary inertia of governments and conservatives (the ones who believe living must be 'earned' as a moral thing) a bit quicker and actually decrease the collateral damage as we figure out how to live in this new kind of world and economy.
Either way - the threat lacks substance, you can't make an efficient threat unless you offer the person you are threatening a way to avoid the outcome. Merely offering to postpone it a bit won't change anybody's minds (and it shouldn't, it's utterly irrational to change your mind based on a promise to postpone rather than prevent a bad thing).
Yes cronyism is the future tense of unfettered capitalism. The one inevitably degenerates into the latter. To prevent it you need actively enforced regulations with real bite that outlaw ever giving money to a politician (for example), restrict mergers that would lead to monopolies, punish collusion and protect consumers. In other words to prevent capitalism from becoming cronyism it has to be fettered capitalism. Conveniently it also makes government less corrupt by removing legalized bribery so any politician who takes money can be presumed to be acting against citizens interest and jailed.
Only if those plants you mention never die and never decompose. Otherwise, eventually, all that carbon gets put right back. Not all of it goes back the short way (some goes into ash and such - but those also break down over time).
Even if that wasn't true, your statement doesn't help. There simply isn't enough land left to achieve the goals you stated. How many American families have a yard big enough to have an acre-sized lawn these days ? There are 350 million Americans, If a typical family is four people. You would need 87-million acres of grass to achieve your goal, and since grass dies and decomposes you actually would need a great deal more to even just slow DOWN the rise in CO2 levels.
Using plants to counteract fossil fuels is just no practical on any level. You would actually do a great deal better if you planted those plants and just burned them yourself INSTEAD of fossil fuels. That at least is a nett-zero process.
>"plants are carbon neutral" Because they are. All living processes are. It took lots of evolution to achieve that. And because, if they were not, the atmosphere's composition could not possibly look like it does - because the one time in history when one part of some plants were not eaten - it made the atmosphere look VERY different.
> "all plants get eaten" Decomposition happens when things eat corpses. It's not just all plants either - it's all living things. Everything is something else's food sooner or later. Even humans.
>contradictory statements There is nothing contradictory in those statements, in fact they are two descriptions of the exact same process.
>animals/organisms who do the eating and decomposition do not have to be "immortal", for carbon that got removed from atmosphere by plants to remain removed. Yep, they would have to be, otherwise - they would burn the carbon and breath out CO2 to power their life processes. And when they die, the things that eat THEM would burn the rest. Whatever bits they in turn store, gets burned when it's their turn to be eaten. You can't breath out more CO2 than the carbon you've consumed, it will always be a little bit less, the little bit is the carbon used to grow new cells in your body - which gets burned when you decompose. It doesn't always happen instantly, but it happens so damn close to always that the rare exception where you got burried in a peat bogg or mummified simply isn't statistically significant enough to change the outcome.
>use logic, if you can. That's funny... since you clearly cannot. Again - think. What would happen if the natural carbon oxygen cycle was not nett-zero ? If either plants or animals were out of balance to any significant degree ? The composition of the atmosphere would change radically. Just like it did the last time an organism was not carbon neutral. Much more radically, in fact, than we are doing with burning of fossil fuels - but we are watching that changing the composition of the atmosphere. We're watching the CO2 levels go up - fast. If anything is not carbon neutral, the atmosphere changes to adapt. When the first plants appeared, there were not oxygen breathing, carbon eating animals yet. And thus they were not carbon neutral, the atmospheric oxygen level skyrockted (coincidentally causing the extinction of every species of animal that DID exist at the time). Before you knew it 21% of the atmosphere was oxygen - up from less than 2. Much later when trees evolved and nothing yet had the ability to digest wood - it doubled the atmospheric oxygen content. It didn't return to it's normal level of 21% until much later when bacteria evolved that could eat wood.
You can't look at single organisms in isolation. You can't look at a plant and say "This plant absorbs CO2 and releases oxygen ergo it is a nett oxygen producer". That's not how it works. You have to look at ALL organisms and how they interact... and the conclusion is that living processes end up cancelling each other out exactly. Animals and plants end up being as close to perfectly balanced as makes no difference - and fundamentally the evidence for this is that for the vast majority of time the composition of the atmosphere is stable and any deviations have anorganic sources. The atmosphere did not start gaining CO2 before we started burning fossil fuels. Yet we've been burning things for thousands of years. But burning WOOD is carbon NEUTRAL. Before coal and oil, we were just doing what the bacteria would have done anyway, only a little bit faster.
>- blind chance is not irrational given that there is no cost attached to it since there is no goal to be achieved.
Rationality has nothing to do with the cost OR the goal. These things have literally no connection to rationality - and all goals are, by definition, emotional anyway. Rationality is about the method, not the goal. It describes a way of thinking. It's about the HOW not the WHY. The WHY has nothing to do with rationality and can never BE rational. Being rational is a description of HOW you do something. Blind Chance can NEVER be a rational approach since the rational approach is not blind chance. Rationality does require you to HAVE a goal (so first strike against evolution being rational), but it has nothing to do with how that goal is selected. Rationality is what gave us the scientific method. Rationality is what gave us Aristotle's laws of logic. Rational thinking has RULES. If you break those rules, you are not rational. It's a PROCESS, nothing more and nothing less.
>There is no such thing as 'subverting evolution', by the way In the context I used the phrase, yes there is, and your counterargument does not apply to that context in any way at all.
Blind chance is so far from rational... rationality is a human trait defined by critical skepticism, trust in evidence and the pursuit of knowledge. We are terrible at it by the way. But we alone have any at all. And we didnt get it from evolution. If anything we got it by subverting evolution and taking brain functions evolved for a very different set of principles and using them for jobs they are only barely capable off (but thats still more than anything else has done). Evolution gave us fight-or-flight. But rationally evaluating risks gives far better results. The two almost never agree on what response a situation demands.
There is nothing rational about evolved responses. In fact they are as far from rational as anything can ever be. Evolution gave us a foodway that crosses our airway - a monumentally stupid design. And left it because when every other animal has the same problem its not a competitive disadvantage. But no halfway competent engineer would have done it that idiotically. Evolution is a lot of things but it is decidedly not rational. Unless you think "build a million random designs and keep whatever works" is a rational design process.
All plants get eaten. Wtf do you think decomposition is ? And eating does not trap the carbon either. Your socalled counterargument only works if all animals are immortal. You want to know what happens when plants are not eaten and thus are not carbon neutral ? You get those 3ft arachnids. We know because thats exactly what happened in the carboniferous period. Trees evolved but nothing had evolved to eat wood yet. All the carbon the trees absorbed got burried instead. In fact the fossil fuels we burn now are mostly the copses of those trees. And the oxygen level of the atmosphere was over 40% which is why giant invertibrates could exist.
That was just tremo and only the woody parts at that. Imagine if all plants produced a nett positive oxygen and negative carbon effect. We would have an oxygen saturation greater than nitrogen is now (71%) and spiders the size of rhinos.
The natural tree is NOT better than the water tower.
It is, however, much rarer (and only getting moreso) while being impossible to replace. We simply do not have the capacity to plant a forrest that's anything like the forrests we cut down, we probably never will, there are too many forces at work which cannot be controlled.
So it's not BETTER, but it IS more valuable, because of simple matters of supply and demand.
As man-made expanded, less and less natural things remained, thus their value went up as the supply dwindled. Until we started protecting the bits that remain lest we have none left whatsoever. This was simply the law being pushed by the market forces of supply and demand to protect a commons which was rapidly being destroyed before there was none left. Because, see, some people can profit from the destruction, at a loss to everybody else. Sooner or later you reach a point where letting them do so is no longer worth it. As they destroy more and more, less and less is left and so the cost for every next bit goes up. Eventually the cost outweighs the benefits and society stops being willing to pay it.
The question is not "is a natural tree better than a man-made water tower". The question is: "Is THIS tree worth more to humanity, including in things that are hard to measure with money, than NOT having THIS tree". And it's important to ask the question about "humanity" and not "me". Because all of nature ends up being treated by the economy as a commons, subject to the tragedy OF the commons - unless you somehow prevent that. There's a reason we call that process the TRAGEDY of the commons - because that which is lost by all when it happens is worth so much more than the profits made by the people who benefit from it. So there is a logical and rational point where it makes sense to stop those selfish few from further exploiting the commons so that some will be left for everybody else.
Historically there is only one way to stop the tragedy of the commons: harshly enforced laws to manage access to it. Rightwingers will claim its "privatising" but, in fact, this does NOT prevent the tragedy of the commons - it IS the tragedy of the commons in another form. The tragedy of the commons is not the "loss of the resource" it is "the loss of the resources by the many". Privatising the resource preserves the remainder of the resource for the use by a small few, who may or may not let some others access it for money (which not everybody has). That is already the tragedy.
It would not BE a tragedy if the loss to the many was not greater than the gains by the few.
The greatest scam of the 20th century was convincing people that selfishness is rationality. This is just flagrantly wrong. From the start of the enlightenment rationality was the driving force- but no enlightenment thinker would be so stupid as to think that rationality means not considering emotional considerations and certainly not dismissing considerations like empathy or caring about other people.
In fact, quite the opposite. Not acting with empathy, not caring about other lives is absolutely IRRATIONAL thinking. It's flagrantly NOT rational. See contrary to what the Randians like to claim - there is not nor can there ever be such a thing as a rational motivation. Motivations, by definition, are emotions - hence ALL motivations are NOT rational. Rationality is not useful in the least for selecting motivations - in the same way you probably shouldn't ask a fish to select between two baloon designs - it has absolutely no useful reference frame to compare them. Selfishness and greed are not rational motivations - they are emotions. Pretending they are not emotions is a deceit intended to make them look more acceptable compared to other motivations like compassion. But there is no truth to that, compassion is an emotional motivation, greed is an emotional motivation. They are both nothing but emotions. Rationality has nothing to do with either. Rationality is a tool which greatly improves your odds of actually achieving your motivation, but it can never define what your motivations are nor can it select between them because it is utterly incapable of understanding anything about the concept of "motivations" since all motivations are emotions - the one thing that rationality can never be.
The closest overlap comes in working out how pursuing different motivations is likely to affect yourself - and since it will always and invariably harm yourself not to care about others (even if most people do not realize this), it is therefore utterly irrational to pursue those motivations.
You seem to be using a couple of standard tropes as your argument - all of which are false.
>Here's the problem: our temperatures aren't at the high end of the projections. Instead, they're at the bottom end. Yes, the Earth has gotten warmer, but not nearly to the extent the models have already projected. False claim, long since debunked and fully disproven. There was never a "gap" in warming. Just a lie based on a deliberately trying to deceive people.
>If the models aren't accurately predicting our temperatures now, why should we believe their predictions for farther in the future? Because it's EASIER to predict the longer the timeframe. Nevermind that your claims are false, they wouldn't support this assertion anyway. That's how averages work - the larger the dataset becomes, the more accurate your predictions becomes and the easier it is to make accurate predictions. In climate - the timeframe is the dataset you're averaging over. Predicting the temperature tomorrow is difficult and we often get it wrong. Predicting the average temperature for a year is easer and we're usually pretty close. Predicting it for a decade is even easier and we're usually much closer. Over a century, it becomes almost ridiculously simple.
Let me explain by analogy to another example of this problem. J. is a highschool senior, please predict J's final grades. Well obviously that's just guess work, I didn't give you any information that is really helpful. if you get any right it would be sheer dumb luck. I didn't even tell you what subjects J are taking. Okay, so I give you some more information - I tell you J stands for Janice and give you her entire academic record. Now you have a lot of data on this person - can you predict her final grades ? Actually you will probably get several of them pretty close. She may surprize you though. It's not that unusual for somebody to get a wake-up call in senior year and raise their grades several points after all. At this point, it's hard, but doable - and your odds are pretty good.
Now I say to you: please predict the average grade distribution for all seniors finishing high school this year. Suddenly it becomes ridiculous easy. It will be a typical normal distribution. It is ALWAYS a normal distribution. We are SO certain of that, that if any school does NOT follow a normal distribution that is considered legal proof that there was cheating in the exams ! The average is infinitely easier than the specific, and the larger the sample you are averaging, the easier it gets. That's how climate works too. Predicting what will happen to the average temperature over the next 100 years is a LOT easier than predicting what will happen over the next 2 days.
Not to mention: it is incredibly unlikely that we could survive in Dinosaur climates - or they in ours. Plenty of things have existed in the past which could not possibly exist now. In the Carboniferous we had dragonflies with 1m wingspans. That could not possibly exist today - because their booklungs are just not efficient enough to get enough oxygen for a body that big in a climate where the oxygen concentration is around 21%, when they lived it was more like 40% - nearly twice what it is now. But - chances are - we could not have survived then anymore than they could survive now (for different reasons).
Oh, he apparently doesn't know that plastics are made from fossil fuels. I suppose you could argue that making them into plastics prevent them from getting into the air in the first place, and plastics have their pro-side in terms of nature (we use a lot less wood because plastic is cheaper so we cut down less trees for wood - now we cut them down for grazing land instead) - but they are also non-biodegradeable and end up causing a whole host of other problems.
Asphalt for roads is a better form of carbon sequestration - especially if you then use an EV or a bicycle on the road. The trouble however is that small scale sequestering projects simply cannot compete with the level of CO2 production and arguably never can. To actually sequester as much as we burn, while most of our energy is fossil fuel based, we would need to use ALL that energy AND a bunch more to do the sequestering with - it's actually cheaper to just use non-CO2 emitting energy sources in the first place.
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>What is their definition of 'adult'? Over 18?
The mean age of fast food workers in the USA is 29... which means a helluva lot of those people are in their 30's and 40's.
That's what they mean by "adults".
So hooters jobs are safe then.
Good to know...
I wonder... do you think the Foxxconn suicide rate will go down now ? Or do you think the execs of that evil company can even drive robots to suicidal depression ?
You've got cause and effect backwards. As fast food companies have been depressing wages (paying minimum wage which was stagnant while inflation wasn't) - the quality of people they can actually GET for that money has gone done. With each year, as the wage gets worth less - the level of idiot that can get something better goes up.
It's a classic peanuts and monkeys problem.
What's worse is that, as working conditions (of which pay is a major part) decline, worker turn-over goes up. You get fewer and fewer lifers, people have barely mastered the job and they move on to somewhere else. When you pay so little, competing with you for workers is also cheap. Plenty of restaurants figure out that paying 2c an hour more than you, they can steal all your best workers and still end up paying less in total since YOU paid for their basic training - giving them that nudge more to lift them up to the level of a slightly better restaurant is a lot cheaper when the basics were already paid for by you.
Now you would think this would incentivize MickeyD's to pay more, but there's two other forces at play. The first is shortsightedness. The wage bill every month is much more immediately visible than the total cost of labor turn-over per annum so the latter can often be underestimated by people whose jobs depend on the profits for the four months in the next quarterly report. The other is supply and demand. When there are so many people ready to step into a job as soon as it's vacated, having all your best workers poached doesn't appear to be a crisis because you're never short-staffed.
So of course, the service level your customers get goes down - but lets face it nobody goes to mcdonalds for the service anymore than they do for the food - they go there for speed and predictably getting a full stomach. Service declining is a small enough influence in customer decisions (those who would avoid mcd's over service have been avoiding it over crap food for decades anyway) that it doesn't matter.
But yeah - you got the cause and effect reversed. If anything, increasing the minimum wage will likely improve the service quality at your local mcd's significantly by slowing down turn-over and making it more expensive to poach any worker there who is actually good at the job.
>. To the average working class American, a price increase of that magnitude would make a McDonalds meal a rare luxury
Which is what it OUGHT to be and maybe if Americans figure that out, you wouldn't have such a major obesity problem anymore. Are you people allergic to the idea of a homecooked meal? People eating junk food because they don't have enough hours in the day from working 2 jobs with a 4 hour commute to somewhere they can afford to live may legitimately be able to say it's not practical, but the answer is not to make the junk food cheap - it's to make their income reflect hte actual profits it generates so that they can actually afford to work one job, get a car, and get home in time to cook food for themselves and their children.
You know, like on a stove. Homecooking will always be healthier, safer, and far far cheaper than any other alternative.
>who are no longer able to work their way through college can still afford to get the education
That is already everybody. In 1960 a person could pay a year's tuition at yale for just over 250 hours of work at minimum wage level. It was certainly possible to work enough hours in a year to be able to eat, wear clothes and cover other essentials and pay your tuition when only 250 hours were needed for tuition.
Today, tuition *alone* is more than the total number of working hours in a year - and that's before you subtract time to sleep, let alone time to actually go to classes and study for exams.
It's not possible to work your way through college anymore, so nobody does. They all do it by going massively into debt, and a job if held is purely to provide pocket money while studying.
People now work for college AFTER graduating, indeed for the next decade at least.
That trend is global actually. Study after study have confirmed that moderate increases in minimum wage have a nett-zero impact on employment rates. A few studies suggest a very, very minor *increase* in employment following them, but this is not happening enough, or to a sufficient degree, that we can rule it out as pure chance. If there is any truth to it the likely mechanism is that the small increase in spending power at the bottom of the income ladder creates an increase in demand, which new businesses arise to supply - and they employ people.
The main reason the predicted increase in inflation does not happen is because the potential profits from selling to all the people from all the companies earning the slightly higher wage far exceeds the potential increase in profit from raising prices to recoup the expense of paying your own (which would price you right back out of their range).
It's better to sell 50000 items at a 1c margine than 500 items at a 1$ margine.
>Very few people will need to work, but some number will want to work.
I actually think that number is higher than most people think. There's a reason hobby-shops is a multi-billion dollar global industry. People hate to be bored. The moment all basic needs are met (hobby shops cater to the middle class), free time is not long spent idly, people want to feel creative, they want to make something - even if what they make cannot be commercially sold, they do it for the love of creation.
Lots of home-crafting skills that were all but lost as clothes got cheaper has seen a massive resurgence (knitting and crochet for example) in recent years, because even though you cannot possibly hand knit a sweater for the price of a factory made one - there's a joy and a value in creating a sweater with your hands.
Similar trends even reach into high-tek - look at the maker movement, 3D-printing and the like.
Hell, have you ever seen a cosplayer show up with a commercially made costume ? Half the skill is handmaking everything and cosplay groups have maker-space like training sessions where members teach each other to work with various materials and what can be done with them.
The entire FOSS software space is critically dependent (and has been for decades) on the multitude of people who, after working all day, will get home and keep writing code just because they enjoy it and love getting to write code THEY chose to write for a purpose of their own choosing - not tied to some corporate bottom line.
The vast majority of people are never slackers for long, because we have an innate drive to be creative, that drive is what took us from hunter-gatherer into civilization and has driven progress for over 10-thousand years. It's not going to dissapear just because need gets removed, on the contrary, it will hugely expand. Historically - the greatest creative endeavours have not been driven by need but the absence of need. We achieve our greatest progress when needs are met. The driving force of all progress is boredom.
One of the earliest examples happened some ten-thousand years ago in the fertile crescent. The ruins we dig up there have grain stores - because farming had gotten good enough that our ancestors were producing excess food that needed to be stored. So nobody ever needed to be hungry... and then we see on those ruins something never seen anywhere earlier: the walls are plastered. Plastering walls have zero practical benefits, it's purely an aesthetic thing - and it's an expensive thing. To make limestone plaster you need to keep a fire going at high heat for many, many days. It's a lot of labor for something that contributes nothing to your chances of survival. So it never happened until there was a community that had achieved near perfect food security with very minimal effort. But the story doesn't end there. To keep those fires going to bake the limestone into plaster... they had to get good at controlling fire to a level never before achieved. Very high heat over extended periods, entirely new fire-management techniques were developed to pursue this "useless" creative endeavor. The same techniques that, not long afterwards, would allow humans to build smelters and turn the stone age into the bronze age (and later the iron and steel ages). The things we do when we are bored, even the useless things, are when we make the discoveries that will lift us up to the next level of progress in the near future. Maybe for every person who figures out a fire-management technique that will eventually drive smelting a thousand pursued something long forgotten that had no future uses, but that's an acceptable loss - because we NEED the firemaker, even if we have to carry a thousand other people to get him and there is no way to tell him apart from the others until centuries later.
There are other cases where that gets subverted however. McDonalds historically upon entering any country would put all local franchise fast-food businesses out of businesses very soon.
In South Africa though, that did not happen. In fact, after about ten years the McDonalds corporation decided that South Africa will never be nearly as profitable a market as any of their other countries, and sold the local right to sell franchises to a local company under condition that they keep complying with McDonalds branding and the like. Basically McDonalds South Africa is not owned by the McD corporation at all, they simply have a trademark license with conditions.
The reason was - South Africa already had well established nationwide franchises (notably Nandos and Steers) which sold much better quality food with only slightly longer waits and for lower prices. So very soon the novelty of the new American company wore off and everybody who wanted a burger went to Steers instead where you would get a decent real-meat patty on a proper bun with a giant helping of nicely sized portion of chips (not those horrible, hard-boild stick things McDonalds sells) for rather less. Nearly everybody thought the 10 minute extra wait was bloody well worth it because it really was only ten minutes and the food actually tasted good.
Lots of small individual restaurants couldn't hold up to the onslaught anywhere -they simply lacked the funds to ride out the first few years of everybody grabbing mickey d's because it's quick and novel and has a massive marketing budget. But the franchises could, and because their quality was better, they not only survived but ultimately pushed mickey-D's into a niche for people who want some very fast hunger ending at 3am. There's money to be made in that niche, and they are marking it, but it's hardly a dominant position.
Ironically, it's not like McDonalds has ever even BEEN a food company. Ray Koch has given multiple talks in which he spelled it out: McDonald's is a property company. The whole restaurant schtick was just a way of acquiring valuable corner properties right outside city CBDs which would be IN those CBDs a few years later.
McDonalds makes far more from renting out the properties where a restaurant stood decades ago than they have ever made from selling food. Hell the main corporation doesn't even sell any food at all. They sell franchises, and they allow you to buy one by signing over the deed for the place where the restaurant will go and paying the bond on the property. That's how they acquired such a massive supply of valuable properties.
To quote Koch himself: "Every person I've ever met can make a better burger than McDonalds, but none of them are as rich as me, because McDonalds is not a company that makes money from selling burgers".
One side effect is that anything the McDonald's corporation says about labor should be treated as bullshit since they are not in a labor intensive industry at all - they are landlords. The franchise owners care about labor costs, but they are not part of the corporation and the corporation decidedly does not speak for them - they are merely tools the corporation uses to acquire more land.
McDonalds corporation has consistently insisted on that seperation when it came to any and all forms of liability. The case a few years ago in New York where thousands of workers were cheated out of their paychecks by outright fraud (altering their timesheets to lie about how much they worked) ended up having to be pursued against individual franchise owners as the corporation denied any involvement in the management of the franchises nor any liability for anything they do.
Different courts have shown different levels of agreement with that argument (the famous coffee case - which everybody knows only the bullshit corporate-spin version off that has no resemblance to reality at all found the corporation liable for the fuckup at a particular franchise, most cases have not).
The irony is that the only reason this is even an issue is because, for some truly mindblowingly idiotic reason, minimum wage was not tied to inflation in the first place. If it had increased by the inflation rate every year since first instated - it would be at a decent rate today, with no risk of shocks to avoid in the first place.
Tech only gets cheaper. No matter what the minimum wage is, hell even if we bring back slavery and make it zero, sooner or later the robots would be cheaper than the workers. Companies around the world use the "we will automate" argument to suppress wages, but it's a bullshit argument because there is no way to escape the threat in it. They are GOING to automate everything that can be automated. At most the minimum wage change may accelerate it a little... so what ?
There is only two possible outcomes.
1) The one that has always happened in history repeats and the automation actually creates MORE jobs throughout the economy than it absorbs, including many new minimum wage jobs, the workers would then still benefit from the higher minimum wage (as would everybody else since taxpayers no longer have to subsidize company's wage bills by having workers that still need welfare to live).
2) This becomes the automation that changes the historical pattern, job after job dissapears - and we enter a world where everything can be and is automated. When that happens we will have to rethink the entire concept of wages and earning a living anyway. For starters, if we don't, all the rich people starve too - nobody will buy your products if nobody has money. The evidence suggests we're headed to that outcome, getting there a little faster or slower isn't going to change the scale of the transition. If that is where we go, then if anything, it happening a little faster may actually give it the force to overcome the legendary inertia of governments and conservatives (the ones who believe living must be 'earned' as a moral thing) a bit quicker and actually decrease the collateral damage as we figure out how to live in this new kind of world and economy.
Either way - the threat lacks substance, you can't make an efficient threat unless you offer the person you are threatening a way to avoid the outcome. Merely offering to postpone it a bit won't change anybody's minds (and it shouldn't, it's utterly irrational to change your mind based on a promise to postpone rather than prevent a bad thing).
Yes cronyism is the future tense of unfettered capitalism. The one inevitably degenerates into the latter. To prevent it you need actively enforced regulations with real bite that outlaw ever giving money to a politician (for example), restrict mergers that would lead to monopolies, punish collusion and protect consumers.
In other words to prevent capitalism from becoming cronyism it has to be fettered capitalism. Conveniently it also makes government less corrupt by removing legalized bribery so any politician who takes money can be presumed to be acting against citizens interest and jailed.
Only if those plants you mention never die and never decompose. Otherwise, eventually, all that carbon gets put right back. Not all of it goes back the short way (some goes into ash and such - but those also break down over time).
Even if that wasn't true, your statement doesn't help. There simply isn't enough land left to achieve the goals you stated. How many American families have a yard big enough to have an acre-sized lawn these days ? There are 350 million Americans, If a typical family is four people. You would need 87-million acres of grass to achieve your goal, and since grass dies and decomposes you actually would need a great deal more to even just slow DOWN the rise in CO2 levels.
Using plants to counteract fossil fuels is just no practical on any level. You would actually do a great deal better if you planted those plants and just burned them yourself INSTEAD of fossil fuels. That at least is a nett-zero process.
>"plants are carbon neutral"
Because they are. All living processes are. It took lots of evolution to achieve that. And because, if they were not, the atmosphere's composition could not possibly look like it does - because the one time in history when one part of some plants were not eaten - it made the atmosphere look VERY different.
> "all plants get eaten"
Decomposition happens when things eat corpses. It's not just all plants either - it's all living things. Everything is something else's food sooner or later. Even humans.
>contradictory statements
There is nothing contradictory in those statements, in fact they are two descriptions of the exact same process.
>animals/organisms who do the eating and decomposition do not have to be "immortal", for carbon that got removed from atmosphere by plants to remain removed.
Yep, they would have to be, otherwise - they would burn the carbon and breath out CO2 to power their life processes. And when they die, the things that eat THEM would burn the rest. Whatever bits they in turn store, gets burned when it's their turn to be eaten. You can't breath out more CO2 than the carbon you've consumed, it will always be a little bit less, the little bit is the carbon used to grow new cells in your body - which gets burned when you decompose. It doesn't always happen instantly, but it happens so damn close to always that the rare exception where you got burried in a peat bogg or mummified simply isn't statistically significant enough to change the outcome.
>use logic, if you can.
That's funny... since you clearly cannot. Again - think. What would happen if the natural carbon oxygen cycle was not nett-zero ? If either plants or animals were out of balance to any significant degree ? The composition of the atmosphere would change radically. Just like it did the last time an organism was not carbon neutral. Much more radically, in fact, than we are doing with burning of fossil fuels - but we are watching that changing the composition of the atmosphere. We're watching the CO2 levels go up - fast. If anything is not carbon neutral, the atmosphere changes to adapt. When the first plants appeared, there were not oxygen breathing, carbon eating animals yet. And thus they were not carbon neutral, the atmospheric oxygen level skyrockted (coincidentally causing the extinction of every species of animal that DID exist at the time). Before you knew it 21% of the atmosphere was oxygen - up from less than 2. Much later when trees evolved and nothing yet had the ability to digest wood - it doubled the atmospheric oxygen content. It didn't return to it's normal level of 21% until much later when bacteria evolved that could eat wood.
You can't look at single organisms in isolation. You can't look at a plant and say "This plant absorbs CO2 and releases oxygen ergo it is a nett oxygen producer". That's not how it works. You have to look at ALL organisms and how they interact... and the conclusion is that living processes end up cancelling each other out exactly. Animals and plants end up being as close to perfectly balanced as makes no difference - and fundamentally the evidence for this is that for the vast majority of time the composition of the atmosphere is stable and any deviations have anorganic sources. The atmosphere did not start gaining CO2 before we started burning fossil fuels. Yet we've been burning things for thousands of years. But burning WOOD is carbon NEUTRAL. Before coal and oil, we were just doing what the bacteria would have done anyway, only a little bit faster.
>- blind chance is not irrational given that there is no cost attached to it since there is no goal to be achieved.
Rationality has nothing to do with the cost OR the goal. These things have literally no connection to rationality - and all goals are, by definition, emotional anyway. Rationality is about the method, not the goal. It describes a way of thinking. It's about the HOW not the WHY. The WHY has nothing to do with rationality and can never BE rational.
Being rational is a description of HOW you do something. Blind Chance can NEVER be a rational approach since the rational approach is not blind chance. Rationality does require you to HAVE a goal (so first strike against evolution being rational), but it has nothing to do with how that goal is selected. Rationality is what gave us the scientific method. Rationality is what gave us Aristotle's laws of logic. Rational thinking has RULES. If you break those rules, you are not rational. It's a PROCESS, nothing more and nothing less.
>There is no such thing as 'subverting evolution', by the way
In the context I used the phrase, yes there is, and your counterargument does not apply to that context in any way at all.
Blind chance is so far from rational ... rationality is a human trait defined by critical skepticism, trust in evidence and the pursuit of knowledge.
We are terrible at it by the way. But we alone have any at all. And we didnt get it from evolution. If anything we got it by subverting evolution and taking brain functions evolved for a very different set of principles and using them for jobs they are only barely capable off (but thats still more than anything else has done).
Evolution gave us fight-or-flight. But rationally evaluating risks gives far better results. The two almost never agree on what response a situation demands.
There is nothing rational about evolved responses. In fact they are as far from rational as anything can ever be. Evolution gave us a foodway that crosses our airway - a monumentally stupid design. And left it because when every other animal has the same problem its not a competitive disadvantage. But no halfway competent engineer would have done it that idiotically. Evolution is a lot of things but it is decidedly not rational. Unless you think "build a million random designs and keep whatever works" is a rational design process.
Like there's 2-million female virgins in America...
All plants get eaten. Wtf do you think decomposition is ? And eating does not trap the carbon either. Your socalled counterargument only works if all animals are immortal.
You want to know what happens when plants are not eaten and thus are not carbon neutral ? You get those 3ft arachnids. We know because thats exactly what happened in the carboniferous period. Trees evolved but nothing had evolved to eat wood yet. All the carbon the trees absorbed got burried instead. In fact the fossil fuels we burn now are mostly the copses of those trees. And the oxygen level of the atmosphere was over 40% which is why giant invertibrates could exist.
That was just tremo and only the woody parts at that. Imagine if all plants produced a nett positive oxygen and negative carbon effect. We would have an oxygen saturation greater than nitrogen is now (71%) and spiders the size of rhinos.
The natural tree is NOT better than the water tower.
It is, however, much rarer (and only getting moreso) while being impossible to replace. We simply do not have the capacity to plant a forrest that's anything like the forrests we cut down, we probably never will, there are too many forces at work which cannot be controlled.
So it's not BETTER, but it IS more valuable, because of simple matters of supply and demand.
As man-made expanded, less and less natural things remained, thus their value went up as the supply dwindled. Until we started protecting the bits that remain lest we have none left whatsoever. This was simply the law being pushed by the market forces of supply and demand to protect a commons which was rapidly being destroyed before there was none left. Because, see, some people can profit from the destruction, at a loss to everybody else. Sooner or later you reach a point where letting them do so is no longer worth it. As they destroy more and more, less and less is left and so the cost for every next bit goes up. Eventually the cost outweighs the benefits and society stops being willing to pay it.
The question is not "is a natural tree better than a man-made water tower". The question is: "Is THIS tree worth more to humanity, including in things that are hard to measure with money, than NOT having THIS tree". And it's important to ask the question about "humanity" and not "me". Because all of nature ends up being treated by the economy as a commons, subject to the tragedy OF the commons - unless you somehow prevent that. There's a reason we call that process the TRAGEDY of the commons - because that which is lost by all when it happens is worth so much more than the profits made by the people who benefit from it. So there is a logical and rational point where it makes sense to stop those selfish few from further exploiting the commons so that some will be left for everybody else.
Historically there is only one way to stop the tragedy of the commons: harshly enforced laws to manage access to it. Rightwingers will claim its "privatising" but, in fact, this does NOT prevent the tragedy of the commons - it IS the tragedy of the commons in another form. The tragedy of the commons is not the "loss of the resource" it is "the loss of the resources by the many". Privatising the resource preserves the remainder of the resource for the use by a small few, who may or may not let some others access it for money (which not everybody has). That is already the tragedy.
It would not BE a tragedy if the loss to the many was not greater than the gains by the few.
The greatest scam of the 20th century was convincing people that selfishness is rationality. This is just flagrantly wrong. From the start of the enlightenment rationality was the driving force- but no enlightenment thinker would be so stupid as to think that rationality means not considering emotional considerations and certainly not dismissing considerations like empathy or caring about other people.
In fact, quite the opposite. Not acting with empathy, not caring about other lives is absolutely IRRATIONAL thinking. It's flagrantly NOT rational. See contrary to what the Randians like to claim - there is not nor can there ever be such a thing as a rational motivation. Motivations, by definition, are emotions - hence ALL motivations are NOT rational. Rationality is not useful in the least for selecting motivations - in the same way you probably shouldn't ask a fish to select between two baloon designs - it has absolutely no useful reference frame to compare them. Selfishness and greed are not rational motivations - they are emotions. Pretending they are not emotions is a deceit intended to make them look more acceptable compared to other motivations like compassion. But there is no truth to that, compassion is an emotional motivation, greed is an emotional motivation. They are both nothing but emotions. Rationality has nothing to do with either.
Rationality is a tool which greatly improves your odds of actually achieving your motivation, but it can never define what your motivations are nor can it select between them because it is utterly incapable of understanding anything about the concept of "motivations" since all motivations are emotions - the one thing that rationality can never be.
The closest overlap comes in working out how pursuing different motivations is likely to affect yourself - and since it will always and invariably harm yourself not to care about others (even if most people do not realize this), it is therefore utterly irrational to pursue those motivations.
You seem to be using a couple of standard tropes as your argument - all of which are false.
>Here's the problem: our temperatures aren't at the high end of the projections. Instead, they're at the bottom end. Yes, the Earth has gotten warmer, but not nearly to the extent the models have already projected.
False claim, long since debunked and fully disproven. There was never a "gap" in warming. Just a lie based on a deliberately trying to deceive people.
>If the models aren't accurately predicting our temperatures now, why should we believe their predictions for farther in the future?
Because it's EASIER to predict the longer the timeframe. Nevermind that your claims are false, they wouldn't support this assertion anyway. That's how averages work - the larger the dataset becomes, the more accurate your predictions becomes and the easier it is to make accurate predictions. In climate - the timeframe is the dataset you're averaging over. Predicting the temperature tomorrow is difficult and we often get it wrong. Predicting the average temperature for a year is easer and we're usually pretty close. Predicting it for a decade is even easier and we're usually much closer. Over a century, it becomes almost ridiculously simple.
Let me explain by analogy to another example of this problem. J. is a highschool senior, please predict J's final grades. Well obviously that's just guess work, I didn't give you any information that is really helpful. if you get any right it would be sheer dumb luck. I didn't even tell you what subjects J are taking. Okay, so I give you some more information - I tell you J stands for Janice and give you her entire academic record. Now you have a lot of data on this person - can you predict her final grades ? Actually you will probably get several of them pretty close. She may surprize you though. It's not that unusual for somebody to get a wake-up call in senior year and raise their grades several points after all. At this point, it's hard, but doable - and your odds are pretty good.
Now I say to you: please predict the average grade distribution for all seniors finishing high school this year. Suddenly it becomes ridiculous easy. It will be a typical normal distribution. It is ALWAYS a normal distribution. We are SO certain of that, that if any school does NOT follow a normal distribution that is considered legal proof that there was cheating in the exams !
The average is infinitely easier than the specific, and the larger the sample you are averaging, the easier it gets. That's how climate works too. Predicting what will happen to the average temperature over the next 100 years is a LOT easier than predicting what will happen over the next 2 days.
Not to mention: it is incredibly unlikely that we could survive in Dinosaur climates - or they in ours. Plenty of things have existed in the past which could not possibly exist now. In the Carboniferous we had dragonflies with 1m wingspans. That could not possibly exist today - because their booklungs are just not efficient enough to get enough oxygen for a body that big in a climate where the oxygen concentration is around 21%, when they lived it was more like 40% - nearly twice what it is now. But - chances are - we could not have survived then anymore than they could survive now (for different reasons).
Oh, he apparently doesn't know that plastics are made from fossil fuels. I suppose you could argue that making them into plastics prevent them from getting into the air in the first place, and plastics have their pro-side in terms of nature (we use a lot less wood because plastic is cheaper so we cut down less trees for wood - now we cut them down for grazing land instead) - but they are also non-biodegradeable and end up causing a whole host of other problems.
Asphalt for roads is a better form of carbon sequestration - especially if you then use an EV or a bicycle on the road. The trouble however is that small scale sequestering projects simply cannot compete with the level of CO2 production and arguably never can. To actually sequester as much as we burn, while most of our energy is fossil fuel based, we would need to use ALL that energy AND a bunch more to do the sequestering with - it's actually cheaper to just use non-CO2 emitting energy sources in the first place.