The BBC has been under constant critique for ages for being nothing but a pliant propaganda mouthpeace for the Tory government - and selling whatever the hell the Tories want sold and not being critical enough of the government.
In case you missed it - the Tory's are Britain's version of the republicans, and they are VERY pro-fossil fuel and anti-renewables and the BBC has been happy to spread their propaganda for them.
This is the same BBC who when there were marches on parliament last year showed it from angles that made it look like there were maybe a hundred people there, when by simply standing somewhere else it was flagrantly obvious that march had somewhere upwards of 30-thousand participants at least. They were deliberately trying to make it look like the protesters were a tiny bunch of kooks as opposed to a mass movement of people unhappy with a government policy.
*yawn* Yeah - those things. Lies. Lies you were dumb enough to believe. Including subtly pretending "could" or "might" are synonyms for "will".
Here's what happens in the REAL world: In the 1980's scientists studying the glaciers were warning that melting would acelerate. They got some ranges of when from their studies - and published the least alarming, most conservative estimates - that we'd see something noticeable around 2050. In 2007 National Geographic held interviews with a bunch of them - and they all reported that the glaciers they are studying are melting at the OTHER extreme of speed. One of them works on a glacier in the Andes, there used to be a lovely ski resort on that glacier where he would go relax on the weekends. He doesn't anymore. He can't. The Ski resort is still there - but it's a ghost town - because there is not enough snow left for people to ski on. His public statements hadn't thought that likely until 2030 - even though his models on one extreme said it *could* happen by 2007, he never really believed *that* extreme to be likely.
Yeah, the scientists constantly get their global warming predictions "wrong"... because they always conservatively only say in public the most likely, least threatening, least alarming numbers from them - and reality keeps doing the most extreme versions of what the models predict which they put in their published papers but don't talk about to the press.
No it comes down to this: The opponents of AGW has repeatedly lied about what scientists predicted so they could falsely claim the predictions didn't come true (they all have- with greater accuracy than the scientists themselves ever expected) - and you're stupid enough to still believe them.
>Did you know, every time you exhale, you increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is adding to global climate change and the decimation of the planet? Under the concept of "protecting nature" we must stop you from exhaling.
No I don't. And neither do you, or anybody else. Carbon has to come from somewhere. The Carbon in the CO2 you breath out comes from the food you ate, food which (Even if it was a steak) ultimately came from plants, which got it from taking the EXACT SAME amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere last week.
Exhaling is completely carbon neutral. When your reasoning is built around a completely bullshit claim the stupidity of which is trivially obvious... what can we conclude ? One possiblity is that you are just too damn stupid to figure such a trivial thing out... but then, you wouldn't be able to learn to write either (let alone feed or clothe yourself). So it's unlikely. The only other conclusion is that you did figure out and are lying because you think everybody else is too stupid to also figure it out. Well busted, we're not dumb enough to fall for your scam. Go try it on breitbart- they are full of people who also figured it out but will pretend they haven't so you can all make each other feel smart.
They don't need stunts to make trump look like an evil fascist tyrant in the mold of Musolini - he is perfectly capable of doing that himself. It's not like it's hard, all he has to do is be himself.
>Furthermore, how many scientists believe a theory is not the test of whether it is a good theory. The test is how accurately it predicts the results of experiments. So far, most of the predictions made based on AGW have proven wrong.
Actually - you've been lied to - again. The models have been extraordinarily accurate in predicting current events, far moreso actually than their creators would have predicted (scientists tend to be a careful and conservative bunch who always hedge their bets since even the best work can have small errors). But those people lying have been very good at using flagrantly false arguments that take real numbers and pretend they mean something different to what they do (mostly by relying on the fact that you probably don't understand statistics well enough to know they are lying about how it works), using tiny local variations (something the models don't claim to predict) to claim the model was wrong for not predicting what it wasn't designed to predict and didn't claim to predict and other less sophisticated versions of what is all - in the end- nothing but first-class, grade-A bullshit.
And you ate it up like cookies.
So what can I say to somebody who happily chows down on bullshit and thinks it's spaghetti ? The only phrase that comes to mind is: Well the, eat shit and die.
>I do know that the study which is used for the basis for saying that 97% of climatologists support AGW was utter garbage
There wasn't "a" study that showed that. You've been lied to. There have been DOZENS - perhaps hundreds by now - and they all used different methodologies, nearly all the ones after the first one were started with the purpose of testing whether the first one wasn't perhaps wrong. They all found the same thing with very little deviation.
But, of course, somebody somewhere dug out one where they could show some approaches that were worthy of criticism - blew that into "fully flawed study" and then pretended it was THE study that showed the number to convince idiots like you the number was a lie. Them not telling you about all the others I can understand - they are PAID not to. You not finding out for yourself makes you a wilfully ignorant idiot.
Of course the fact that the anti-climate change bloggers, writers and thinktanks DO take bribes and HAVE been REPEATEDLY caught in the act doesn't harm their credibility. But the unproven alegation that scientists do does. Of course they soften that ridiculousness up a bit. It's not "bribes" its "grant money" and then they claim the whole system of science funding is so corrupt it's impossible to get grant money unless you support climate change.
The only problem with that narative is that there is such a thing as private grants - and those trillionaire fossil fuel companies that fund the bloggers, writers and thinktanks will be very happy to give a massive grant to any scientist who can disprove the theory. It would be a much better use of the billions their spending trying to discredit it. Right now they are already paying quite large sums to any scientist who is willing to use deliberate deception and misleading arguments to try and pretend he's disproven climate science (the terrible job these people do just shows how little they have to work with). A scientist who could actually show strong evidence the theory is wrong - would have a billion dollar grant tomorrow, and a nobel prize next year.
Except that, considering the medium, a more apt analogy would be putitng a note to that effect underneath the peanut-laced oil cake where it won't be seen until after the cake is eaten.
They are obeying a court order. No court in the USA will possibly uphold a fine or even bother to HEAR a lawsuit for you for obeying an order by a different court.
Because, generally speaking, complete and utter idiots have a hard time becoming judges.
We're almost as crazy for thinking we can reduce the murder rate with good law enforcement as we were for thinking humans committed most of the murders.
>No, it proves you have no clue what you're talking about. There may have been one or two customers who made minimum wage, but the vast majority made far above. I'm talking truckers back in the day when they made darned good money. The increase in minimum wage did not affect the vast majority of my customers.
Eeeeh Wrong. An increase in minimum wage affects EVERYBODY's salary. Because suddenly a lot of people who were just above minimum wage are now at minimum wage and complaining about being a floor manager and earning the same as a floor sweeper - so you have to give them a raise too, but now the people above them need a raise, and so on and so forth. A minimum wage increase raises wages for all employees. The biggest difference is at the bottom of the pile but everybody benefits.
>And, we're talking a repair shop...does increasing minimum wage cause a flood of broken radios? Geez man, use that lump on your shoulders for something other than a hat rack!
No, but it does mean people who previously lacked the resources can afford to upskil and that means more people driving. The same "more customers"thing also applies to every other business - which means they are all shipping more stuff, so there is demand for more truckers, truckers being driven harder (so actually yeah - it DOES cause more broken trucks), and more of them are running.
>You try to come off as sooo intellectually superior, but you actually sound like a clueless douche that has never run a business. I have, but then I would never be affected by minimum wage laws because I have never paid even my least valuable employee anything less than double that. Because whatever the law says, I think it's morally wrong to take advantage of another person's desperation.
>Jobs that you'd willingly pay more for but choose not to? That is ALL jobs. No employer pays a penny more than they MUST for any job - which is inevitably less than they WOULD pay if they couldn't get it cheaper.
Ultimately an employer WOULD pay for a job ANY number that's less than what they make out of that labour, they want to profit of it, and profit as much as possible. But if the profit is less they don't fire the person (contrary to what they keep threatening) because only an idiot would choose "no profit at all" OVER "less profit".
All you just did was prove you're a terrible businessman who can't do math. The increase in minimum wage means all your potential customers suddenly had increased buying power. The logical thing to do would be to keep your prices the same (or cut them a little) and higher ANOTHER person - so you can produce MORE products to sell to these people who could not afford your product before. When you responded to a wage hike by firing somebody - you deprived yourself of a potential profit far bigger than his salary.
Luckily for us- empirical data proves that almost every employer in the world is smarter than you are, which is why in the real world, no moderate minimum wage increase has ever affected employment rates AT ALL - and the few studies that seem to show a minor effect - show a positive one. In the short term the effect is nett-zero, in the medium term - it actually creates MORE jobs.
Nothing makes a business higher more staff faster than having more customers than they had yesterday.
A large hikes may cause the problems that the right always predict, but honestly we don't know since they have almost never happened - so there is virtually no empirical data we can look at to confirm if the theory holds or not.
Answer: nothing. Indeed, if I wanted to kidnap a bunch of people to use as slave labour, this would be the perfect setup. Open a bunch of accounts, chain them up in front of PCs and have them working MT jobs all day while I stand behind them with a whip and all the money flows into my accounts.
Now I'm not the kind of horrible person who would ever do such a thing - but there are no shortage of people who are. In fact, there are more slaves in the world right now then were sold during the entire existence of the transatlantic slave trade ! Slavery is the third largest polluter in the world and if it was a company, it would be on of the 5 largest and most profitable companies on earth. If crime was a whole was one business, it would be 3 times larger than the combined profits of the entire fortune-500
Now of course, if you can do basic math, you realize that it's impossible for that much illegitimate money to possibly be laundered - there is only one way that this can be true: if a huge chunk of the fortune 500's profits are ALSO part of the profits of Crime Inc. The two numbers have to overlap (by 80% or more) or the system would collapse and crime would be operating at a loss.
1) Because a huge amount of Americans have no solid or reliable income and are desperate for any way to buy food. 2) There are a few reasons - and they correlate with the numbers. - Internet access is not evenly distributed over the globe. India has very good access, and so significant people can make use of the system -for them it's good money - Europe mostly has BETTER internet than the US, as does South Korea, but those regions have low unemployment, very good labour protections and laws, and powerful unions - so there isn't many people there who don't already earn more than this.
That doesn't leave much. But most of Africa has extremely limited and highly expensive internet access. If you have a reliable home connection, especially a broadband one, you're already rich.
So who is left that might use it in Africa ? Well my family perhaps could consider it, I work full time as an engineer but my wife (by choice) stays home to look after our toddler, she could conceivably make a few dollars every few days doing mechanical turk stuff to add to our budget.... but she could make a thousand times that much for the same amount of work if she filmed herself with a vibrator and posted it on clips4sale. Mechanical Turk sure can't compete with them on remuneration.
To those for whom mechanical turk pays well - it still pays worse than a lot of other things you could do, which are more fun, and the only thing stopping people is moralism, if you don't subscribe to that particular moralism, why would you do it?
The people in Africa who may work there because they need the money and lack another source and is desperate enough to do anything to get paid - and aren't likely to make much in more lucrative internet industries (like the 50% who have penisses instead of vaginas)... well they mostly don't have any better internet than what a 10 year old cellphone with 3G can offer, and that's generally their only connected device. If you go to an internet cafe and use their computers - the price of sitting there for an hour will exceed the profit you can make on M.T.
In Nigeria they long ago figured out that one of the most lucrative internet industries is to lie about your identity and convince other people they'll get rich if they give you money - and Nigeria is one of the two best connected countries on the continent.
That would achieve nothing. The goal of equalising the minimum wage is to make the company either 1) Keep the jobs at home 2) Actually HAVE a bunch of people in that poor company able to live like millionaires giving it a huge economic injection which very soon will cause it's economy to grow to match that of the US benefiting everybody there. And gain an instant economic and military ally and a whole lot of new customers for US export businesses. Which again, leads to jobs for US workers.
The long term goal- is that it shouldn't matter where you were born, the quality of life you ultimately get is determined exclusively by your talents and efforts. We're a long way from solving most of the things that mess with that, this answer does nothing about the "rich parents = rich life" problem for example - but it the median it DOES remove the difference based purely on which piece of geography two people got laid in before you even existed.
It's kind of odd that protectionism has such a bad rep. The US became the richest country in the world almost entirely thanks to protectionism. Adam Smith's economic ideas were rejected in his day - and for 200 years after, it was the Hamilton plan that governed US economic relations for the first few centuries and that was an extremely protectionist approach. Hell the US didn't even recognise foreign copyrights until the 1920s (while trying to pressure other countries to recognise US copyrights). The US only became anti-protectionist after world war 2 really, when their major industrial competitors (Germany, Britain and Itally) were laid to waste by the war, and US businesses saw a huge potential for making massive profits by selling to foreigners who could no longer buy from these countries. Suddenly it made sense to stop being protectionist so you could open up those markets even if it meant opening up your own.
It's quite a valid question whether this is still true today. It could very well be that the best thing to do for the US is to go back to protectionism and nourish an economy where US companies are a lot smaller because they barely sell outside the US - but they employ Americans and sell to Americans. Then you only open up those specific markets where you cannot produce sufficiently at home (perhaps they rely on a resource the US has a shortage of). Of course, if you do that, and you're not an asshole - then you would support other countries doing the same - including cutting out US producers in favor of local ones (whether the US can avoid being an asshole is debateable, it's happened on occasion but this is definitely not the rule).
I'm generally anti-nationalist and consider the very concept of countries and borders to be arbitrary and senseless, I have every reason to reject protectionism as being utterly incompatible with my moral beliefs - but I wouldn't be so dishonest as to pretend it didn't work.
Because the goal of UBI is not to have people "live off" it, indeed it's not supposed to cover survival costs. It's to put a floor on quality of living by ensuring everybody has at LEAST a certain amount of money every month - encouraging them to increase that by earning money of their own on top. It's meant to be a fallback, a suplement. A way to get further education, money to save for a rainy day, something guaranteed so the not-already-rich can take the risk of starting a business.
It's meant to do a lot of things - but it's not meant to be a replacement for economic participation.
Now that may change. In a hypothetical future where AI and automation has taken almost all jobs - and there are simply fewer jobs that require human hands than there are people, it may have to become such - but in such a world the costs the rich bear have also gone down hugely, and their biggest problem is finding anybody to be their customers, it's to their advantage to pay enough taxes to fund a much higher UBI because without it, they won't be rich very long.
Even then you wouldn't see a complete absence of productivity in the rest of the population - you will merely see a shift away from working for money towards working for joy. Creative people will create - and not having to worry about how to buy food will only let them create more.
Except that 2 million is no punishment at all for Apple. And in fact... 52 weeks a year * 6 days a week (Assuming Apple's retail workers get at least one day a week off) = 312 days a year. 2007 - 2012 = 5 years 5 * 312 = 1560 days without lunches. Current California minimum wage is 10 dollars an hour, but it was 9 dollars for the period in question. 30 minutes is half an hour so call it $4.50. Of course we KNOW that what they pay is LESS than the worker's time is worth to THEM - that's how profit works, but lets be ultra conservative and use the $4.50 as if that was the value of the lunch break (considering the breaks are unpaid it's seriously generous not to use the likely value of about 30 dollars).
So if we assume that work days were not so long as to require two breaks under the law (again - being hugely generous to apple since the evidence suggests otherwise). That 1560 * 4.5 dollars saved per employee. 21 000 employees. 21000 * 1560 * 4.5 = $147420000.0
Just shy of 150 million dollars.. They made, at the bare minimum using every assumption in their favor) just shy of 150 million dollars by breaking the law - and we "punish" them by making them give 2 million dollars back.
And of course, the odds go up when you employ contractors, or pay employees badly or most of the other 'labour cost saving' things businesses love to do. All these things have the common outcomes of 1) Making employees far less invested in, and loyal to, the business (only an idiot is loyal to somebody who is not loyal to them) 2) Making them poorer
Poorer people have less to lose and more to gain from theft (so the odds of them deciding it's worth it go up), and less invested, less loyal people are more likely to rationalize away any moral qualms about stealing a laptop from the office.
Slashdot Mirror
Errrr yeah ! You didn't know that ?
The BBC has been under constant critique for ages for being nothing but a pliant propaganda mouthpeace for the Tory government - and selling whatever the hell the Tories want sold and not being critical enough of the government.
In case you missed it - the Tory's are Britain's version of the republicans, and they are VERY pro-fossil fuel and anti-renewables and the BBC has been happy to spread their propaganda for them.
This is the same BBC who when there were marches on parliament last year showed it from angles that made it look like there were maybe a hundred people there, when by simply standing somewhere else it was flagrantly obvious that march had somewhere upwards of 30-thousand participants at least. They were deliberately trying to make it look like the protesters were a tiny bunch of kooks as opposed to a mass movement of people unhappy with a government policy.
*yawn*
Yeah - those things. Lies. Lies you were dumb enough to believe. Including subtly pretending "could" or "might" are synonyms for "will".
Here's what happens in the REAL world:
In the 1980's scientists studying the glaciers were warning that melting would acelerate. They got some ranges of when from their studies - and published the least alarming, most conservative estimates - that we'd see something noticeable around 2050.
In 2007 National Geographic held interviews with a bunch of them - and they all reported that the glaciers they are studying are melting at the OTHER extreme of speed. One of them works on a glacier in the Andes, there used to be a lovely ski resort on that glacier where he would go relax on the weekends. He doesn't anymore. He can't. The Ski resort is still there - but it's a ghost town - because there is not enough snow left for people to ski on.
His public statements hadn't thought that likely until 2030 - even though his models on one extreme said it *could* happen by 2007, he never really believed *that* extreme to be likely.
Yeah, the scientists constantly get their global warming predictions "wrong"... because they always conservatively only say in public the most likely, least threatening, least alarming numbers from them - and reality keeps doing the most extreme versions of what the models predict which they put in their published papers but don't talk about to the press.
No it comes down to this:
The opponents of AGW has repeatedly lied about what scientists predicted so they could falsely claim the predictions didn't come true (they all have- with greater accuracy than the scientists themselves ever expected) - and you're stupid enough to still believe them.
And all those people who complain about windfarms never ask themselves "Would I rather have black lung ?"
>Did you know, every time you exhale, you increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is adding to global climate change and the decimation of the planet? Under the concept of "protecting nature" we must stop you from exhaling.
No I don't. And neither do you, or anybody else. Carbon has to come from somewhere. The Carbon in the CO2 you breath out comes from the food you ate, food which (Even if it was a steak) ultimately came from plants, which got it from taking the EXACT SAME amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere last week.
Exhaling is completely carbon neutral. When your reasoning is built around a completely bullshit claim the stupidity of which is trivially obvious... what can we conclude ? One possiblity is that you are just too damn stupid to figure such a trivial thing out... but then, you wouldn't be able to learn to write either (let alone feed or clothe yourself). So it's unlikely. The only other conclusion is that you did figure out and are lying because you think everybody else is too stupid to also figure it out.
Well busted, we're not dumb enough to fall for your scam. Go try it on breitbart- they are full of people who also figured it out but will pretend they haven't so you can all make each other feel smart.
They don't need stunts to make trump look like an evil fascist tyrant in the mold of Musolini - he is perfectly capable of doing that himself. It's not like it's hard, all he has to do is be himself.
>Furthermore, how many scientists believe a theory is not the test of whether it is a good theory. The test is how accurately it predicts the results of experiments. So far, most of the predictions made based on AGW have proven wrong.
Actually - you've been lied to - again. The models have been extraordinarily accurate in predicting current events, far moreso actually than their creators would have predicted (scientists tend to be a careful and conservative bunch who always hedge their bets since even the best work can have small errors). But those people lying have been very good at using flagrantly false arguments that take real numbers and pretend they mean something different to what they do (mostly by relying on the fact that you probably don't understand statistics well enough to know they are lying about how it works), using tiny local variations (something the models don't claim to predict) to claim the model was wrong for not predicting what it wasn't designed to predict and didn't claim to predict and other less sophisticated versions of what is all - in the end- nothing but first-class, grade-A bullshit.
And you ate it up like cookies.
So what can I say to somebody who happily chows down on bullshit and thinks it's spaghetti ? The only phrase that comes to mind is: Well the, eat shit and die.
>I do know that the study which is used for the basis for saying that 97% of climatologists support AGW was utter garbage
There wasn't "a" study that showed that. You've been lied to. There have been DOZENS - perhaps hundreds by now - and they all used different methodologies, nearly all the ones after the first one were started with the purpose of testing whether the first one wasn't perhaps wrong. They all found the same thing with very little deviation.
But, of course, somebody somewhere dug out one where they could show some approaches that were worthy of criticism - blew that into "fully flawed study" and then pretended it was THE study that showed the number to convince idiots like you the number was a lie. Them not telling you about all the others I can understand - they are PAID not to.
You not finding out for yourself makes you a wilfully ignorant idiot.
Of course the fact that the anti-climate change bloggers, writers and thinktanks DO take bribes and HAVE been REPEATEDLY caught in the act doesn't harm their credibility. But the unproven alegation that scientists do does.
Of course they soften that ridiculousness up a bit. It's not "bribes" its "grant money" and then they claim the whole system of science funding is so corrupt it's impossible to get grant money unless you support climate change.
The only problem with that narative is that there is such a thing as private grants - and those trillionaire fossil fuel companies that fund the bloggers, writers and thinktanks will be very happy to give a massive grant to any scientist who can disprove the theory. It would be a much better use of the billions their spending trying to discredit it. Right now they are already paying quite large sums to any scientist who is willing to use deliberate deception and misleading arguments to try and pretend he's disproven climate science (the terrible job these people do just shows how little they have to work with).
A scientist who could actually show strong evidence the theory is wrong - would have a billion dollar grant tomorrow, and a nobel prize next year.
Except that, considering the medium, a more apt analogy would be putitng a note to that effect underneath the peanut-laced oil cake where it won't be seen until after the cake is eaten.
Blink tag ?
What browser still obeys that ?
Dude... update your packages. It's seriously insecure to still be using IE6...
They are obeying a court order. No court in the USA will possibly uphold a fine or even bother to HEAR a lawsuit for you for obeying an order by a different court.
Because, generally speaking, complete and utter idiots have a hard time becoming judges.
We're almost as crazy for thinking we can reduce the murder rate with good law enforcement as we were for thinking humans committed most of the murders.
Baskin-Robbins always finds out.
>No, it proves you have no clue what you're talking about. There may have been one or two customers who made minimum wage, but the vast majority made far above. I'm talking truckers back in the day when they made darned good money. The increase in minimum wage did not affect the vast majority of my customers.
Eeeeh Wrong.
An increase in minimum wage affects EVERYBODY's salary. Because suddenly a lot of people who were just above minimum wage are now at minimum wage and complaining about being a floor manager and earning the same as a floor sweeper - so you have to give them a raise too, but now the people above them need a raise, and so on and so forth. A minimum wage increase raises wages for all employees. The biggest difference is at the bottom of the pile but everybody benefits.
>And, we're talking a repair shop...does increasing minimum wage cause a flood of broken radios? Geez man, use that lump on your shoulders for something other than a hat rack!
No, but it does mean people who previously lacked the resources can afford to upskil and that means more people driving. The same "more customers"thing also applies to every other business - which means they are all shipping more stuff, so there is demand for more truckers, truckers being driven harder (so actually yeah - it DOES cause more broken trucks), and more of them are running.
>You try to come off as sooo intellectually superior, but you actually sound like a clueless douche that has never run a business.
I have, but then I would never be affected by minimum wage laws because I have never paid even my least valuable employee anything less than double that. Because whatever the law says, I think it's morally wrong to take advantage of another person's desperation.
>Jobs that you'd willingly pay more for but choose not to?
That is ALL jobs.
No employer pays a penny more than they MUST for any job - which is inevitably less than they WOULD pay if they couldn't get it cheaper.
Ultimately an employer WOULD pay for a job ANY number that's less than what they make out of that labour, they want to profit of it, and profit as much as possible. But if the profit is less they don't fire the person (contrary to what they keep threatening) because only an idiot would choose "no profit at all" OVER "less profit".
All you just did was prove you're a terrible businessman who can't do math.
The increase in minimum wage means all your potential customers suddenly had increased buying power. The logical thing to do would be to keep your prices the same (or cut them a little) and higher ANOTHER person - so you can produce MORE products to sell to these people who could not afford your product before. When you responded to a wage hike by firing somebody - you deprived yourself of a potential profit far bigger than his salary.
Luckily for us- empirical data proves that almost every employer in the world is smarter than you are, which is why in the real world, no moderate minimum wage increase has ever affected employment rates AT ALL - and the few studies that seem to show a minor effect - show a positive one.
In the short term the effect is nett-zero, in the medium term - it actually creates MORE jobs.
Nothing makes a business higher more staff faster than having more customers than they had yesterday.
A large hikes may cause the problems that the right always predict, but honestly we don't know since they have almost never happened - so there is virtually no empirical data we can look at to confirm if the theory holds or not.
Answer: nothing.
Indeed, if I wanted to kidnap a bunch of people to use as slave labour, this would be the perfect setup. Open a bunch of accounts, chain them up in front of PCs and have them working MT jobs all day while I stand behind them with a whip and all the money flows into my accounts.
Now I'm not the kind of horrible person who would ever do such a thing - but there are no shortage of people who are. In fact, there are more slaves in the world right now then were sold during the entire existence of the transatlantic slave trade ! Slavery is the third largest polluter in the world and if it was a company, it would be on of the 5 largest and most profitable companies on earth. If crime was a whole was one business, it would be 3 times larger than the combined profits of the entire fortune-500
Now of course, if you can do basic math, you realize that it's impossible for that much illegitimate money to possibly be laundered - there is only one way that this can be true: if a huge chunk of the fortune 500's profits are ALSO part of the profits of Crime Inc. The two numbers have to overlap (by 80% or more) or the system would collapse and crime would be operating at a loss.
You have choices ?
Then we're not talking about you.
The laws here are to protect those who do NOT get to CHOOSE - because their only other option is to die from hunger.
1) Because a huge amount of Americans have no solid or reliable income and are desperate for any way to buy food.
2) There are a few reasons - and they correlate with the numbers.
- Internet access is not evenly distributed over the globe. India has very good access, and so significant people can make use of the system -for them it's good money
- Europe mostly has BETTER internet than the US, as does South Korea, but those regions have low unemployment, very good labour protections and laws, and powerful unions - so there isn't many people there who don't already earn more than this.
That doesn't leave much. But most of Africa has extremely limited and highly expensive internet access. If you have a reliable home connection, especially a broadband one, you're already rich.
So who is left that might use it in Africa ? Well my family perhaps could consider it, I work full time as an engineer but my wife (by choice) stays home to look after our toddler, she could conceivably make a few dollars every few days doing mechanical turk stuff to add to our budget.... but she could make a thousand times that much for the same amount of work if she filmed herself with a vibrator and posted it on clips4sale. Mechanical Turk sure can't compete with them on remuneration.
To those for whom mechanical turk pays well - it still pays worse than a lot of other things you could do, which are more fun, and the only thing stopping people is moralism, if you don't subscribe to that particular moralism, why would you do it?
The people in Africa who may work there because they need the money and lack another source and is desperate enough to do anything to get paid - and aren't likely to make much in more lucrative internet industries (like the 50% who have penisses instead of vaginas)... well they mostly don't have any better internet than what a 10 year old cellphone with 3G can offer, and that's generally their only connected device.
If you go to an internet cafe and use their computers - the price of sitting there for an hour will exceed the profit you can make on M.T.
In Nigeria they long ago figured out that one of the most lucrative internet industries is to lie about your identity and convince other people they'll get rich if they give you money - and Nigeria is one of the two best connected countries on the continent.
That would achieve nothing. The goal of equalising the minimum wage is to make the company either
1) Keep the jobs at home
2) Actually HAVE a bunch of people in that poor company able to live like millionaires giving it a huge economic injection which very soon will cause it's economy to grow to match that of the US benefiting everybody there. And gain an instant economic and military ally and a whole lot of new customers for US export businesses. Which again, leads to jobs for US workers.
The long term goal- is that it shouldn't matter where you were born, the quality of life you ultimately get is determined exclusively by your talents and efforts. We're a long way from solving most of the things that mess with that, this answer does nothing about the "rich parents = rich life" problem for example - but it the median it DOES remove the difference based purely on which piece of geography two people got laid in before you even existed.
It's kind of odd that protectionism has such a bad rep. The US became the richest country in the world almost entirely thanks to protectionism. Adam Smith's economic ideas were rejected in his day - and for 200 years after, it was the Hamilton plan that governed US economic relations for the first few centuries and that was an extremely protectionist approach. Hell the US didn't even recognise foreign copyrights until the 1920s (while trying to pressure other countries to recognise US copyrights).
The US only became anti-protectionist after world war 2 really, when their major industrial competitors (Germany, Britain and Itally) were laid to waste by the war, and US businesses saw a huge potential for making massive profits by selling to foreigners who could no longer buy from these countries. Suddenly it made sense to stop being protectionist so you could open up those markets even if it meant opening up your own.
It's quite a valid question whether this is still true today. It could very well be that the best thing to do for the US is to go back to protectionism and nourish an economy where US companies are a lot smaller because they barely sell outside the US - but they employ Americans and sell to Americans. Then you only open up those specific markets where you cannot produce sufficiently at home (perhaps they rely on a resource the US has a shortage of).
Of course, if you do that, and you're not an asshole - then you would support other countries doing the same - including cutting out US producers in favor of local ones (whether the US can avoid being an asshole is debateable, it's happened on occasion but this is definitely not the rule).
I'm generally anti-nationalist and consider the very concept of countries and borders to be arbitrary and senseless, I have every reason to reject protectionism as being utterly incompatible with my moral beliefs - but I wouldn't be so dishonest as to pretend it didn't work.
Because the goal of UBI is not to have people "live off" it, indeed it's not supposed to cover survival costs. It's to put a floor on quality of living by ensuring everybody has at LEAST a certain amount of money every month - encouraging them to increase that by earning money of their own on top. It's meant to be a fallback, a suplement. A way to get further education, money to save for a rainy day, something guaranteed so the not-already-rich can take the risk of starting a business.
It's meant to do a lot of things - but it's not meant to be a replacement for economic participation.
Now that may change. In a hypothetical future where AI and automation has taken almost all jobs - and there are simply fewer jobs that require human hands than there are people, it may have to become such - but in such a world the costs the rich bear have also gone down hugely, and their biggest problem is finding anybody to be their customers, it's to their advantage to pay enough taxes to fund a much higher UBI because without it, they won't be rich very long.
Even then you wouldn't see a complete absence of productivity in the rest of the population - you will merely see a shift away from working for money towards working for joy. Creative people will create - and not having to worry about how to buy food will only let them create more.
Except that 2 million is no punishment at all for Apple. And in fact...
52 weeks a year * 6 days a week (Assuming Apple's retail workers get at least one day a week off) = 312 days a year.
2007 - 2012 = 5 years
5 * 312 = 1560 days without lunches.
Current California minimum wage is 10 dollars an hour, but it was 9 dollars for the period in question.
30 minutes is half an hour so call it $4.50. Of course we KNOW that what they pay is LESS than the worker's time is worth to THEM - that's how profit works, but lets be ultra conservative and use the $4.50 as if that was the value of the lunch break (considering the breaks are unpaid it's seriously generous not to use the likely value of about 30 dollars).
So if we assume that work days were not so long as to require two breaks under the law (again - being hugely generous to apple since the evidence suggests otherwise).
That 1560 * 4.5 dollars saved per employee.
21 000 employees.
21000 * 1560 * 4.5 = $147420000.0
Just shy of 150 million dollars..
They made, at the bare minimum using every assumption in their favor) just shy of 150 million dollars by breaking the law - and we "punish" them by making them give 2 million dollars back.
And of course, the odds go up when you employ contractors, or pay employees badly or most of the other 'labour cost saving' things businesses love to do. All these things have the common outcomes of
1) Making employees far less invested in, and loyal to, the business (only an idiot is loyal to somebody who is not loyal to them)
2) Making them poorer
Poorer people have less to lose and more to gain from theft (so the odds of them deciding it's worth it go up), and less invested, less loyal people are more likely to rationalize away any moral qualms about stealing a laptop from the office.