In a nutshell, a living wage is one that keeps you a certain percentage above the poverty level with full-time employment. The poverty line has pretty well-established metrics. Everyone should get a living wage, and the minimum wage should be a living wage. However, those high school kids are unlikely to be working enough hours to be able to support themselves, on account of them also being in high school.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. If a human can't do a job for a living wage, that job shouldn't be done by a human. Any job that fits that criteria is either not worthwhile, or the process has not been optimized.
The very definition of inferior goods is that demand decreases when wages increase, which has overlap with, but is not the same as, cheaper goods. We can debate whether or not, or to what extent, Walmart operates in inferior goods, but if we accept the premise that this is a major part of their business model, it would be hurting at least that part of the model. There is also no shortage of discussing whether or not Walmart is a business of inferior goods, with the consensus leaning towards yes.
Walmart is where the most welfare/WIC/Food stamps is spent. That's a pretty good indicator that they deal in inferior goods. They are socially seen as basically the worst place to shop, and people may shop at other places just to avoid Walmart employees and customers, if they are economically capable of doing so.
The difference is that Mikey here needs to feel better than someone else, so he needs to be sure that there is someone lower than him on the totem pole. Regardless of the social costs of state-subsidized wage-slaves, they allow people like Mikey to feel better than someone else, and not feel bad that they are probably being exploited as well.
Also, not all jobs can command a living wage for a given area. You make the mistake that assumes all labor is valuable.
On the contrary, I consider lots of labor not worth human effort. That's why we need either a reasonable living wage, or a UBI, because cheap, often subsidized, labor is a disincentive towards labor-saving innovations. Why make something efficient enough to pay a decent wage when you can throw an army of dirt-cheap labor at your problems?
Wal-Mart's business is not just cheap goods, but the economic class of goods known as "inferior goods." If people have the money to shop elsewhere, they will shop at Wal-Mart considerably less, and likely even save money in the long run (since well-made goods don't need to be replaced as often, or fail less).
You don't understand how poverty works. Having a living wage gives you a lot of extra opportunities for self-improvement, as well as the ability to buy decent goods that provide better value. Even a change of a few dollars an hour can make an enormous difference in one's standard of living, which enables people to move on to viable career paths.
Plus, being cheap assholes holds back technological progress. Why bother investing in improvements when you can just throw cheap labor at all of your problems? No, we need to pay workers what they are worth, so that human time is valued instead of wasted.
Another reason might be that they don't have to deal with copyright policing to anywhere near the same extent with shorter videos. They don't have to make radical changes to their business model, and they can gain a foothold in the GIF and short vid markets.
It was an especially concentrated barrage, but they were pretty strongly anti-Bernie and pro-Clinton, because billionaire Bezos was with her, and on top of that, the Beltway bubble was in her corner as well. That's a big part of why it's a useless rag on a lot of topics, because while written by intelligent writers, they live in a fantasy world detached from reality, blindly accepting the conventional knowledge in spite of any kind of evidence to the contrary.
As for alternatives, I'm not sure I'd blanket recommend many organizations, just good journalists within them, quite often the one that tends to contrast a lot with their peers, tending towards deep distrust of powerful people and organizations. An easy example of a journalist I generally trust would be Glenn Greenwald or Lee Fang.
The people living the hottest places on Earth are less likely than say, continental Americans, to have air conditioners. But there are places where it's cold enough that they don't NEED AC. From what I can tell, it looks like Sweden, for example, tops out at 23 C, so I doubt they need to bother with that.
At least post-Bezos, it's little more than a corporate mouthpiece, instead of actual independent journalism. For example, they ran 16 negative Bernie stories in 24 hours during the election because they were very much in the tank for Clinton.
It's not a claim of "fake news," but acknowledging that there are significant biases inherent in their incentive structure, as well as the worldview of their reporters. Those biases undermine the ability for them to perform their most important role as the press, which is speaking truth to power.
And again, while I think that WaPo generally isn't fit for wiping one's ass, they were correct on this particular matter, which is what actually matters in this conversation.
The fuck are you on about? John Bolton is incredibly hawkish, and if he didn't mean that (he did, but I'll indulge your delusions), he probably should've made a comparison where the leader wasn't killed after appeasing the US, because that's what Kim is going to take away (as will the politically literate).
Yes, leaving a negotiation CAN be a sign of power, as can door-in-the-face demands. But that's a very specific tool to be used in a very specific way. Trump/Pence shit the bed, and ruined the hard work South Korea had done. That's the simplest, most likely explanation.
GOP leadership doesn't have a clue how international relations work, they just want to swing their dicks and say they are more powerful and tough than the Dems.
Trump is just saying this to save face because he fucked up putting a hell of a feather in his cap. He screwed the pooch on his demands, especially since we're showing a clear pattern of overthrowing any leader who appeases us.
Anyone who lives anywhere near Chicago knows the truth, and Chicago isn't unique. The names change but the machine stays the same. You can trot out a thousand "studies" by groups that have no interest in fixing the system as proof that it doesn't happen; watching it happen proves otherwise.
Then catch some motherfuckers and provide some actual proof. Out of billions of votes, we've only seen about 30 somewhat credible claims, and they were pretty much all family members.
Yeah, purging the roles of dead people is just a way to disenfranchise the living. No bias in THAT claim, is there?
I don't even know what your deluded ass is even trying to claim. I cited the specific example of Alabama shutting down DMVs only in areas that are mostly black after passing a voter ID law.
Yeah, if the system were perfect there would be no fraud. But it isn't, and claiming there is no fraud is just sticking your head in the sand.
I'm not claiming that there is no fraud. I'm claiming that a very specific kind of fraud does not exist, and that people who claim it does are either lying to cover the fraud and other tricks they do, or is an uniformed imbecile parroting their bullshit rhetoric.
You might notice, the same people who claim there is no vote fraud are also the ones who don't want to fix the voter rolls.
Nobody in power wants to fix the voter rolls. Neither Dems nor the GOP.
And when someone shows up who does want to fix the rolls, the ones who don't want them fixed cry "racism!". We haven't seen that in THIS discussion, have we?
I'm not aware of anybody in power trying to do that, or claiming that such actions are racist. They've claimed that completely unrelated voter ID laws are racist, but there's empirical evidence to support that claim, unlike yours.
The first part of the post is you claiming without evidence that this is a common practice, while every study on the matter has concluded the very opposite.
Yeah, keeping dead people from voting is such a disenfranchisement. Really. The dead have rights, too!
Don't plead ignorance here. It's well known that these are methods to disenfranchise the living voters in the state. Alabama passes a voter ID law, and then they almost immediately shut down all the DMVs in predominantly black counties. It's pretty clear what they were doing.
As for dead voters, that's primarily a problem of voter rolls, and fixing voter roll problems also fixes the other actual form of meatbag fraud.
We're not talking about what takes less effort, we're talking about what works.
And it DOES NOT WORK. That's the point, and if you had bothered to respond to ALL of my questions, you'd have to acknowledge that. From a business perspective, this form of fraud would be a less for more position, which is a niche that guarantees failure.
And has been used for generations.
No, it hasn't. The meatbag trick that's been used in modern election is voting in multiple jurisdictions, and even that is pretty rare, because using meatbags to cheat is for suckers.
I got it. You think that only the very tip top of any list of concerns should be dealt with. Ignore everything but what you think is the easiest.
No, let me spell it out for you. This type of fraud is so rare that for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist. Hanging chads had more of an effect on elections than voter impersonation in the last 40 years.
It's not an election integrity issue, because if you care about the integrity of elections, this is effectively last on your list. This is an attempt to disenfranchise voters under the guise of election integrity. Nobody who understands ANYTHING about modern elections is concerned about voter impersonation, but they are concerned about rigged primaries, political duopolies, voter disenfranchisement, and voting machine vulnerabilities, because those actual hurt democracy.
The concern is that there are lots of political reasons to lie, and absent hard evidence, they can turn "uses off-the-shelf-malware and a tor exit node" into "high confidence." Basically, if we can't see the evidence ourselves, we should give an assessment from anybody with major government contracts zero confidence until we see direct evidence.
You're damn fucking right I'm nasty. Politics is inherently on a scale beyond what our brains can intuitively understand. Civility has no place in politics, otherwise manipulative cunts like you hide behind someone saying mean words.
As for why you can't pull off voter impersonation, it's for the same reason that cleaning a football stadium with a toothbrush is ineffective. It's mathematically absurd. Plus, the risk of getting caught grows exponentially with every single vote cast. Any other method of influencing an election would be more effective and less risky.
This is slashdot, so we know better. If you seriously think that the best attack vector by far isn't the voting machines, fucking kill yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
In a nutshell, a living wage is one that keeps you a certain percentage above the poverty level with full-time employment. The poverty line has pretty well-established metrics. Everyone should get a living wage, and the minimum wage should be a living wage. However, those high school kids are unlikely to be working enough hours to be able to support themselves, on account of them also being in high school.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. If a human can't do a job for a living wage, that job shouldn't be done by a human. Any job that fits that criteria is either not worthwhile, or the process has not been optimized.
The very definition of inferior goods is that demand decreases when wages increase, which has overlap with, but is not the same as, cheaper goods. We can debate whether or not, or to what extent, Walmart operates in inferior goods, but if we accept the premise that this is a major part of their business model, it would be hurting at least that part of the model. There is also no shortage of discussing whether or not Walmart is a business of inferior goods, with the consensus leaning towards yes.
Walmart is where the most welfare/WIC/Food stamps is spent. That's a pretty good indicator that they deal in inferior goods. They are socially seen as basically the worst place to shop, and people may shop at other places just to avoid Walmart employees and customers, if they are economically capable of doing so.
The difference is that Mikey here needs to feel better than someone else, so he needs to be sure that there is someone lower than him on the totem pole. Regardless of the social costs of state-subsidized wage-slaves, they allow people like Mikey to feel better than someone else, and not feel bad that they are probably being exploited as well.
On the contrary, I consider lots of labor not worth human effort. That's why we need either a reasonable living wage, or a UBI, because cheap, often subsidized, labor is a disincentive towards labor-saving innovations. Why make something efficient enough to pay a decent wage when you can throw an army of dirt-cheap labor at your problems?
Wal-Mart's business is not just cheap goods, but the economic class of goods known as "inferior goods." If people have the money to shop elsewhere, they will shop at Wal-Mart considerably less, and likely even save money in the long run (since well-made goods don't need to be replaced as often, or fail less).
Higher wages would be detrimental to Wal-Mart.
You don't understand how poverty works. Having a living wage gives you a lot of extra opportunities for self-improvement, as well as the ability to buy decent goods that provide better value. Even a change of a few dollars an hour can make an enormous difference in one's standard of living, which enables people to move on to viable career paths.
Plus, being cheap assholes holds back technological progress. Why bother investing in improvements when you can just throw cheap labor at all of your problems? No, we need to pay workers what they are worth, so that human time is valued instead of wasted.
We also need to fix our broken system of subsidies and tariffs that add sugar to almost everything that is both convenient and cheap.
Another reason might be that they don't have to deal with copyright policing to anywhere near the same extent with shorter videos. They don't have to make radical changes to their business model, and they can gain a foothold in the GIF and short vid markets.
From what I can tell, 23 is the average annual high temperature, at least prior to climate change bullshit.
It was an especially concentrated barrage, but they were pretty strongly anti-Bernie and pro-Clinton, because billionaire Bezos was with her, and on top of that, the Beltway bubble was in her corner as well. That's a big part of why it's a useless rag on a lot of topics, because while written by intelligent writers, they live in a fantasy world detached from reality, blindly accepting the conventional knowledge in spite of any kind of evidence to the contrary.
As for alternatives, I'm not sure I'd blanket recommend many organizations, just good journalists within them, quite often the one that tends to contrast a lot with their peers, tending towards deep distrust of powerful people and organizations. An easy example of a journalist I generally trust would be Glenn Greenwald or Lee Fang.
The people living the hottest places on Earth are less likely than say, continental Americans, to have air conditioners. But there are places where it's cold enough that they don't NEED AC. From what I can tell, it looks like Sweden, for example, tops out at 23 C, so I doubt they need to bother with that.
At least post-Bezos, it's little more than a corporate mouthpiece, instead of actual independent journalism. For example, they ran 16 negative Bernie stories in 24 hours during the election because they were very much in the tank for Clinton.
It's not a claim of "fake news," but acknowledging that there are significant biases inherent in their incentive structure, as well as the worldview of their reporters. Those biases undermine the ability for them to perform their most important role as the press, which is speaking truth to power.
And again, while I think that WaPo generally isn't fit for wiping one's ass, they were correct on this particular matter, which is what actually matters in this conversation.
The fuck are you on about? John Bolton is incredibly hawkish, and if he didn't mean that (he did, but I'll indulge your delusions), he probably should've made a comparison where the leader wasn't killed after appeasing the US, because that's what Kim is going to take away (as will the politically literate).
WaPo is utter garbage, but predicting that Bolton wants war is like predicting the sun will rise, so even those hacks didn't fuck this up.
The key difference is a South Korean administration that actually wants peace.
That's what "Libya model" meant. War criminal John Bolton said it.
Yes, leaving a negotiation CAN be a sign of power, as can door-in-the-face demands. But that's a very specific tool to be used in a very specific way. Trump/Pence shit the bed, and ruined the hard work South Korea had done. That's the simplest, most likely explanation.
GOP leadership doesn't have a clue how international relations work, they just want to swing their dicks and say they are more powerful and tough than the Dems.
Trump is just saying this to save face because he fucked up putting a hell of a feather in his cap. He screwed the pooch on his demands, especially since we're showing a clear pattern of overthrowing any leader who appeases us.
Then catch some motherfuckers and provide some actual proof. Out of billions of votes, we've only seen about 30 somewhat credible claims, and they were pretty much all family members.
I don't even know what your deluded ass is even trying to claim. I cited the specific example of Alabama shutting down DMVs only in areas that are mostly black after passing a voter ID law.
I'm not claiming that there is no fraud. I'm claiming that a very specific kind of fraud does not exist, and that people who claim it does are either lying to cover the fraud and other tricks they do, or is an uniformed imbecile parroting their bullshit rhetoric.
Nobody in power wants to fix the voter rolls. Neither Dems nor the GOP.
I'm not aware of anybody in power trying to do that, or claiming that such actions are racist. They've claimed that completely unrelated voter ID laws are racist, but there's empirical evidence to support that claim, unlike yours.
The first part of the post is you claiming without evidence that this is a common practice, while every study on the matter has concluded the very opposite.
Don't plead ignorance here. It's well known that these are methods to disenfranchise the living voters in the state. Alabama passes a voter ID law, and then they almost immediately shut down all the DMVs in predominantly black counties. It's pretty clear what they were doing.
As for dead voters, that's primarily a problem of voter rolls, and fixing voter roll problems also fixes the other actual form of meatbag fraud.
There's no need to be kind to trolls making facile arguments that fly in the face of a basic understanding of technology.
And it DOES NOT WORK. That's the point, and if you had bothered to respond to ALL of my questions, you'd have to acknowledge that. From a business perspective, this form of fraud would be a less for more position, which is a niche that guarantees failure.
No, it hasn't. The meatbag trick that's been used in modern election is voting in multiple jurisdictions, and even that is pretty rare, because using meatbags to cheat is for suckers.
No, let me spell it out for you. This type of fraud is so rare that for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist. Hanging chads had more of an effect on elections than voter impersonation in the last 40 years.
It's not an election integrity issue, because if you care about the integrity of elections, this is effectively last on your list. This is an attempt to disenfranchise voters under the guise of election integrity. Nobody who understands ANYTHING about modern elections is concerned about voter impersonation, but they are concerned about rigged primaries, political duopolies, voter disenfranchisement, and voting machine vulnerabilities, because those actual hurt democracy.
The concern is that there are lots of political reasons to lie, and absent hard evidence, they can turn "uses off-the-shelf-malware and a tor exit node" into "high confidence." Basically, if we can't see the evidence ourselves, we should give an assessment from anybody with major government contracts zero confidence until we see direct evidence.
You're damn fucking right I'm nasty. Politics is inherently on a scale beyond what our brains can intuitively understand. Civility has no place in politics, otherwise manipulative cunts like you hide behind someone saying mean words.
As for why you can't pull off voter impersonation, it's for the same reason that cleaning a football stadium with a toothbrush is ineffective. It's mathematically absurd. Plus, the risk of getting caught grows exponentially with every single vote cast. Any other method of influencing an election would be more effective and less risky.
This is slashdot, so we know better. If you seriously think that the best attack vector by far isn't the voting machines, fucking kill yourself.