My guess is that they probably did notice this fundamental issue of live load, which is common to every building built, ever.
Residential live floor loads vary from 30 to 60 psf (pounds per square foot) depending on function of the floor. This 20 2U server load you cite is 110 psf, about twice the maximum seen in residential construction, but hardly unusual for industrial construction. The floor of 33 Thomas in New York (an AT&T switching/data facility is designed for 200-300 psf.
Not my job. Try looking at the Canadian government web site.
Actually it is. You made the claim the treaty existed, but give no evidence whatsoever that it does. This is called upholding the burden of proof.
Making a false claim and then saying that those requesting proof should "look it up" (impossible since it does not exist) is one of the laziest techniques of debate trolling.
Currently you are looking like a lazy troll. If you are not, just name the treaty and this appearance will be instantly dispelled. Up to you.
There's a whole lot of empty between us and the nearest star. I wonder what the actual odds are of collision over that distance. Would be a neat problem for someone who knows this stuff... which is not me.
As I post this there are 160 posts, but nobody has tried to make an actual estimate, so here goes. According to this paper there is one dust particle per million cubic meters in local interstellar space (a figure that surprised me, it seemed much higher than I expected).
A one square centimeter spacecraft would sweep out a volume 4.5 LY long, with is 4.5E13 km, or 4.5E18 cm. A million cubic meters is 1E12 cm^3, So the 1 cm^2 area would get by 4.5E6 dust particles on its way, or an average impact density of one per 20 square microns. You will need a distributed mesh that can function after this level of dust penetration.
Since a dust particle impact on a film would create an explosion (of 1E-4 J) the obvious solution is to make the mesh a true net with empty space between nodes. An impact on the mesh filament would vaporize that segment, but the number of such impacts (location random) could be estimated in advance, and the design based on preserving functionality reliably with that level of random disconnection.
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
Except that it isn't true. Look, for example, at this discussion by conservative economist, and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett.
Some key excerpts:
All economists reject that idea. They point out that prices are set by market forces and the suppliers of goods and services aren’t only C-corporations, which pay taxes on the corporate tax schedule, but also sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations that are taxed under the individual income tax. Other suppliers include foreign corporations and nonprofits.
Therefore, corporations cannot raise prices to compensate for the corporate income tax because they will be undercut by businesses to which the tax does not apply. It should also be noted that the states have substantially different corporate tax regimes, including some that do not tax corporations at all, and we do not observe that prices for goods and services vary from state to state depending on its taxation of corporations.
In 1962, the University of Chicago economist Arnold C. Harberger, published an important article arguing that the corporate tax was borne entirely by shareholders. This was unquestionably true in the first instance; that is, when the corporate income tax was first imposed. The tax simply reduced corporate profits and had to come out of the pockets of shareholders, given that it could not be shifted onto consumers.
But as time went by, some economists argued that a substantial portion of the corporate income tax was ultimately paid by workers in the form of lower wages...
...The Treasury economists conclude that 82 percent of the corporate tax falls on capital and 18 percent on labor. This is very close to the methodology of the private Tax Policy Center, whose analyses are frequently cited in policy debates. It assumes that 80 percent of the corporate tax is borne by capital and 20 percent by labor.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
This gets the story of the switch from agriculture to manufacturing and white collar work completely backwards.
It was not a process of automation on the farm putting farmers out of work who then migrated to other jobs.
It was a process of new high labor-demand industries (the original factory system), and clerical work of new complex economy, that paid higher wages pulling people away from farms that caused this switch. It was a labor-demand driven process.
As people left farming for better jobs, farms got sold and assembled into ever larger farms which could then support the high capital requirement for automation to replace the now non-existent plow boys and girls.
See for example which depicts the ag side of this transformation.
A process that eliminates jobs, and reduce labor demand, which we are now facing, is completely different
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate...
Real history shows that it is THIS claim that is absolutely false. The people displaced in the original Industrial Revolution did not ever find new employment, in high paying jobs or elsewhere. They became destitute. Eventually the productivity increase of the IR created a wealthy enough society that decent employment was restored for the full population, but it took 70 years to do this. Most of the people whose livelihoods that were destroyed in 1770 did not ever get decent jobs again. Their children did not. Their grandchildren did not. Their great-grandchildren did however, around 1840.
The beggars, squalid poverty, workhouses, debtors prisons of Dickens time were all very real.
Interestingly, that little clause you stuck in there "at least in the aggregate" indicates you realize to some degree the falseness of your claim. It is exactly the problem that people exist as people, not as aggregates, that makes the average increase in wealth from automation completely useless to the people put out of work.
If robotics puts people out of work in large numbers today, we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Exactly. A top exec will be pulling in a 100% bonus typically. And then there are options, guaranteed severance packages, etc. Do you have an employment contract guaranteeing term of employment and compensation including severance? Those guys do. Base salary is a con job. Tell use total compensation of don't waste our time.
You are leaving out the most prominent bit of "non-salary" compensation: bonuses.
Bonuses aren't salary, but a top level exec will always, always get them because if he does not qualify, he wouldn't be kept in the position anyway. What is a typical bonus for a top exec? 100% is usual. So, in fact even without factoring in options (which can easily outstrip all other forms of compensation), or severance packages, their real take-home pay is double what is quoted.
In publicly traded companies this stuff is in the annual SEC filings so you can look it up yourself, its all on-line these days. The last company I worked for HR gave me static about getting a salary increase commensurate with my experience, position and contribution claiming that what I wanted was 90% of what the CIO made. Can't have that! But I pointed out to him that the SEC filings showed that the CIO got a 100% bonus each year, so really what I was asking for was only 45%. We settled for 42.5%.
Asteroid mining would do nothing for Earth resources anyways. What would be the point in mining asteroids only to return the materials to Earth, they are worth far more in orbit.
Plenty of buyers in orbit! Lots of factories and consumers!
Oh wait, there aren't any of those things. Raw materials are feedstocks to manufacturing, which make stuff that are put in the hands of consumers (there are many types of consumers). None of that exists in orbit.
Well maybe we could put the factories in orbit?
How much does that cost? Has anyone ever put a factory in orbit? Who services the orbiting factory? Who buys the stuff the factory makes?
A case could be made that one day, centuries from now, when a space-based civilization exists, raw materials in orbit might be worth more than on the ground, but certainly not for many iterations of space mining.
...The biggest cost of getting into orbit and beyond is the cost of accelerating large amounts of matter to or beyond 11.2km/s....
No it isn't. It is almost entirely the high cost of spaceflight hardware - an extremely high tech bit of manufacturing, the costliest end of aerospace tech.
Raw materials in space do not make you a vehicle equipped with electronics, intricate propulsion systems, power generation, thermal control, environmental control all of which is ultra-high-reliability (because otherwise you die, or you probe quits working where repairmen are unavailable) in a vacuum subjected to hard UV, space flare radiation, etc. All that requires a very sophisticated set of factories that happen to only reside on the surface of Earth. Even free raw materials in space (which space mining most definitely is not) would not change that.
Currently part of that high cost hardware is used just for launching, and being non-reusable makes the launch itself expensive, which we are working on with Space-X, etc. But even getting cheap launches does not eliminate the majority of the high cost of space flight. Check out what fraction of projects like the ISS, or any space mission at all, is actually due to launch costs. Even today, with throw-away launchers, these are always a modest component, never the driver to the project's overall cost.
This stuff has nothing to do with Marxism; I'm always surprised to hear that "cultural Marxism" term. Who came up with it?!
"Cultural Marxism" is a recent far-right-wing invention, dating from around 1999, but becoming popular among right-wing conspiracy fans a few years later.
It is another iteration in the long-running right-wing paranoid fantasy of a conspiracy to destroy the Greatness of America (or in the case of extreme-right mass murderer Anders Breivik's case, Greatness of White People, which means the same). Earlier they had the Communist Party, which at least actually existed, though incredible notions, and numerous falsehoods, were attributed to it. The Trilateral Commission, has been extremely popular as a source of The Conspiracy, and entire thesis would be required to enumerate all of its manifestations. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
As a concept it is as devoid of actual content as the Sokal Hoax was or anything about "cryoscapes" might be.
This is an example of the very common "Principal-Agent Problem" which exists in some form in many, many commercial products and services. Manufacturers and service providers make decisions in effect for consumer that benefit their bottom line, but pass on all sorts of costs to consumers as a result.
In this case cheap energy-wasteful wall-warts that reduce the manufacturer cost but adds to everyone's electricity bill. Market competition does not address this issue since purveyors of electronics are not using "wall-wart power efficiency" in their sales campaigns, or even reveal how much power they waste if the consumer wants to find out (you have to buy it and see).
Only regulation by an organization that acts in the interests of the consumer can address this.
First Line of Carly's Concession Speech
on
Carly Is Out
·
· Score: 1
This campaign was always about citizenship—taking back our country from a political class that only serves the big, the powerful, the wealthy, and the well connected.
So she was running against herself the whole time. Who knew?
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
on
Carly Is Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But no one has ever adequately explained to me how, if society values a certain form of labor at $x, but we legislate to be $x*1.2, prices won't eventually inflate by x1.2; leaving the minimum wage earner with a larger bank account, but the same buying power; and society still paying equivalently the same in buying power for the labor that it had before.
Allow me to help you out. For goods and services that are provided through minimum wage labor, the actual labor cost is a fairly small component (not insignificant, but dominated by other costs). Raising the minimum wage form the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour is calculated to raise the cost of fast food for example by 4.3%, but more than doubling the salary of the employee. Obviously the cost of service provided by minimum wage labor cannot be 100% labor which is the only situation where your hypothetical could hold. Minimum wage workers are left much, much better off.
Certainly, I do recall from my youth, when minimum wages increased a few months later prices would also increase at places like McDonalds, Subway, and such... the places where minimum wage earners go.
Your youth must have been in the 1970s, I gather. An anomalous period of high inflation when the prices of everything was going up.
Granted, it's not like my degree is in economics, and I know there IS data that shows that minimum wage increases do boost the economy. But it just feels like voodoo.
Good that you are interested in actual facts (many here are not, their mind is made up and have no need for stinkin' facts). Yes, minimum wage increases do boost the economy. There are many natural experiments here, where one area raises minimum wages, while another does not. It is not voodoo at all. It is just very, very basic economics. Businesses make money selling things. To sell things people must have money to buy things, and be willing to spend it. Low wage people spend almost all their money buying things that many businesses sell, they aren't putting it into overseas bank accounts or buying yachts. In a consumer driven economy like ours, a higher share of the GDP going to labor leads to a higher growth rate, since there is more economic activity. That share has been declining for decades, and so has the economic growth rate.
Plus, when I was growing up, minimum wage jobs were for high-schoolers learning how to have a job, college kids earning beer money, and retirees who just wanted to get out of the house. No one expected to make a career out of it.
And now many people do depend on minimum wages to make a living. It is impossible in truth, so the difference is made up by public assistance - the government subsidizing low wage businesses. Walmart instructs its workers how to apply for public assistance, since otherwise they could not work at Walmart.
But a key point about minimum wage that so many here seem not to notice, but my Republican uncle who runs a business, and supports minimum wages, does - it levels the wage playing field. Without a minimum wage competitive pressure prevents him from offering higher wages to his workers, since the guy down the street will undercut him on prices by not doing that. When a decent minimum wage floor is in place, that disappears. There is no competitive disadvantage.
Freedom isn't free. When you take your $70K/year out of college and blow it on a nice car, a party lifestyle, and expensive booze, you should not be surprised to find yourselves in shackles eventually.
Or have children and support a family, like normal people do. Right, nobody ever has a kid with leukemia that runs up huge bills and keeps you tied down just trying to keep her alive as long as you can. Financial disaster strikes nobody ever, its all just a big fucking party.
And the string of acquisitions by Mayer, handing out hundreds of millions to buy companies of questionable value from her friends, former Googlers, brings home the self-referential self-dealing of big business execs.
You realize that your cell phone is based on a subscription model don't you? Unless you pay someone for some kind of connectivity it is pretty useless as a phone. And yet you have no issues with that....
Are you on salary with Microsoft, is this is a per-post gig?
A correct analogy would be if the maker of your phone required monthly payments to keep your phone working, not with your phone service. Funny isn't, we actually use the word "service" in the name when the service model is necessary and rational.
We are all happy with paying an ISP monthly to provide the essential service of continuous connection to the outside world (just like phone service).
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that they probably did notice this fundamental issue of live load, which is common to every building built, ever.
Residential live floor loads vary from 30 to 60 psf (pounds per square foot) depending on function of the floor. This 20 2U server load you cite is 110 psf, about twice the maximum seen in residential construction, but hardly unusual for industrial construction. The floor of 33 Thomas in New York (an AT&T switching/data facility is designed for 200-300 psf.
Not my job. Try looking at the Canadian government web site.
Actually it is. You made the claim the treaty existed, but give no evidence whatsoever that it does. This is called upholding the burden of proof.
Making a false claim and then saying that those requesting proof should "look it up" (impossible since it does not exist) is one of the laziest techniques of debate trolling.
Currently you are looking like a lazy troll. If you are not, just name the treaty and this appearance will be instantly dispelled. Up to you.
Whoosh?
But would they? I wonder what the odds are?
There's a whole lot of empty between us and the nearest star. I wonder what the actual odds are of collision over that distance. Would be a neat problem for someone who knows this stuff ... which is not me.
As I post this there are 160 posts, but nobody has tried to make an actual estimate, so here goes. According to this paper there is one dust particle per million cubic meters in local interstellar space (a figure that surprised me, it seemed much higher than I expected).
A one square centimeter spacecraft would sweep out a volume 4.5 LY long, with is 4.5E13 km, or 4.5E18 cm. A million cubic meters is 1E12 cm^3, So the 1 cm^2 area would get by 4.5E6 dust particles on its way, or an average impact density of one per 20 square microns. You will need a distributed mesh that can function after this level of dust penetration.
Since a dust particle impact on a film would create an explosion (of 1E-4 J) the obvious solution is to make the mesh a true net with empty space between nodes. An impact on the mesh filament would vaporize that segment, but the number of such impacts (location random) could be estimated in advance, and the design based on preserving functionality reliably with that level of random disconnection.
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
Except that it isn't true. Look, for example, at this discussion by conservative economist, and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett.
Some key excerpts:
All economists reject that idea. They point out that prices are set by market forces and the suppliers of goods and services aren’t only C-corporations, which pay taxes on the corporate tax schedule, but also sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations that are taxed under the individual income tax. Other suppliers include foreign corporations and nonprofits.
Therefore, corporations cannot raise prices to compensate for the corporate income tax because they will be undercut by businesses to which the tax does not apply. It should also be noted that the states have substantially different corporate tax regimes, including some that do not tax corporations at all, and we do not observe that prices for goods and services vary from state to state depending on its taxation of corporations.
In 1962, the University of Chicago economist Arnold C. Harberger, published an important article arguing that the corporate tax was borne entirely by shareholders. This was unquestionably true in the first instance; that is, when the corporate income tax was first imposed. The tax simply reduced corporate profits and had to come out of the pockets of shareholders, given that it could not be shifted onto consumers.
But as time went by, some economists argued that a substantial portion of the corporate income tax was ultimately paid by workers in the form of lower wages...
...The Treasury economists conclude that 82 percent of the corporate tax falls on capital and 18 percent on labor. This is very close to the methodology of the private Tax Policy Center, whose analyses are frequently cited in policy debates. It assumes that 80 percent of the corporate tax is borne by capital and 20 percent by labor.
So no, consumers do not pay that tax. Those with capital, the shareholders do, and to a small extent, eventually, workers. 70% of all shares are held by the top 5% of the population (by wealth) by the way, 42% by just the top 1%. But if productivity gains from automation are being passed on to workers (unlike what has happened since 1972) then their real wages will be rising anyway.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
This gets the story of the switch from agriculture to manufacturing and white collar work completely backwards.
It was not a process of automation on the farm putting farmers out of work who then migrated to other jobs.
It was a process of new high labor-demand industries (the original factory system), and clerical work of new complex economy, that paid higher wages pulling people away from farms that caused this switch. It was a labor-demand driven process.
As people left farming for better jobs, farms got sold and assembled into ever larger farms which could then support the high capital requirement for automation to replace the now non-existent plow boys and girls.
See for example which depicts the ag side of this transformation.
A process that eliminates jobs, and reduce labor demand, which we are now facing, is completely different
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate...
Real history shows that it is THIS claim that is absolutely false. The people displaced in the original Industrial Revolution did not ever find new employment, in high paying jobs or elsewhere. They became destitute. Eventually the productivity increase of the IR created a wealthy enough society that decent employment was restored for the full population, but it took 70 years to do this. Most of the people whose livelihoods that were destroyed in 1770 did not ever get decent jobs again. Their children did not. Their grandchildren did not. Their great-grandchildren did however, around 1840.
The beggars, squalid poverty, workhouses, debtors prisons of Dickens time were all very real.
Interestingly, that little clause you stuck in there "at least in the aggregate" indicates you realize to some degree the falseness of your claim. It is exactly the problem that people exist as people, not as aggregates, that makes the average increase in wealth from automation completely useless to the people put out of work.
If robotics puts people out of work in large numbers today, we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Exactly. A top exec will be pulling in a 100% bonus typically. And then there are options, guaranteed severance packages, etc. Do you have an employment contract guaranteeing term of employment and compensation including severance? Those guys do. Base salary is a con job. Tell use total compensation of don't waste our time.
You are leaving out the most prominent bit of "non-salary" compensation: bonuses.
Bonuses aren't salary, but a top level exec will always, always get them because if he does not qualify, he wouldn't be kept in the position anyway. What is a typical bonus for a top exec? 100% is usual. So, in fact even without factoring in options (which can easily outstrip all other forms of compensation), or severance packages, their real take-home pay is double what is quoted.
In publicly traded companies this stuff is in the annual SEC filings so you can look it up yourself, its all on-line these days. The last company I worked for HR gave me static about getting a salary increase commensurate with my experience, position and contribution claiming that what I wanted was 90% of what the CIO made. Can't have that! But I pointed out to him that the SEC filings showed that the CIO got a 100% bonus each year, so really what I was asking for was only 45%. We settled for 42.5%.
Asteroid mining would do nothing for Earth resources anyways. What would be the point in mining asteroids only to return the materials to Earth, they are worth far more in orbit.
Plenty of buyers in orbit! Lots of factories and consumers!
Oh wait, there aren't any of those things. Raw materials are feedstocks to manufacturing, which make stuff that are put in the hands of consumers (there are many types of consumers). None of that exists in orbit.
Well maybe we could put the factories in orbit?
How much does that cost? Has anyone ever put a factory in orbit? Who services the orbiting factory? Who buys the stuff the factory makes?
A case could be made that one day, centuries from now, when a space-based civilization exists, raw materials in orbit might be worth more than on the ground, but certainly not for many iterations of space mining.
...The biggest cost of getting into orbit and beyond is the cost of accelerating large amounts of matter to or beyond 11.2km/s....
No it isn't. It is almost entirely the high cost of spaceflight hardware - an extremely high tech bit of manufacturing, the costliest end of aerospace tech.
Raw materials in space do not make you a vehicle equipped with electronics, intricate propulsion systems, power generation, thermal control, environmental control all of which is ultra-high-reliability (because otherwise you die, or you probe quits working where repairmen are unavailable) in a vacuum subjected to hard UV, space flare radiation, etc. All that requires a very sophisticated set of factories that happen to only reside on the surface of Earth. Even free raw materials in space (which space mining most definitely is not) would not change that.
Currently part of that high cost hardware is used just for launching, and being non-reusable makes the launch itself expensive, which we are working on with Space-X, etc. But even getting cheap launches does not eliminate the majority of the high cost of space flight. Check out what fraction of projects like the ISS, or any space mission at all, is actually due to launch costs. Even today, with throw-away launchers, these are always a modest component, never the driver to the project's overall cost.
Obligatory XKCD cite: https://xkcd.com/1321/
This stuff has nothing to do with Marxism; I'm always surprised to hear that "cultural Marxism" term. Who came up with it?!
"Cultural Marxism" is a recent far-right-wing invention, dating from around 1999, but becoming popular among right-wing conspiracy fans a few years later.
It is another iteration in the long-running right-wing paranoid fantasy of a conspiracy to destroy the Greatness of America (or in the case of extreme-right mass murderer Anders Breivik's case, Greatness of White People, which means the same). Earlier they had the Communist Party, which at least actually existed, though incredible notions, and numerous falsehoods, were attributed to it. The Trilateral Commission, has been extremely popular as a source of The Conspiracy, and entire thesis would be required to enumerate all of its manifestations. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
As a concept it is as devoid of actual content as the Sokal Hoax was or anything about "cryoscapes" might be.
Everybody but you thinks the U.S. economy is 70% larger than the Chinese economy.
Some mighty fine FUD you have there. Next time try bringing some facts to the table.
A link to the Wikipedia page on this "Principal-Agent Problem".
This is an example of the very common "Principal-Agent Problem" which exists in some form in many, many commercial products and services. Manufacturers and service providers make decisions in effect for consumer that benefit their bottom line, but pass on all sorts of costs to consumers as a result.
In this case cheap energy-wasteful wall-warts that reduce the manufacturer cost but adds to everyone's electricity bill. Market competition does not address this issue since purveyors of electronics are not using "wall-wart power efficiency" in their sales campaigns, or even reveal how much power they waste if the consumer wants to find out (you have to buy it and see).
Only regulation by an organization that acts in the interests of the consumer can address this.
This campaign was always about citizenship—taking back our country from a political class that only serves the big, the powerful, the wealthy, and the well connected.
So she was running against herself the whole time. Who knew?
But no one has ever adequately explained to me how, if society values a certain form of labor at $x, but we legislate to be $x*1.2, prices won't eventually inflate by x1.2; leaving the minimum wage earner with a larger bank account, but the same buying power; and society still paying equivalently the same in buying power for the labor that it had before.
Allow me to help you out. For goods and services that are provided through minimum wage labor, the actual labor cost is a fairly small component (not insignificant, but dominated by other costs). Raising the minimum wage form the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour is calculated to raise the cost of fast food for example by 4.3%, but more than doubling the salary of the employee. Obviously the cost of service provided by minimum wage labor cannot be 100% labor which is the only situation where your hypothetical could hold. Minimum wage workers are left much, much better off.
Certainly, I do recall from my youth, when minimum wages increased a few months later prices would also increase at places like McDonalds, Subway, and such... the places where minimum wage earners go.
Your youth must have been in the 1970s, I gather. An anomalous period of high inflation when the prices of everything was going up.
Granted, it's not like my degree is in economics, and I know there IS data that shows that minimum wage increases do boost the economy. But it just feels like voodoo.
Good that you are interested in actual facts (many here are not, their mind is made up and have no need for stinkin' facts). Yes, minimum wage increases do boost the economy. There are many natural experiments here, where one area raises minimum wages, while another does not. It is not voodoo at all. It is just very, very basic economics. Businesses make money selling things. To sell things people must have money to buy things, and be willing to spend it. Low wage people spend almost all their money buying things that many businesses sell, they aren't putting it into overseas bank accounts or buying yachts. In a consumer driven economy like ours, a higher share of the GDP going to labor leads to a higher growth rate, since there is more economic activity. That share has been declining for decades, and so has the economic growth rate.
Plus, when I was growing up, minimum wage jobs were for high-schoolers learning how to have a job, college kids earning beer money, and retirees who just wanted to get out of the house. No one expected to make a career out of it.
And now many people do depend on minimum wages to make a living. It is impossible in truth, so the difference is made up by public assistance - the government subsidizing low wage businesses. Walmart instructs its workers how to apply for public assistance, since otherwise they could not work at Walmart.
But a key point about minimum wage that so many here seem not to notice, but my Republican uncle who runs a business, and supports minimum wages, does - it levels the wage playing field. Without a minimum wage competitive pressure prevents him from offering higher wages to his workers, since the guy down the street will undercut him on prices by not doing that. When a decent minimum wage floor is in place, that disappears. There is no competitive disadvantage.
Freedom isn't free. When you take your $70K/year out of college and blow it on a nice car, a party lifestyle, and expensive booze, you should not be surprised to find yourselves in shackles eventually.
Or have children and support a family, like normal people do. Right, nobody ever has a kid with leukemia that runs up huge bills and keeps you tied down just trying to keep her alive as long as you can. Financial disaster strikes nobody ever, its all just a big fucking party.
Asshole.
And the string of acquisitions by Mayer, handing out hundreds of millions to buy companies of questionable value from her friends, former Googlers, brings home the self-referential self-dealing of big business execs.
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Try one hundred million dollars.
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
Any number of sociopathic executives. The golden parachute will be provided in advance of course.
You realize that your cell phone is based on a subscription model don't you? Unless you pay someone for some kind of connectivity it is pretty useless as a phone. And yet you have no issues with that....
Are you on salary with Microsoft, is this is a per-post gig?
A correct analogy would be if the maker of your phone required monthly payments to keep your phone working, not with your phone service. Funny isn't, we actually use the word "service" in the name when the service model is necessary and rational.
We are all happy with paying an ISP monthly to provide the essential service of continuous connection to the outside world (just like phone service).
Mod Zontar up somebody! He has it in a nutshell.