Minimum wage is an arbitrary price control, a wage is just a price on labour.
To an economist or a mathematician, maybe.
In reality, a wage is what people use to live. It is in no way the same thing as something like the cost of a beer.
If somebody is willing to buy a service at 5 bucks but not at 10 for example, then your statement reads like so: because of politics you should have to pay 10 bucks for the service and if you cannot afford it - tough.
Actually it reads: "you have to pay 10 bucks for this service so it can be delivered while meeting the basic requirements for civilised society".
You could make the same argument about anything that increases costs, from worker safety standards to regulations against lead paint.
Though as a Libertarian I'm sure you think employers should be able to endanger their employees and customers at will so long as it increases their profits.
Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, [...]
It does if there's money in it. Or, at least, it would if it wasn't already illegal.
[...] governments on the other hand force you to participate, if you do not like it, you can always opt out to go to jail for tax evasion.
Or not earn enough to be taxed. Or leave the country.
Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't.
Yes, it should. That's the whole reason it exists.
A minimum wage job shouldn't require any skills. It should be the going rate for unskilled, inexperienced, basic labour.
If it's not, it's not because the minimum wage is too low, it's because the business model is broken.
Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.
What skills will someone learn in an unskilled below-minimum wage job, that will help them get a similarly unskilled, but marginally better paid, slightly-above-minimum wage job ?
Yeah, let's print some and give it away to people. That will sure boost the economy, at least according to your idiotic theory.
It would if it were going to real people and not banks and (by proxy) businesses and the wealthy.
(Which is not, of course, either condoning or advocating unlimited money printing.)
The economy is depressed because everyone who isn't rich, is unemployed, broke and/or weighed down by debt. And the rich don't spend proportionally as much as they own and earn, and certainly not across as much of the economy.
No it doesn't. If you're unemployed, or not employed full-time, you will be living below the "standard" of people on the minimum wage, all other factors being equal.
Well, in an ideal world there wouldn't be any unemployment (other than people transitioning between jobs, genuinely disabled/incapable of working (who should be supported by welfare), etc), but Governments influenced by big business have long since abrogated their responsibility to implement full-employment policies and decent welfare support.
You could say the minimum wage sets a floor on living standards for full-time workers with no dependents, but that's not as catchy.
I would argue the minimum wage should set a floor on living standards for the typical family, not individual. It should be possible for a typical family to live on a single minimum wage.
But, yes, it's not as catchy to give the full breakdown and all caveats. But this is a discussion on Slashdot, and the broad *point* is the same, regardless of the minor incidental details.
Nither side is really that effective, or hazardous. Until you get a significant increase in wages. Say $20 minimum wage, where it would be enough for the low end workers to have a significant improvement in quality of life, however at the same time, making many jobs much to expensive to maintain, and force companies to find ways to improve efficiency or outsource.
Or, horrific as the idea might sound to some, reducing profit margins.
Wealthy people don't keep their money in bank accounts, you big dummy. They buy stocks which provides capital for companies to get started and to operate, creating and maintaining jobs.
If no-one can afford to buy their products and services, why would companies create jobs ?
Learn something about economics, please.
Learn something about reality, please.
Wealth and job creation is driven from the bottom up, not the top down.
Lets look at it like this. Lets say they do jump from 10-15 bucks overnight. well, what about the people who were making 15.25? are they getting a 5 buck an hour raise as well? or are they now considered minimum wage jobs??
Can the business raise the price of their product or service to meet those higher salary costs ?
so now we have people who worked hard to get their raises getting shit on
If contemporary businesses weren't driven to minimise the wages of their lowest paid workers purely so they could maximise the wages of their highest paid, there'd be much less angst about paying the lowest earners more.
Only when those businesses have succeeded, and almost everyone is being paid minimum wage (or less), and no-one has any money to buy the products and services those businesses want to sell, will they realise the flaw in their cunning plan.
Really? I dont believe that at all. one should not be paid 20 buck an hour to pick apples, or take an order at mcdonalds, the job is not worth that much, if it were our food would cost double and we would be in the same boat. just because you now make 50 grand instead of 25 sounds good, but if the cost of everything goes up to match that change, whats the point??
So your argument is society must always have an oppressed, poverty-stricken underclass, reliant upon charity or welfare to survive ?
Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, [...]
It does (and did) if there's money to be made from it.
Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.
Please tell us about the general skills someone learns in an unskilled job paying less than minimum wage, that they don't already have, that are required in a job paying minimum wage.
Whether a job is a 'liability' or not is also a question to the laws, many of which are also designed to destroy competition to the larger players in the field, those who donate money to the politicians. However checking oil and tire pressure and wiping your windshield and pumping your gas is a courtesy that can no longer be provided to you by the gas station, not because of liability, but because of the all the labour laws and inflation and government is the responsible party for all of it.
No, this is a lie.
That service can absolutely be provided, it's just that no-one is prepared to pay what it costs (in no small part because their incomes have been suppressed for thirty-plus years to facilitate ever-greater corporate profits).
Business model is not broken only due to artificial govt laws that do not operate in the free market but are there f9r political purposes.
All laws are artificial and do not operate in the free market.
If minimum wage was set tomorrow to 100 usd per hour by your logic it would mean that every business is broken, because near nobody can afford those labour prices.
No, this is what we call an excluded middle fallacy.
We (and this is a problem afflicting most western countries) don't have high unemployment because people are being paid too much. We have high unemployment because there's not enough work for them to do. Sure, you can get rid of the safeguards around things like minimum wage and worker safety, which will drop the unemployment numbers, but all you've done is engaged in a slightly different form of rigging the numbers. The core problem remains.
Employment for the sake of employment is not the goal. You can do that tomorrow by reinstating slavery and having people move piles of rocks around (which is, basically, what people who think there shouldn't be a minimum wage are arguing for). Creating wealth and increasing living standards for everyone is the goal.
Nonsense and propaganda. You cannot state anything until those increases actually kick in and are in effect for some time.
Actually I feel pretty confident stating that if more people have more money, economic activity will increase.
Minimum wage is actually minimum ability.
No, minimum wage is setting a floor on living standards.
It cannot extract non-existing money from small business, but it can prevent people with abilities that are below minimum wage from finding jobs.
If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle.
...It's not the Engineers who decide whether or not the people get replaced.
We are within a generation - two at the most - of at least half of the population being made literally redundant. Any job they could possibly do, will be done faster, cheaper and better by robots. Basically, if it's a job involving manual labour, it'll be automated, with the possible exception of high-end positions catering to the luxury demands of the ultra-rich. Many management jobs will also go as collateral damage (don't need to manage robots, after all).
Probably a generation after that advances in AI will have taken over a huge swathe of lower-end "knowledge worker" jobs.
With greedy, psychopathic, neoliberal Governments running most of the civilised world, the future is looking pretty grim for the common man.
So, how about some evidence for these claims? I'm particularly interested actual double-blind testing of 4K versus 2K displays at "normal viewing distances" which is pretty ambiguous on its own.
The difference between an old 15" MBP and new Retina MBP is easily noticable.
I wouldn't have actually believed it until I borrowed a work Retina MBP for a couple of weeks. Now I'm eagerly looking for an affordable ~27" IPS 4k display to replace my existing monitors.
It's not that society doesn't want to avoid jury duty because of jury duty. It's because it messes up your life.
You get paid $40/day for Jury Duty, and many employers don't pay for Jury Duty at all. For a typical middle-class American, you lose your $100-$200/day job for a $40/day ($5/hour) jury duty. You can't live on that much of a cut in pay.
The solution here seems pretty obvious, but undoubtedly the usual suspects would cry "socialism!".
The ACCC a few years back put in a new law (which Apple fought tooth and nail, source: http://www.afr.com/p/technolog... [afr.com]) which required every piece of electronics sold in Australia to have a two year "warranty". I put that in sarcasm quotes not because it's invalid (the ACCC has some *serious* bite here, enough to scare Apple into compliance), but because it's not technically a warranty. It's simply: "a reasonable expectation that an electronic product will be fit for purpose for two years from purchase".
I think you'll find that two years is just a minimum.
Which is to say you could probably argue that a high-end mobile phone would be expected by any "reasonable" person to work for more like 3-4, possibly even 5, years.
If I had an Apple phone fail within 3 years I'd expect Apple to replace it without too much haranguing. Closer to the 4 year mark I'd expect to have to get consumer affairs involved, but still succeed.
You're confusing usefulness with relevance. Thunderbolt is, and will reman, irrelevant to PCs, largely because PCs have plenty of internal expansion capability and sufficient USB ports, Display Ports, HDMI ports, etc.
Not often I wish for mod points and don't have them, but this pretty much nails it.
Thunderbolt is solid technology - basically PCIe on a cable - but its relevance to machines that don't need PCIe on a cable (or provide an equivalent - ie: a docking station) is close to nil.
The use case for Thunderbolt on Macs, due to their typical design focusing on form factor over other factors, is reasonable.
The use case outside of Macs, is niche (to say the least).
Trust me, you have no idea what "revenue generation" is.
Here in Australia, a personalised number plate will set you back anywhere from $400-odd to a few grand. And that's before even getting into "rare" plates that people already own.
Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs;
No we don't. It's be decades since any western country had full employment, or even a policy to achieve same, thanks to the sadistic neoliberal idea of NAIRU. In most of the western world, there are an order of magnitude more job seekers than there are jobs.
And that's not even taking into consideration the swathes of the population involved in unproductive, pointless, bullshit jobs that serve no real purpose (eg: most layers of management).
Within a generation, two at the outside, the vast, vast majority of jobs involving manual labour will be performed by robots, except for those targeting the high-end luxury market. I expect a fairly large chunk of today's "intellectual" jobs will also disappear towards the end of that timeframe (eg: basic engineering, software development, lower levels of management, etc) as AI capabilities improve.
Slashdot Mirror
Minimum wage is an arbitrary price control, a wage is just a price on labour.
To an economist or a mathematician, maybe.
In reality, a wage is what people use to live. It is in no way the same thing as something like the cost of a beer.
If somebody is willing to buy a service at 5 bucks but not at 10 for example, then your statement reads like so: because of politics you should have to pay 10 bucks for the service and if you cannot afford it - tough.
Actually it reads: "you have to pay 10 bucks for this service so it can be delivered while meeting the basic requirements for civilised society".
You could make the same argument about anything that increases costs, from worker safety standards to regulations against lead paint.
Though as a Libertarian I'm sure you think employers should be able to endanger their employees and customers at will so long as it increases their profits.
Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, [...]
It does if there's money in it. Or, at least, it would if it wasn't already illegal.
[...] governments on the other hand force you to participate, if you do not like it, you can always opt out to go to jail for tax evasion.
Or not earn enough to be taxed. Or leave the country.
Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't.
Yes, it should. That's the whole reason it exists.
A minimum wage job shouldn't require any skills. It should be the going rate for unskilled, inexperienced, basic labour.
If it's not, it's not because the minimum wage is too low, it's because the business model is broken.
Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.
What skills will someone learn in an unskilled below-minimum wage job, that will help them get a similarly unskilled, but marginally better paid, slightly-above-minimum wage job ?
Yeah, let's print some and give it away to people. That will sure boost the economy, at least according to your idiotic theory.
It would if it were going to real people and not banks and (by proxy) businesses and the wealthy.
(Which is not, of course, either condoning or advocating unlimited money printing.)
The economy is depressed because everyone who isn't rich, is unemployed, broke and/or weighed down by debt. And the rich don't spend proportionally as much as they own and earn, and certainly not across as much of the economy.
No it doesn't. If you're unemployed, or not employed full-time, you will be living below the "standard" of people on the minimum wage, all other factors being equal.
Well, in an ideal world there wouldn't be any unemployment (other than people transitioning between jobs, genuinely disabled/incapable of working (who should be supported by welfare), etc), but Governments influenced by big business have long since abrogated their responsibility to implement full-employment policies and decent welfare support.
You could say the minimum wage sets a floor on living standards for full-time workers with no dependents, but that's not as catchy.
I would argue the minimum wage should set a floor on living standards for the typical family, not individual. It should be possible for a typical family to live on a single minimum wage.
But, yes, it's not as catchy to give the full breakdown and all caveats. But this is a discussion on Slashdot, and the broad *point* is the same, regardless of the minor incidental details.
Nither side is really that effective, or hazardous. Until you get a significant increase in wages. Say $20 minimum wage, where it would be enough for the low end workers to have a significant improvement in quality of life, however at the same time, making many jobs much to expensive to maintain, and force companies to find ways to improve efficiency or outsource.
Or, horrific as the idea might sound to some, reducing profit margins.
Wealthy people don't keep their money in bank accounts, you big dummy. They buy stocks which provides capital for companies to get started and to operate, creating and maintaining jobs.
If no-one can afford to buy their products and services, why would companies create jobs ?
Learn something about economics, please.
Learn something about reality, please.
Wealth and job creation is driven from the bottom up, not the top down.
Lets look at it like this. Lets say they do jump from 10-15 bucks overnight. well, what about the people who were making 15.25? are they getting a 5 buck an hour raise as well? or are they now considered minimum wage jobs??
Can the business raise the price of their product or service to meet those higher salary costs ?
so now we have people who worked hard to get their raises getting shit on
If contemporary businesses weren't driven to minimise the wages of their lowest paid workers purely so they could maximise the wages of their highest paid, there'd be much less angst about paying the lowest earners more.
Only when those businesses have succeeded, and almost everyone is being paid minimum wage (or less), and no-one has any money to buy the products and services those businesses want to sell, will they realise the flaw in their cunning plan.
Really? I dont believe that at all. one should not be paid 20 buck an hour to pick apples, or take an order at mcdonalds, the job is not worth that much, if it were our food would cost double and we would be in the same boat. just because you now make 50 grand instead of 25 sounds good, but if the cost of everything goes up to match that change, whats the point??
So your argument is society must always have an oppressed, poverty-stricken underclass, reliant upon charity or welfare to survive ?
Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, [...]
It does (and did) if there's money to be made from it.
Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.
Please tell us about the general skills someone learns in an unskilled job paying less than minimum wage, that they don't already have, that are required in a job paying minimum wage.
Whether a job is a 'liability' or not is also a question to the laws, many of which are also designed to destroy competition to the larger players in the field, those who donate money to the politicians. However checking oil and tire pressure and wiping your windshield and pumping your gas is a courtesy that can no longer be provided to you by the gas station, not because of liability, but because of the all the labour laws and inflation and government is the responsible party for all of it.
No, this is a lie.
That service can absolutely be provided, it's just that no-one is prepared to pay what it costs (in no small part because their incomes have been suppressed for thirty-plus years to facilitate ever-greater corporate profits).
Business model is not broken only due to artificial govt laws that do not operate in the free market but are there f9r political purposes.
All laws are artificial and do not operate in the free market.
If minimum wage was set tomorrow to 100 usd per hour by your logic it would mean that every business is broken, because near nobody can afford those labour prices.
No, this is what we call an excluded middle fallacy.
We (and this is a problem afflicting most western countries) don't have high unemployment because people are being paid too much. We have high unemployment because there's not enough work for them to do. Sure, you can get rid of the safeguards around things like minimum wage and worker safety, which will drop the unemployment numbers, but all you've done is engaged in a slightly different form of rigging the numbers. The core problem remains.
Employment for the sake of employment is not the goal. You can do that tomorrow by reinstating slavery and having people move piles of rocks around (which is, basically, what people who think there shouldn't be a minimum wage are arguing for). Creating wealth and increasing living standards for everyone is the goal.
Nonsense and propaganda. You cannot state anything until those increases actually kick in and are in effect for some time.
Actually I feel pretty confident stating that if more people have more money, economic activity will increase.
Minimum wage is actually minimum ability.
No, minimum wage is setting a floor on living standards.
It cannot extract non-existing money from small business, but it can prevent people with abilities that are below minimum wage from finding jobs.
If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle.
Economic activity is increased by more people having more money to spend ?
Inconceivable !
As mentioned earlier, this government was not voted in, the previous one was voted out.
Exactly.
You've only got to look at where the votes went, and the approvals ratings of the current Government (and especially Abbot) to see that.
We got demoed this 6 months or so ago.
I still fail to see what this buys you over a bunch of regular blades or rackmounts running your virtualisation platform of choice.
If enough people are out of work without some sort of guaranteed income... they'll just eat the robot owners.
Right. Maybe they'll get lucky and the killbots will have a preset kill limit.
We are rapidly approaching the first time in history, when the rulers will no longer need any human servants at all.
...It's not the Engineers who decide whether or not the people get replaced.
We are within a generation - two at the most - of at least half of the population being made literally redundant. Any job they could possibly do, will be done faster, cheaper and better by robots. Basically, if it's a job involving manual labour, it'll be automated, with the possible exception of high-end positions catering to the luxury demands of the ultra-rich. Many management jobs will also go as collateral damage (don't need to manage robots, after all).
Probably a generation after that advances in AI will have taken over a huge swathe of lower-end "knowledge worker" jobs.
With greedy, psychopathic, neoliberal Governments running most of the civilised world, the future is looking pretty grim for the common man.
So, how about some evidence for these claims? I'm particularly interested actual double-blind testing of 4K versus 2K displays at "normal viewing distances" which is pretty ambiguous on its own.
The difference between an old 15" MBP and new Retina MBP is easily noticable.
I wouldn't have actually believed it until I borrowed a work Retina MBP for a couple of weeks. Now I'm eagerly looking for an affordable ~27" IPS 4k display to replace my existing monitors.
It's not that society doesn't want to avoid jury duty because of jury duty. It's because it messes up your life.
You get paid $40/day for Jury Duty, and many employers don't pay for Jury Duty at all. For a typical middle-class American, you lose your $100-$200/day job for a $40/day ($5/hour) jury duty. You can't live on that much of a cut in pay.
The solution here seems pretty obvious, but undoubtedly the usual suspects would cry "socialism!".
You're missing the point.
"Spent" doing what ?
The ACCC a few years back put in a new law (which Apple fought tooth and nail, source: http://www.afr.com/p/technolog... [afr.com]) which required every piece of electronics sold in Australia to have a two year "warranty". I put that in sarcasm quotes not because it's invalid (the ACCC has some *serious* bite here, enough to scare Apple into compliance), but because it's not technically a warranty. It's simply: "a reasonable expectation that an electronic product will be fit for purpose for two years from purchase".
I think you'll find that two years is just a minimum.
Which is to say you could probably argue that a high-end mobile phone would be expected by any "reasonable" person to work for more like 3-4, possibly even 5, years.
If I had an Apple phone fail within 3 years I'd expect Apple to replace it without too much haranguing. Closer to the 4 year mark I'd expect to have to get consumer affairs involved, but still succeed.
You're confusing usefulness with relevance. Thunderbolt is, and will reman, irrelevant to PCs, largely because PCs have plenty of internal expansion capability and sufficient USB ports, Display Ports, HDMI ports, etc.
Not often I wish for mod points and don't have them, but this pretty much nails it.
Thunderbolt is solid technology - basically PCIe on a cable - but its relevance to machines that don't need PCIe on a cable (or provide an equivalent - ie: a docking station) is close to nil.
The use case for Thunderbolt on Macs, due to their typical design focusing on form factor over other factors, is reasonable.
The use case outside of Macs, is niche (to say the least).
Trust me, you have no idea what "revenue generation" is.
Here in Australia, a personalised number plate will set you back anywhere from $400-odd to a few grand. And that's before even getting into "rare" plates that people already own.
Our society has become massively automated compared to the middle ages. And we have 25 times the world population now. Yet we still have plenty of jobs;
No we don't. It's be decades since any western country had full employment, or even a policy to achieve same, thanks to the sadistic neoliberal idea of NAIRU. In most of the western world, there are an order of magnitude more job seekers than there are jobs.
And that's not even taking into consideration the swathes of the population involved in unproductive, pointless, bullshit jobs that serve no real purpose (eg: most layers of management).
Within a generation, two at the outside, the vast, vast majority of jobs involving manual labour will be performed by robots, except for those targeting the high-end luxury market. I expect a fairly large chunk of today's "intellectual" jobs will also disappear towards the end of that timeframe (eg: basic engineering, software development, lower levels of management, etc) as AI capabilities improve.
And yet there are apparently bugs still being found, otherwise there's be nothing to download for a 3 year old server [...]
Of course there would.
Just because a bug was fixed in a firmware update 3 years ago doesn't mean that update was applied 3 years ago.