You make a common mistake, which is to assume that because a statement is qualified, hedged, or relative, that it is less reliable than a proclamation of certitude.
The problem with your statement is not that it is cautious, it is that you confuse an appeal to authority (and an unnamed, fictitious authority at that) with facts and evidence.
You posted your opinions on slashdot - if you don't want people to disagree with you, don't post
What makes you think I don't want people to disagree with me? What I would prefer, however, is that you actually bring some facts and insights to the table, something you sadly seem incapable of.
Companies pay their workers as little as possible,
Yes, we call that a free market.
Company would charge $110 per hour for the wiring, which....I'll give you a second to think about this....means by definition my friend was worth that much per hour for the contractor. He got $18.
No, it means that the company's work was worth that much to the customer. If your friend thought his labor by itself was worth $110, he could have simply gone into business for himself. But the simple fact is that the customer mostly paid for know-how, coordination, insurance, support, and other contributions from the company, while the labor your friend supplied was actually just a minor input.
Do you really like paying more in taxes so more-money-than-God corporations can enjoy even more profits?
Not at all: I think we should eliminate welfare and minimum wage.
Oh, I see, your definition of a "Free market" is that one source of energy (fossil fuels) gets to ignore all of its externalities. That's nonsense, of course. EVs have been operating at a massive disadvantage even with these subsidies
What do you think EVs are powered by? Unicorn farts? The primary power source for EVs is fossil fuels.
Yes, other companies have had the same tax breaks available, but that's not what I'm getting at.
What I'm getting at is that Tesla has never had to produce EVs, batteries, solar, and green energy components that are competitive with traditional technologies in a free market.
I tend to agree. EVs, batteries, solar and green energy are the future.
They are. But so far, the company has benefited from tax breaks and subsidies and never operated in a competitive environment. It's questionable whether they will actually be able to deliver a competitive product once the subsidies go away and these technologies become mainstream.
They rallied the residents in lower income areas behind the idea that they were going to be stuck with old buses when the more affluent areas would get the new infrastructure.
So they were telling them the truth then, while politicians were lying to them. Your problem with this is... what?
But just within CA, the areas of SF and LA alone have the population density equal to that of Germany (between Munich and Berlin or Bohn, for example).
And mass transit usage in Germany is still in the single digits.
The reason is nothing more than politics.
You bet it is. American voters are wondering why they should finance a government-sponsored ride for a few percent of the population already living in wealth and luxury in our cities.
Powerful people don't use mass transit, therefore there is no priority on mass transit.
Powerful people love mass transit; no, not the ultra-wealthy ultra-powerful like Hillary, but educated white collar workers in major cities. That's why places like NYC, DC, and Boston have such extensive mass transit systems and why those systems tend to connect to the places where the elites congregate.
Operations -- the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative -- are perpetually starved for cash.
And that's the answer: transit systems are not economically self-sufficient; they require massive government subsidies to stay afloat. In the US, there is less appetite to levy the taxes required to support transit systems. In Europe, people are taxes accordingly. And "people" is "the middle class", not "the wealthy"; middle class income taxes in Europe are generally roughly 50% higher than in the US, and in addition to that, there is a high VAT.
So, if you want European-style transit systems and other government benefits, it's simple: raise taxes on the average American family from 25% to 35%.
. He said moons such as Saturn's Titan and Jupiter's Europa have been routinely called planets by planetary scientists since the time of Galileo.
I think few people would call that a "planet". In common usage, moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars.
The only issue is that there are some other things that orbit stars: asteroids, stellar rings, etc. Among those, planets are objects large enough to have been shaped into a spheroid under gravitation.
Again, it's not his record unless you can show evidence to support your claims. In many cases, it seems as though you aren't paying attention to the facts and instead are choosing an interpretation that fits your opinions.
You mean "facts" and "evidence" like "economists generally suggest" and "they were better than"? As a long-term former Democrat, former progressive, and Obama voter, you can bet that I have considered the positions you take and actually used to hold them myself.
There are things to criticize about Obama, but the things you are choosing to harp on don't make you seem very informed, or objective.
I gave you my assessment of Obama's presidency. I didn't invite you to debate it and, given your biases, consider that pointless. I encourage you to do the necessary reading on your own why people reach the conclusions that I and many other reached about Obama and his policies.
You can disagree with all sorts of policies, and there are criticisms that I could understand, but for an insult to stick it needs to have at least some shred of truth.
I don't care for insulting people. The "blowhard nut" was NEW22's phrasing that I was simply echoing.
The way I would put it myself is that Obama was rivaling Bush for being the worst president during my lifetime, creating massive moral hazards with his bailouts, paying off cronies in the energy and medical sectors, pushing through a disastrous healthcare reform package, massively interfering with the economic recovery, interfering with due process and freedom of religion in the US, weakening the US abroad, causing millions of people to leave the workforce, and expanding the abuse of executive power to unprecedented levels. These aren't "policy disagreements", that's his record. The part that is astounding is how oblivious Obama and his fans are to his failures and lack of competence.
Mind you, I voted for Obama. I didn't think much of him even when he ran, but I thought he was better than McCain.
“Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it's to serve as a bad example”
I think it's great that Berlin takes on the burden to demonstrate the dangers of this kind of policies. And I'm glad they are using Google to do it. It's a win-win situation!
That's debatable, but it's also irrelevant. The problem is that irresponsible bankers, CEOs, and homebuyers, people who should have gone bankrupt and lost their shirts, were kept in wealth and power.
That got us out of a recession.
All recessions end, the question is how quickly and how well, and the recovery from this recession has been dismally back. We aren't even back to pre-recession employment levels. The recovery was worse than what Obama himself predicted would happen if we did nothing. That is, the recovery is piss-poor even by Obama's own standards.
Can't say I remember any race baiting (sure your not thinking of Trump here?)
We can debate at length what he did, but the simple fact is that race relations deteriorated massively under Obama.
and cronyism is kind of a political thing (Trump manages this just fine as well).
Trump has done nothing on the massive scale of the ACA, cronyism that ensures continued massive profits to insurers, the AMA, and drug manufacturers.
Math isn't your strong suit, is it? If the money is coming from taxes on these businesses (and they raise prices), it isn't coming from taxes on the rest of us.
The workers still get the government benefits, which we taxpayers pay for under existing taxes. In addition, under the proposal, there is a new tax that Amazon pays, which isn't going to be offset by spending anywhere. That's why we end up paying twice.
Also, raising prices is one option. There are others. Maybe the CEO doesn't need an 8th mansion.
What you think that CEO "needs" doesn't matter. That CEO, like any investor or professional, is going to go where he gets the most money for his labor. If you tax him too much, he's going to change business, move out of state, move out of country, or retire.
And before you discount that, that's what's actually happened in places that passed minimum wage hikes. The increased sales from people having money to spend largely made up for the increased labor costs.
And you don't get what that actually means. It doesn't mean that a person who used to earn $8/h now earns $15/h. What it means is that a person who used to earn $8/h became unemployable and probably goes fully on welfare while someone who is worth $15/h got hired to replace them. And the increased demand for more skilled labor drives up prices throughout the economy.
And the worst part is: the reason why we have so many people who can't command a decent salary is because they leave public schools illiterate, innumerate, and unskilled. So, first government fails to educate these people, and then it makes them entirely unemployable through minimum wage laws, and skilled and educated workers are supposed to fit the bill for it all. That's progress Democrat-style.
Yes! Like the president! And like pretty much everybody else in the federal government, politician or high level bureaucrat alike, of either party or no party.
Which part of "a federal government full of people who lust for power and money" was too hard for you to understand?
Could you remind me of the Obama early morning bat shit crazy tweets again. I seem to have forgotten about them.
Sadly, Obama's nuttiness wasn't limited to tweeting or picking fights with his minions, he screwed us over with bailouts, monetary policy, race baiting, and cronyism.
A reasonable question, and it deserves a reasonable answer, so here it is: Bob Woodward's book comes out on Tuesday, and it contains hundreds of hours of carefully transcribed conversations with dozens of White House aides, all saying roughly the same thing that this op-ed is saying
The question isn't whether the statements about how the WH is run are accurate, the question is whether the claims about the authorship of the op-ed are true.
As for what Woodward says about the WH, so what? I like small government. A WH that's ineffective and chaotic sounds good to me, certainly better than the creepy authoritarians that Bob Woodward and the WaPo favor for the WH.
Why would this push anyone with even a tiny bit of ethics left in them away from the Democrats?
Why would anyone with even a tiny bit of ethics have allegiance to either party?
Are you imagining a White House full of secret Democrats?
I'm imagining a federal government full of people who lust for power and money, and who are going to fight tooth and nail anything that threatens their privileges.
These are Republicans trying to contain a blowhard nut. There is nothing about that that is unethical on Democrats' part.
It's a shame that there weren't any Democrats trying to contain a blowhard nut in the last administration; but that's because the last blowhard nut paid off his corrupt entourage handsomely.
You can tell from the WH reaction that it is real, or at least close enough to truth that they think it is.
The memo may be "real" in the sense that it may have been written by someone in the federal government (rather than being completely fabricated by the NYT). That someone may also be a Republican. And they may be using their position to sabotage executive actions. None of those would be news: there are plenty of Republicans and plenty of federal employees who hate Trump. However, there is no reason to believe that the person who wrote it has any special insights about the things they write about. I mean, the memo could be written by Bruce Ohr for all we know.
So, if employers start refusing to hire poor people, their available pool of workers becomes near zero, massively increasing the wages the remaining workers can demand, driving costs up....making the poor desirable employees....hey look! problem gone.
If labor costs go up, prices go up and/or employers go out of business. Either way, it's not Amazon or Bezos that pays for this, it's Americans as a whole. And the effect is that we are paying for government assistance twice: once through taxes, and a second time through higher prices.
Conservatives have been propagandized to be skeptical of the minimum wage
Leftists have been propagandized to think that they can force businesses to pay workers more than they are worth to the business. Elementary logic ought to tell you that that is impossible. But, of course, elementary logic is what leftists lack (not to mention a lack of morality, decency, and compassion).
And Trump has been bashing Amazon for some time now, so it might get some grudging support from the MAGA hat set.
So you're saying that a high minimum wage is a rational choice because Trump might support a tax on Amazon?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your statement is not that it is cautious, it is that you confuse an appeal to authority (and an unnamed, fictitious authority at that) with facts and evidence.
What makes you think I don't want people to disagree with me? What I would prefer, however, is that you actually bring some facts and insights to the table, something you sadly seem incapable of.
Yes, we call that a free market.
No, it means that the company's work was worth that much to the customer. If your friend thought his labor by itself was worth $110, he could have simply gone into business for himself. But the simple fact is that the customer mostly paid for know-how, coordination, insurance, support, and other contributions from the company, while the labor your friend supplied was actually just a minor input.
Not at all: I think we should eliminate welfare and minimum wage.
What do you think EVs are powered by? Unicorn farts? The primary power source for EVs is fossil fuels.
Yes, other companies have had the same tax breaks available, but that's not what I'm getting at.
What I'm getting at is that Tesla has never had to produce EVs, batteries, solar, and green energy components that are competitive with traditional technologies in a free market.
They are. But so far, the company has benefited from tax breaks and subsidies and never operated in a competitive environment. It's questionable whether they will actually be able to deliver a competitive product once the subsidies go away and these technologies become mainstream.
No, but they used to.
A rogue planet is to a planet kind of like a dead parrot is to a parrot.
So they were telling them the truth then, while politicians were lying to them. Your problem with this is... what?
And mass transit usage in Germany is still in the single digits.
You bet it is. American voters are wondering why they should finance a government-sponsored ride for a few percent of the population already living in wealth and luxury in our cities.
Powerful people love mass transit; no, not the ultra-wealthy ultra-powerful like Hillary, but educated white collar workers in major cities. That's why places like NYC, DC, and Boston have such extensive mass transit systems and why those systems tend to connect to the places where the elites congregate.
And that's the answer: transit systems are not economically self-sufficient; they require massive government subsidies to stay afloat. In the US, there is less appetite to levy the taxes required to support transit systems. In Europe, people are taxes accordingly. And "people" is "the middle class", not "the wealthy"; middle class income taxes in Europe are generally roughly 50% higher than in the US, and in addition to that, there is a high VAT.
So, if you want European-style transit systems and other government benefits, it's simple: raise taxes on the average American family from 25% to 35%.
I think few people would call that a "planet". In common usage, moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars.
The only issue is that there are some other things that orbit stars: asteroids, stellar rings, etc. Among those, planets are objects large enough to have been shaped into a spheroid under gravitation.
You mean "facts" and "evidence" like "economists generally suggest" and "they were better than"? As a long-term former Democrat, former progressive, and Obama voter, you can bet that I have considered the positions you take and actually used to hold them myself.
I gave you my assessment of Obama's presidency. I didn't invite you to debate it and, given your biases, consider that pointless. I encourage you to do the necessary reading on your own why people reach the conclusions that I and many other reached about Obama and his policies.
I don't care for insulting people. The "blowhard nut" was NEW22's phrasing that I was simply echoing.
The way I would put it myself is that Obama was rivaling Bush for being the worst president during my lifetime, creating massive moral hazards with his bailouts, paying off cronies in the energy and medical sectors, pushing through a disastrous healthcare reform package, massively interfering with the economic recovery, interfering with due process and freedom of religion in the US, weakening the US abroad, causing millions of people to leave the workforce, and expanding the abuse of executive power to unprecedented levels. These aren't "policy disagreements", that's his record. The part that is astounding is how oblivious Obama and his fans are to his failures and lack of competence.
Mind you, I voted for Obama. I didn't think much of him even when he ran, but I thought he was better than McCain.
“Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it's to serve as a bad example”
I think it's great that Berlin takes on the burden to demonstrate the dangers of this kind of policies. And I'm glad they are using Google to do it. It's a win-win situation!
That's debatable, but it's also irrelevant. The problem is that irresponsible bankers, CEOs, and homebuyers, people who should have gone bankrupt and lost their shirts, were kept in wealth and power.
All recessions end, the question is how quickly and how well, and the recovery from this recession has been dismally back. We aren't even back to pre-recession employment levels. The recovery was worse than what Obama himself predicted would happen if we did nothing. That is, the recovery is piss-poor even by Obama's own standards.
We can debate at length what he did, but the simple fact is that race relations deteriorated massively under Obama.
Trump has done nothing on the massive scale of the ACA, cronyism that ensures continued massive profits to insurers, the AMA, and drug manufacturers.
The workers still get the government benefits, which we taxpayers pay for under existing taxes. In addition, under the proposal, there is a new tax that Amazon pays, which isn't going to be offset by spending anywhere. That's why we end up paying twice.
What you think that CEO "needs" doesn't matter. That CEO, like any investor or professional, is going to go where he gets the most money for his labor. If you tax him too much, he's going to change business, move out of state, move out of country, or retire.
And you don't get what that actually means. It doesn't mean that a person who used to earn $8/h now earns $15/h. What it means is that a person who used to earn $8/h became unemployable and probably goes fully on welfare while someone who is worth $15/h got hired to replace them. And the increased demand for more skilled labor drives up prices throughout the economy.
And the worst part is: the reason why we have so many people who can't command a decent salary is because they leave public schools illiterate, innumerate, and unskilled. So, first government fails to educate these people, and then it makes them entirely unemployable through minimum wage laws, and skilled and educated workers are supposed to fit the bill for it all. That's progress Democrat-style.
Yes! Like the president! And like pretty much everybody else in the federal government, politician or high level bureaucrat alike, of either party or no party.
Which part of "a federal government full of people who lust for power and money" was too hard for you to understand?
Sadly, Obama's nuttiness wasn't limited to tweeting or picking fights with his minions, he screwed us over with bailouts, monetary policy, race baiting, and cronyism.
The question isn't whether the statements about how the WH is run are accurate, the question is whether the claims about the authorship of the op-ed are true.
As for what Woodward says about the WH, so what? I like small government. A WH that's ineffective and chaotic sounds good to me, certainly better than the creepy authoritarians that Bob Woodward and the WaPo favor for the WH.
Why would anyone with even a tiny bit of ethics have allegiance to either party?
I'm imagining a federal government full of people who lust for power and money, and who are going to fight tooth and nail anything that threatens their privileges.
It's a shame that there weren't any Democrats trying to contain a blowhard nut in the last administration; but that's because the last blowhard nut paid off his corrupt entourage handsomely.
The memo may be "real" in the sense that it may have been written by someone in the federal government (rather than being completely fabricated by the NYT). That someone may also be a Republican. And they may be using their position to sabotage executive actions. None of those would be news: there are plenty of Republicans and plenty of federal employees who hate Trump. However, there is no reason to believe that the person who wrote it has any special insights about the things they write about. I mean, the memo could be written by Bruce Ohr for all we know.
If labor costs go up, prices go up and/or employers go out of business. Either way, it's not Amazon or Bezos that pays for this, it's Americans as a whole. And the effect is that we are paying for government assistance twice: once through taxes, and a second time through higher prices.
No, they'll either go out of business or pass on the costs to consumers.
If it's the latter, I'll end up paying twice for SNAP, once through taxes, and a second time through higher prices.
Leftists have been propagandized to think that they can force businesses to pay workers more than they are worth to the business. Elementary logic ought to tell you that that is impossible. But, of course, elementary logic is what leftists lack (not to mention a lack of morality, decency, and compassion).
So you're saying that a high minimum wage is a rational choice because Trump might support a tax on Amazon?
False premise. Amazon wouldn't be paying these workers more if they didn't receive these government payments.