I notice that your response is devoid of any counter argument but full of attempts to belittle me. So, the answer is that you have run out of arguments and are now switching to personal attacks.
Again, let's recap that you yourself have stated that increasing the minimum wage forces some people out of the labor force and not work at all, we are now just debating the consequences of that. Simple economics tells you that less labor input means less overall production and hence less wealth. But even if that weren't the case,
Even if that weren't so, it is morally wrong, in fact it is a despicable infringement on human rights, to force people out of the labor force because you think it is a "net win" for society. Those "net win" arguments for infringing on human rights are at the root of much of the horrors of the 20th century.
It is unregulated gambling. Just because you can't cash out, doesn't make it not gambling.
Well, actually it generally is. For example, raffles aren't gambling. Even if something can be cashed out, it's not gambling. Digging for gold by the hour isn't gambling. Bitcoin mining isn't gambling.
But this RNG "slot machine" type of behavior is exactly designed to bilk players out of money and hand out as few valuable items as possible
So is every time you play a video game: your opponents are often randomly generated, and your score is dependent on whether you get lucky. And even if your opponents aren't randomly generated, your own game depends on random factors. So people keep putting in quarters in hopes of getting a better score. Just like people keep renting tennis courts, keep paying for lift tickets, keep traveling to chess tournaments, etc.
Paying money for the chance of receiving random rewards is an essential element of games... and of life.
Counting examples is measuring a set, or at least providing a lower bound on its cardinality
And those examples are examples of what killing net neutrality is actually intended to achieve, namely to give ISPs the option of offering new kinds of products.
The problem isn't that net neutrality advocates lack examples, the problem is that people disagree over the meaning of those examples.
Those of us who have looked into the issue have pointed out a long history of abuse by multiple cable companies (prioritizing their own in-house services to the detriment of competitors, etc.)
That clearly shows an empirical measurement, one you can look up though the court systems.
That is not only an "empirical measurement", that is one of the desired outcomes of killing net neutrality. You may disagree that it's a good thing, but your disagreement then isn't based on some objective fact but a preference.
I disagree with Catholics and Christians being anywhere near children because of their tendency to be rapey.
Presumably, you want that in order to reduce child rapes (rather than out of religious prejudice). Unfortunately, you don't seem to ask the question of whether (1) it conflicts with Constitutional rights or (2) it is a rational policy; you just have a knee-jerk reaction based on how media program you.
As for (1), you can't pass a law that infringes on the right of Catholics or Christians to interact with children; such a law would be against everything a free society stands for. We judge people based on their individual actions, not by their religious beliefs or statistics. But that's not the worst of your problems.
A far worse problem is that with (2), that it's not a rational policy. In fact, both school teachers and step fathers pose a far greater threat to children in terms of sexual abuse than Catholics or Catholic priests (Catholic priests and Catholics probably commit sexual abuse at average rates). It is irrational to demand that "Catholics not be anywhere near children" (average abuse risk) without first demanding that something be done about sexual abuse by school teachers and step fathers.
Their ideas can and have be proven objectively wrong.
Well, the idea why I oppose net neutrality is because I do not wish the FCC to have additional regulatory control over the Internet or ISPs. Please "prove me objectively wrong".
So at this point, focusing on the people seems like the only sane approach.
That's the kind of approach terrorists take. The "sane approach" is to accept the outcome of the election and be more convincing next time.
I think its possible the scientific community was biased toward a water flow explanation, or possibly that's just the one the media stuck to. Did they work as hard to prove other explanations? I'm not sure they did, but this story is evidence that they are doing just that.
You're making the mistake of equating what's published with some measure of scientific truth. The scientific literature is a place for debate, not truth. You can't have a debate if you insist that everything everybody says is known to be true. Finding the truth is the whole point of having a scientific debate in the first place.
I have no idea what you're trying to get at. There are vast water ice deposits on the surface of Mars covered by about 1-10m of Martian dust and sand. For the purpose of Martian colonists getting at them, means "on the surface" (as opposed to deep underground).
I guess that changes the Space Nutter narrative a bit, huh?
No, not really. In terms of availability of water, this also makes little difference, because it's clear that Mars has vast quantities of water ice on the surface; whether that occasionally melts on its own or not it really not important.
But we space nutters don't really consider Mars a good target for colonization anyway: there is little economic benefit, and it's a deep gravity well.
Liquid brines are not only plausible under Martian conditions, they have been reproduced experimentally.
Given the presence of large amounts of calcium perchlorate (eutectic point -74C), there are almost certainly liquid reservoirs of brine somewhere on Mars, the only question is how big they are and where/when they are exposed to the surface.
People already knew that sand/dust can cause similar features. They believed (and still believe) that this is indicative of flowing water because of seasonality, temperatures, and association with hydrated minerals. We won't know for certain until we observe flowing water more directly, of course.
Here is the Forbes article (you know Forbes, right? Not exactly a left-wing-socialist-tool) explaining it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...
The argument in Forbes is "since government tops up wages to a living wage anyway, companies will simply pay less and let the tax payer pick up the rest". The premise of that argument is wrong. If the premise were right, the correct solution would be to change government policy, not to add a bad policy (minimum wage) on top of another bad policy (topping up wages). That article's argument has nothing to do with your argument.
The take-away calculation is that if minimum wage increases, while some businesses will decide not to hire some workers because their productivity now is less than their cost, pay increases for the rest of the minimum wage workers, the ones who had been being paid less than their marginal value. It turns out to be a net win-- the workers not hired are the ones who were producing minimum value.
So you agree then that minimum wage increases cause people to lose their jobs, you just erroneously consider that a "net win". Of course, it's not a "net win" at all.
(1) While nominal salaries may go up for some people, the people who now don't work at all still need to be supported, and that comes out of taxes of working people or salaries of their spouses or relatives. But since these people are now out of work, the rest of society not only has to "top up" their salaries, they also have to make up for the "minimum value" that these workers would have produced but aren't producing anymore because they have been priced out of the market.
(2) Another way of looking at this is that the people dropping out of the labor force due to minimum wage may produce less than what you consider a "living wage", but they still make a net positive contribution to the economy. By removing them from the labor force, you lose their contribution, that is, on average, everybody ends up being poorer off.
(3) Minimum wage jobs are usually entry level jobs where people get started in the workforce. By pricing inexperienced workers out of entry level jobs, you risk serious problems with youth unemployment, career changes, long term unemployment, etc. And minimum wage laws end up primarily hurting minorities and immigrants (eugenics and racism is, in fact, why Democrats and progressives have been pushing minimum wages in the past).
You're basically saying that you want to increase wages by creating an artificial scarcity of labor. Why do you even go through the trouble of dressing that up as a minimum wage? Just do what leftists traditionally do to create artificial labor shortages!
Real economics is actually somewhat interesting-- you should learn some of it, instead of the oversimplified cartoon economics that libertarians hold so dearly to. You might like it.
Good heavens, in light of your ridiculous argument above ("hey, we price people out of the labor force, but that's good for society!"), that is laughable. Why don't you read some real economics and then actually try to understand it?
They've pretty much ridden the "Appeal to nature" logical fallacy right into the dirt. They see the natural world as the epitome of morality and the more the human race steers away from it
That's Social Darwinism, an ideology that has a more than hundred year history among the American left, American intellectuals, and American progressives. You're projecting your own ideological daemons onto others.
That's not at all the view of libertarians or classical liberals.
The problem is they forget that we too are a part of nature and that the human race is where it is by way of collective action, not individualism.
Libertarians very much favor collective action, of the voluntary kind. You are arguing for collective action of the coercive kind, the kind favored by communists, socialists, and fascists.
Given that most unemployable and poor people in the US are a product of the coercive, tax-payer financed public education system, it is idiotic for you to blame libertarians or the free market for the plight of these people, or to try to force companies to subsidize their welfare.
Yes you absolutely can. If the position is "worth" less than minimum wage, that's the employer's problem, not the employee's
The employer doesn't have a problem with that at all; the employer will simply leave the business and invest their money and time in something more profitable. What an employer won't do is pay $15/h to someone worth only $10/h.
That's a common libertarian statement, yes: they have no problem with people starving, but if you try to make a system where people don't starve,
You aren't trying to make a system where people don't starve, you are trying to make a system where people do starve, and for selfish and greedy reasons: you're saying "these starving people aren't my problem and I don't want to pay for them, stick it to big corporations".
Libertarians, classical liberals, and conservatives are saying that people who can't command living wages in the economy are a failure of society and the educational system, and the proper way to address that is to make society pay for fixing the problem, instead of forcing corporations and employers to do so.
Morality, ethics, and common decency have no place in business
I don't see the moral, ethical, or common decency problem with saying "here is a grocery bag and I offer you $5 to fill it".
There is a huge moral, ethical, and common decency problem with your position, however, which is: "although you may wish to accept the offer of filling this grocery bag for $5, I forbid you to do so".
all that matters is paying workers as little as possible in order for the company to make as much profit as possible
You forgot the other thing that matters: being able to find workers willing to work for the salary you offer in the first place. In order to accomplish that, you need to offer people what they are worth.
Employment is a voluntary transaction between employer and employee. The immoral position is yours, namely attempts to interfere with it.
It's a job market. That is, you offer your labor and employers bid for it. You end up with the highest pay that your abilities justify.
If the highest pay you can get in the job market is below what you need to eat, you have a problem and society has a problem if there are lots of people like you. But you can't fix that problem by trying to force employers to pay you more than you're worth to them. The proper fix is to put you on welfare, linked to a requirement to make a decent effort to improve your skills.
The man, who goes by Ike, declined to let Ars use his full name for fear of reprisal—he also doesn’t want unwanted scrutiny from his colleagues at his full-time public sector job.
Furthermore, you cannot force employers to pay you more than your labor is worth. If Instacart is too abstract for you, think about your neighbor's kid: you offer him $50/month to mow your lawn. He says he needs $2000/month because his parents aren't feeding and clothing him properly. Are you going to pay him $2000/month? I would guess no: feeding and clothing him are his parents responsibility, and $2000/month is just too much for lawn mowing.
In your world I'm sure math stops at linear relationships.
The "below 1000 ppm" is the IPCC prediction; that already includes "things like melting permafrost releasing methane and other dynamical systems". That's why I put fhe link in there (hint: you can click on the blue text).
The real truth is that science shows the significantly worse outcomes are significantly more likely, and humans face a near extinction from collapse of food production, sanitation, and increased prevalence of disease along with susceptibility to everything all at once.
I have no doubt that you have to fear climate change: you are obviously incapable of wiping your own ass, so if government doesn't do it for you, you rot in your own filth. But society shouldn't cater to the fears of morons like you, in particular when the proposed solutions (Paris accords etc.) are worthless. If we need to wipe your ass for you, we're going to do it on our terms, not yours.
If you extrapolate current emission scenarios to 2100 with no artificial carbon scrubbing, you end up with below 1000 ppm CO2. Basic science tells us that even such an unrealistic scenario gives us perhaps 3C warming over current conditions. In the past, when there have been such carbon concentrations, mammalian life was flourishing and primates became established. But that scenario is unrealistic anyway because economies are already motivated to reduce emissions all by themselves: fossil fuels are expensive, and they are getting more expensive the more we use them up. That drives both energy efficiency and renewable energies. In reality, we're probably going to end up with maybe 600 ppm CO2, leaving us with less than 2C temperature increase.
The problem with climate science isn't the science, it's the fear mongering, corruption, and politics people misuse the science for. Yes, carbon emission growth and temperature increases are real, but Paris is not the answer. In fact, government attempts to intervene are likely going to make things worse rather than better.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice that your response is devoid of any counter argument but full of attempts to belittle me. So, the answer is that you have run out of arguments and are now switching to personal attacks.
Again, let's recap that you yourself have stated that increasing the minimum wage forces some people out of the labor force and not work at all, we are now just debating the consequences of that. Simple economics tells you that less labor input means less overall production and hence less wealth. But even if that weren't the case,
Even if that weren't so, it is morally wrong, in fact it is a despicable infringement on human rights, to force people out of the labor force because you think it is a "net win" for society. Those "net win" arguments for infringing on human rights are at the root of much of the horrors of the 20th century.
Well, actually it generally is. For example, raffles aren't gambling. Even if something can be cashed out, it's not gambling. Digging for gold by the hour isn't gambling. Bitcoin mining isn't gambling.
So is every time you play a video game: your opponents are often randomly generated, and your score is dependent on whether you get lucky. And even if your opponents aren't randomly generated, your own game depends on random factors. So people keep putting in quarters in hopes of getting a better score. Just like people keep renting tennis courts, keep paying for lift tickets, keep traveling to chess tournaments, etc.
Paying money for the chance of receiving random rewards is an essential element of games... and of life.
Simple solution: wrinkle free clothes.
And those examples are examples of what killing net neutrality is actually intended to achieve, namely to give ISPs the option of offering new kinds of products.
The problem isn't that net neutrality advocates lack examples, the problem is that people disagree over the meaning of those examples.
That is not only an "empirical measurement", that is one of the desired outcomes of killing net neutrality. You may disagree that it's a good thing, but your disagreement then isn't based on some objective fact but a preference.
Presumably, you want that in order to reduce child rapes (rather than out of religious prejudice). Unfortunately, you don't seem to ask the question of whether (1) it conflicts with Constitutional rights or (2) it is a rational policy; you just have a knee-jerk reaction based on how media program you.
As for (1), you can't pass a law that infringes on the right of Catholics or Christians to interact with children; such a law would be against everything a free society stands for. We judge people based on their individual actions, not by their religious beliefs or statistics. But that's not the worst of your problems.
A far worse problem is that with (2), that it's not a rational policy. In fact, both school teachers and step fathers pose a far greater threat to children in terms of sexual abuse than Catholics or Catholic priests (Catholic priests and Catholics probably commit sexual abuse at average rates). It is irrational to demand that "Catholics not be anywhere near children" (average abuse risk) without first demanding that something be done about sexual abuse by school teachers and step fathers.
Well, the idea why I oppose net neutrality is because I do not wish the FCC to have additional regulatory control over the Internet or ISPs. Please "prove me objectively wrong".
That's the kind of approach terrorists take. The "sane approach" is to accept the outcome of the election and be more convincing next time.
You're making the mistake of equating what's published with some measure of scientific truth. The scientific literature is a place for debate, not truth. You can't have a debate if you insist that everything everybody says is known to be true. Finding the truth is the whole point of having a scientific debate in the first place.
Actually, the presence of perchlorates is good news for the possibility of life on Mars.
I have no idea what you're trying to get at. There are vast water ice deposits on the surface of Mars covered by about 1-10m of Martian dust and sand. For the purpose of Martian colonists getting at them, means "on the surface" (as opposed to deep underground).
No, not really. In terms of availability of water, this also makes little difference, because it's clear that Mars has vast quantities of water ice on the surface; whether that occasionally melts on its own or not it really not important.
But we space nutters don't really consider Mars a good target for colonization anyway: there is little economic benefit, and it's a deep gravity well.
Liquid brines are not only plausible under Martian conditions, they have been reproduced experimentally.
Given the presence of large amounts of calcium perchlorate (eutectic point -74C), there are almost certainly liquid reservoirs of brine somewhere on Mars, the only question is how big they are and where/when they are exposed to the surface.
People already knew that sand/dust can cause similar features. They believed (and still believe) that this is indicative of flowing water because of seasonality, temperatures, and association with hydrated minerals. We won't know for certain until we observe flowing water more directly, of course.
The argument in Forbes is "since government tops up wages to a living wage anyway, companies will simply pay less and let the tax payer pick up the rest". The premise of that argument is wrong. If the premise were right, the correct solution would be to change government policy, not to add a bad policy (minimum wage) on top of another bad policy (topping up wages). That article's argument has nothing to do with your argument.
So you agree then that minimum wage increases cause people to lose their jobs, you just erroneously consider that a "net win". Of course, it's not a "net win" at all.
(1) While nominal salaries may go up for some people, the people who now don't work at all still need to be supported, and that comes out of taxes of working people or salaries of their spouses or relatives. But since these people are now out of work, the rest of society not only has to "top up" their salaries, they also have to make up for the "minimum value" that these workers would have produced but aren't producing anymore because they have been priced out of the market.
(2) Another way of looking at this is that the people dropping out of the labor force due to minimum wage may produce less than what you consider a "living wage", but they still make a net positive contribution to the economy. By removing them from the labor force, you lose their contribution, that is, on average, everybody ends up being poorer off.
(3) Minimum wage jobs are usually entry level jobs where people get started in the workforce. By pricing inexperienced workers out of entry level jobs, you risk serious problems with youth unemployment, career changes, long term unemployment, etc. And minimum wage laws end up primarily hurting minorities and immigrants (eugenics and racism is, in fact, why Democrats and progressives have been pushing minimum wages in the past).
You're basically saying that you want to increase wages by creating an artificial scarcity of labor. Why do you even go through the trouble of dressing that up as a minimum wage? Just do what leftists traditionally do to create artificial labor shortages!
Good heavens, in light of your ridiculous argument above ("hey, we price people out of the labor force, but that's good for society!"), that is laughable. Why don't you read some real economics and then actually try to understand it?
That's the economic equivalent of believing that the earth is flat. Thanks for demonstrating your complete and utter ignorance so clearly.
That's Social Darwinism, an ideology that has a more than hundred year history among the American left, American intellectuals, and American progressives. You're projecting your own ideological daemons onto others.
That's not at all the view of libertarians or classical liberals.
Libertarians very much favor collective action, of the voluntary kind. You are arguing for collective action of the coercive kind, the kind favored by communists, socialists, and fascists.
Given that most unemployable and poor people in the US are a product of the coercive, tax-payer financed public education system, it is idiotic for you to blame libertarians or the free market for the plight of these people, or to try to force companies to subsidize their welfare.
The employer doesn't have a problem with that at all; the employer will simply leave the business and invest their money and time in something more profitable. What an employer won't do is pay $15/h to someone worth only $10/h.
There is nothing coerced about it: they can walk away from the job any time they want and take a better paying job.
You aren't trying to make a system where people don't starve, you are trying to make a system where people do starve, and for selfish and greedy reasons: you're saying "these starving people aren't my problem and I don't want to pay for them, stick it to big corporations".
Libertarians, classical liberals, and conservatives are saying that people who can't command living wages in the economy are a failure of society and the educational system, and the proper way to address that is to make society pay for fixing the problem, instead of forcing corporations and employers to do so.
I don't see the moral, ethical, or common decency problem with saying "here is a grocery bag and I offer you $5 to fill it".
There is a huge moral, ethical, and common decency problem with your position, however, which is: "although you may wish to accept the offer of filling this grocery bag for $5, I forbid you to do so".
You forgot the other thing that matters: being able to find workers willing to work for the salary you offer in the first place. In order to accomplish that, you need to offer people what they are worth.
Employment is a voluntary transaction between employer and employee. The immoral position is yours, namely attempts to interfere with it.
It's a job market. That is, you offer your labor and employers bid for it. You end up with the highest pay that your abilities justify.
If the highest pay you can get in the job market is below what you need to eat, you have a problem and society has a problem if there are lots of people like you. But you can't fix that problem by trying to force employers to pay you more than you're worth to them. The proper fix is to put you on welfare, linked to a requirement to make a decent effort to improve your skills.
These people are doing their work part time:
Furthermore, you cannot force employers to pay you more than your labor is worth. If Instacart is too abstract for you, think about your neighbor's kid: you offer him $50/month to mow your lawn. He says he needs $2000/month because his parents aren't feeding and clothing him properly. Are you going to pay him $2000/month? I would guess no: feeding and clothing him are his parents responsibility, and $2000/month is just too much for lawn mowing.
That depends on whether you let other people dictate how you see the world.
You're revealing your true self: irrational, scared, and homophobic, while ignoring facts even from widely accepted sources like the IPCC report.
Thanks for your wonderful illustration of the modern American left.
The "below 1000 ppm" is the IPCC prediction; that already includes "things like melting permafrost releasing methane and other dynamical systems". That's why I put fhe link in there (hint: you can click on the blue text).
I have no doubt that you have to fear climate change: you are obviously incapable of wiping your own ass, so if government doesn't do it for you, you rot in your own filth. But society shouldn't cater to the fears of morons like you, in particular when the proposed solutions (Paris accords etc.) are worthless. If we need to wipe your ass for you, we're going to do it on our terms, not yours.
If you extrapolate current emission scenarios to 2100 with no artificial carbon scrubbing, you end up with below 1000 ppm CO2. Basic science tells us that even such an unrealistic scenario gives us perhaps 3C warming over current conditions. In the past, when there have been such carbon concentrations, mammalian life was flourishing and primates became established. But that scenario is unrealistic anyway because economies are already motivated to reduce emissions all by themselves: fossil fuels are expensive, and they are getting more expensive the more we use them up. That drives both energy efficiency and renewable energies. In reality, we're probably going to end up with maybe 600 ppm CO2, leaving us with less than 2C temperature increase.
The problem with climate science isn't the science, it's the fear mongering, corruption, and politics people misuse the science for. Yes, carbon emission growth and temperature increases are real, but Paris is not the answer. In fact, government attempts to intervene are likely going to make things worse rather than better.