To respond specifically to your points 1 and 2 (pressure on employers), my primary case was explicitly that the minimum wage (whether any minimum wage is a good idea is moot; it's not going away) has not kept up with inflation over the last twenty-three years. All other business expenses essentially keep up with inflation, as well as revenues (hey, aren't price increases the definition of inflation?). If a minimum wage increase is a trailing indicator of inflation (i.e., the business owner doesn't have to pay this cost until a year after the price increases), then of itself, it cannot be an inflationary pressure; it is a predictable cost based on previous revenue increases (although maybe not for any given business owner, but somebody's getting that money). The pressures to cut costs and possibly workers tend to come from ownership looking for increased profit quarter-by-quarter.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "amount of money a minimum wage increase would generate." Do you mean in income tax? None, actually, and could perhaps cost the governement in earned income tax credits. Payroll tax? That goes straight to Social Security and Medicare. The actual salary increase? Well, that money's not the government's in the first place; it's the business owner's. Do you intend to, rather than raise the minimum wage, charge business owners a fee (tax) based on the number of minimum wage workers they employ?
I'm not trying to bust your chops here; I agree that better and cheaper (for the user) public transportation, child care vouchers, et al., to help people get and keep a job are a much better solution than welfare. I just don't see what monies you intend to use when you talk about these as an alternative to raising the minimum wage.
The two exit ramps at the end of the eight-mile drive I'm thinking of both have approximately ninety-second reds with about a thirty-second green. The only way I can be sure to get the previous light cycle is to save ninety seconds, which requires going so much faster as to be practically impossible if there's any kind of traffic. To make the previous cycle with my one minute savings, I would have to have arrived at the light in the first sixty seconds of the red given my 65 mph speed; then 75 mph would have gotten me to that previous green. So that's just about fifty percent. So my expected improvement in time is not sixty seconds, but closer to forty-five seconds (half the time I get through on the same green, half the time I get the previous green; there's some mucking about with hitting the beginning or end of the green, but I'm eliding that).
Unfortunately, maintaining that 75 mph speed over the whole eight miles brings up that practical impossibility problem: too many other drivers on the road!
Okay, I've got to respond to this. When I was in high school, the minimum wage was $3.35, and all of us gas-money burger-flippers bitched about how little that was. I couldn't imagine trying to manage monthly expenses for even a single person, much less a small family, on less than $550 a month gross, which would be no more than $510 after SS/Med tax withholding (rent alone on a one-bedroom apartment would have eaten up more than half that).
Assuming a very conservative 2.5% annual inflation (and believe me, it was much more than that in the first decade) over the last 23 years, that $3.35 would have to be about $5.90 just to keep up. With a (probably more accurate) 3.5% average, it would have to be $7.40. And now Congress is debating a raise to $5.75? I'm not entirely a bleeding-heart liberal (although I do consider myself relatively progressive), but that's just pathetic.
You can argue that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage, it's just a starting point, blah blah blah, but the point is, there are a lot of people who don't see the point of even trying for a minimum wage job because they can't afford the child care or transportation or whatever that it would cost them to hold the job in the first place.
I'm sorry, how can it not be allowed to study with other people? But you should absolutely study with other people as long as (a) you're comfortable asking stupid questions of your studymates and (b) you're patient and friendly answering what you think are stupid questions. Stupid questions are how you find out what things you don't know--and quite possibly what your classmates don't know, either!
Regarding the panic attacks: I had one in my very first semester at U, in vector calc, as a maths major. Well, it wasn't really a panic attack until I realized I only had ten more minutes and I was still on the third problem. I was almost in tears. But that was the only one I ever had. I prepared for every subsequent exam by studying with other people if I wasn't completely comfortable with the concepts. I made sure that, even if I wasn't perfectly ready, I had my tools sharpened (I got through electro-mag on partial credit because I could do all the integrals).
As a graduate student teaching at another U, I pulled a student out of a final exam who I saw was starting to panic. Out in the hall, I had him lie on the floor, close his eyes, and do three minutes of deep breathing (basic self-hypnosis). He got himself back under control enough to finish the exam, and although he didn't get great marks on the exam, he did pass the course. The best recommendation I can make is that as soon as you realize you're losing control, close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply (count five slowly before releasing) until you feel yourself pull together. Then immediately go on to a new problem.
I wish I had mod points. Parent is the first responder to mention the lock-in employers have over their H1-B employees. If the employee leaves the job (voluntarily or not), they must leave the country! To get back in, they have to apply for a new visa.
I was with Craig right up until he said that the infrastructure, the "dark fiber" he called it, was "already paid for."
Already laid, sure (well, most of it); but I guarantee that the fiber that Verizon laid throughout the Tampa Bay area less than two years ago is "paid for." Budgeted for? Probably, based on projections of customer sign-up over the next seven years or so.
Craig certainly had less FUD. The only way to keep it free of regulation is by regulating it further? Huh.
You should probably review the difference between mean and median. Most statistics about US standard of living refer to the median, which will almost certainly be lower than the mean (since an income can't go lower than 0, but can go up to corporate CEO levels). Mean is the arithmetical average (total divided by size of sample), while median is the center of the sample.
Consider two data sets: 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 27. The mean is 71 / 15 = 4.733.... The median is the 8th entry in the sorted list: 2. When think-tanks and media outlets give numbers, they're almost always talking about median (50th percentile) or other percentiles, which refer to *position* in the sorted sample, not to the "average" you learned in grade school. Note that the median doesn't change in the above sample set if all the numbers (think incomes) above 2 (think $20000/year) are replaced by 2, but the mean suddenly drops to something less than 2.
Put away the maximum possible in your 401k. Put away the maximum possible in your IRA (Roth, if you expect to be in the same or higher tax bracket when you retire). Live beneath your means. Never ever buy a new car. Look very, very carefully at your monthlies (phone, cable, internet).
Assume no Social Security by the time you retire, no tuition assistance for your kids college education.
And it doesn't require you to work two jobs: for the coupe de grace, marry someone who has no intention of ever retiring (university professor). And convince him or her to put away the maximum possible yada yada yada. By the time you're fifty-five (and hopefully all children have graduated from college) have enough tax-free income to replace your after-tax salary.
I was disappointed (not the editor's fault, in any way) that this wasn't a comparison of VHS->DVD burners. I've got lots of old VHS I'd like to store to DVD, and it's hard to get good feature-set comparisons. You know, adding menu, chapter breaks, compression (most are recorded in SLP; can I get six hours on one DVD?).
Can anyone point me towards a good review/comparison? C|Net reviews weren't any help last I checked.
Sing it yourself, American! Learn the lyrics and tune, and sing it loud and proud. I do (except when I'm playing one of the instruments). Teach your kids. Teach the mute lumps around you at the ballpark.
This is our national anthem, people, it's not entertainment. I don't care how lousy you sound (like singing at church: God gave you that voice, give it right back!).
I don't even mind if you voted for W; it's his country, too, even if he is trying to eviscerate it.
If you might change major (and, believe me, anybody might), you need to buy the Apple. Any required Windows software ought to be able to run under Virtual PC (if you buy a hefty enough Book).
Keeping the phone in a purse/bag also renders "vibrate" useless. Okay, you might hear the buzz in an otherwise silent situation, but in a noisy restaurant or on the street?
On the other side, though, I don't want my boss calling and being told I'm in a movie; does he want to interrupt?
Model I, Level 2, with 16k of RAM! I was 11 when my Dad bought it with his monetary gifts received for completing his PhD. For every (significant) program my brothers and I wrote, we could pick out a retail program from the local Radio Shack.
Dad was too cheap to get a compiler, or even an assembler; but one day he brought home a debugger and a sheet with the machine instruction codes. Man, I was in heaven! No more PEEKs and POKEs. I started flinging memory around, paging my graphics (ate up 2k of memory right there), and wrote a kind of asteroids/space invaders game in one night.
When I went to college, he had promised me a word processor; instead, I got the TRaSh and his old Smith-Corona. Hmph. Did anyone else have the problem where the text on the screen would start to lean and drift? I could correct it by picking up the kbd/computer and tilting it the other way. Blew people's minds in the dorm.
Please don't take golf at your own pace. There are now six foursomes stacked up behind you. Always try to be on the tee when the group in front of you is on the green. You'll have plenty of time to chat waiting for those slow morons to putt out.
It's not living in places that are unsuited to human habitation. It's building beyond the ability of the environment to keep up.
Here in West Central Florida, the Floridan aquifer provided plenty of clean, cold fresh water for years. But the developers keep building, the county commissions don't have the spine to stand up to them, and now there isn't enough fresh water.
The aquifer gets drained as quickly as heavy rains can fill it; the empty limestone bubbles then make great sinkholes, increasing the cost to insure homes.
Local politicians just can't bring themselves to stop taking contributions from the fat wallets of developers long enough to realize that the reason we have to spend so much on transportation, schools, and freakin' drinking water is because of these same sugar daddies.
So who's going to reprogram my "smart" VCR, that "knows" when DST begins and ends? I'll have to tell it to stay on EST, and change the time myself twice a year (blowing away one of the features I was pleased to have for a few years now), or else manually change the time (or all my programmed recordings) four times a year.
Yeah, it's a silly example, but how many embedded systems are out there that handle DST? How easy are they to reprogram?
Changing DST was for show, just to tell the constituents, "Hey! We're doing something about saving energy!" Why can't they do something useful, like double or triple the gas tax? Pour serious money into solar power research or something else to make it take less than the duration of my mortgage to earn back in energy savings the cost of installing rooftop solar (and I'm in Florida).
And don't forget the problem of people not knowing how to shoe a horse (reliance on motor vehicles), or light a fire (reliance on electricity), or plough a field (reliance on supermarkets).
My wife is a professor of English Literature. It's amazing the number of papers she gets where it is obvious the student has simply selected the first choice of those presented by a spell checker: it looks kind of like the word the student probably meant, but means something entirely different. I wish she were here to provide a concrete example, but just try it yourself: deliberately misspell a few words(phonetically, perhaps) and see what your checker comes up with.
It's easier to understand someone who misspells a few words than someone who lets a computer correct their misspellings.
The khipu is cool. One of my advisors at Michigan, Tom Storer, demonstrated the Fibonacci sequence to us using one. You knot a string, then tie it to another string, then tie that into another like it . . . wicked. Other combinatorial sequences (Stirling numbers, etc.) can be generated in similar fashion. That must be sixteen or seventeen years ago now--I never thought I'd see these again.
The "contracting firms" mentioned in TFA are generally considered "temporary staffing solutions" (Adecco, etc.). Back-in-the-day those companies provided a "working demo" as it were for companies who wanted to try before they hired (I know, I worked for Kelly for a while), or as genuine short-term work (maternity leave replacement, seasonal work).
The plaintiff named in TFA took a buyout package in (presumably) a round of layoffs, then was "hired" back as a contractor. She had been working there for ten years as a "temporary worker," doing all those things real employees do, but without the HP bennies (guess what kind of bennies Adecco provides?).
Long-term, full-time work leads to the expectation of conversion to permanent: that's what the complaint is about.
My Grampa always says, "It's the stingy man who pays the most." Now, that's not always paying in dollars: If you're going to put WinBLAH on the Intel box, it's going to be your time spent updating and virus protecting and what-all; if you're going to put Linux on it, it's still going to be your time spend updat--wait, you want a *nix? Stimpy, you eee-diot! Mac mini already has one, and it's already configured perfectly for your hardware!
Unless, of course, the wife is going to be programming.Net components. Then, by all means, get a WinBLAH box. Otherwise, buy the damn' "cute little Mac!"
Now, having said that, I did have a computer and phone in my room before I turned 18.
I had a phone in my room when I was 11 after I pulled it out of a neighbor's trash, fixed it, found an RJ adapter at Radio Shack and wired that in myself. It was an old Western Electric (?) that must have weighed five pounds.
So I guess any kid who can (re)build his or her own computer ought to be able to have one in his or her room.
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To respond specifically to your points 1 and 2 (pressure on employers), my primary case was explicitly that the minimum wage (whether any minimum wage is a good idea is moot; it's not going away) has not kept up with inflation over the last twenty-three years. All other business expenses essentially keep up with inflation, as well as revenues (hey, aren't price increases the definition of inflation?). If a minimum wage increase is a trailing indicator of inflation (i.e., the business owner doesn't have to pay this cost until a year after the price increases), then of itself, it cannot be an inflationary pressure; it is a predictable cost based on previous revenue increases (although maybe not for any given business owner, but somebody's getting that money). The pressures to cut costs and possibly workers tend to come from ownership looking for increased profit quarter-by-quarter.
I'm not trying to bust your chops here; I agree that better and cheaper (for the user) public transportation, child care vouchers, et al., to help people get and keep a job are a much better solution than welfare. I just don't see what monies you intend to use when you talk about these as an alternative to raising the minimum wage.
Unfortunately, maintaining that 75 mph speed over the whole eight miles brings up that practical impossibility problem: too many other drivers on the road!
Assuming a very conservative 2.5% annual inflation (and believe me, it was much more than that in the first decade) over the last 23 years, that $3.35 would have to be about $5.90 just to keep up. With a (probably more accurate) 3.5% average, it would have to be $7.40. And now Congress is debating a raise to $5.75? I'm not entirely a bleeding-heart liberal (although I do consider myself relatively progressive), but that's just pathetic.
You can argue that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage, it's just a starting point, blah blah blah, but the point is, there are a lot of people who don't see the point of even trying for a minimum wage job because they can't afford the child care or transportation or whatever that it would cost them to hold the job in the first place.
Regarding the panic attacks: I had one in my very first semester at U, in vector calc, as a maths major. Well, it wasn't really a panic attack until I realized I only had ten more minutes and I was still on the third problem. I was almost in tears. But that was the only one I ever had. I prepared for every subsequent exam by studying with other people if I wasn't completely comfortable with the concepts. I made sure that, even if I wasn't perfectly ready, I had my tools sharpened (I got through electro-mag on partial credit because I could do all the integrals).
As a graduate student teaching at another U, I pulled a student out of a final exam who I saw was starting to panic. Out in the hall, I had him lie on the floor, close his eyes, and do three minutes of deep breathing (basic self-hypnosis). He got himself back under control enough to finish the exam, and although he didn't get great marks on the exam, he did pass the course. The best recommendation I can make is that as soon as you realize you're losing control, close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply (count five slowly before releasing) until you feel yourself pull together. Then immediately go on to a new problem.
I wish I had mod points. Parent is the first responder to mention the lock-in employers have over their H1-B employees. If the employee leaves the job (voluntarily or not), they must leave the country! To get back in, they have to apply for a new visa.
Already laid, sure (well, most of it); but I guarantee that the fiber that Verizon laid throughout the Tampa Bay area less than two years ago is "paid for." Budgeted for? Probably, based on projections of customer sign-up over the next seven years or so.
Craig certainly had less FUD. The only way to keep it free of regulation is by regulating it further? Huh.
Consider two data sets: 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 27. The mean is 71 / 15 = 4.733.... The median is the 8th entry in the sorted list: 2. When think-tanks and media outlets give numbers, they're almost always talking about median (50th percentile) or other percentiles, which refer to *position* in the sorted sample, not to the "average" you learned in grade school. Note that the median doesn't change in the above sample set if all the numbers (think incomes) above 2 (think $20000/year) are replaced by 2, but the mean suddenly drops to something less than 2.
Put away the maximum possible in your 401k. Put away the maximum possible in your IRA (Roth, if you expect to be in the same or higher tax bracket when you retire). Live beneath your means. Never ever buy a new car. Look very, very carefully at your monthlies (phone, cable, internet).
Assume no Social Security by the time you retire, no tuition assistance for your kids college education.
And it doesn't require you to work two jobs: for the coupe de grace, marry someone who has no intention of ever retiring (university professor). And convince him or her to put away the maximum possible yada yada yada. By the time you're fifty-five (and hopefully all children have graduated from college) have enough tax-free income to replace your after-tax salary.
Can anyone point me towards a good review/comparison? C|Net reviews weren't any help last I checked.
This is our national anthem, people, it's not entertainment. I don't care how lousy you sound (like singing at church: God gave you that voice, give it right back!).
I don't even mind if you voted for W; it's his country, too, even if he is trying to eviscerate it.
On the other side, though, I don't want my boss calling and being told I'm in a movie; does he want to interrupt?
Dad was too cheap to get a compiler, or even an assembler; but one day he brought home a debugger and a sheet with the machine instruction codes. Man, I was in heaven! No more PEEKs and POKEs. I started flinging memory around, paging my graphics (ate up 2k of memory right there), and wrote a kind of asteroids/space invaders game in one night.
When I went to college, he had promised me a word processor; instead, I got the TRaSh and his old Smith-Corona. Hmph. Did anyone else have the problem where the text on the screen would start to lean and drift? I could correct it by picking up the kbd/computer and tilting it the other way. Blew people's minds in the dorm.
I'm a lousy golfer, but at least I play on pace.
Here in West Central Florida, the Floridan aquifer provided plenty of clean, cold fresh water for years. But the developers keep building, the county commissions don't have the spine to stand up to them, and now there isn't enough fresh water.
The aquifer gets drained as quickly as heavy rains can fill it; the empty limestone bubbles then make great sinkholes, increasing the cost to insure homes.
Local politicians just can't bring themselves to stop taking contributions from the fat wallets of developers long enough to realize that the reason we have to spend so much on transportation, schools, and freakin' drinking water is because of these same sugar daddies.
Yeah, it's a silly example, but how many embedded systems are out there that handle DST? How easy are they to reprogram?
Changing DST was for show, just to tell the constituents, "Hey! We're doing something about saving energy!" Why can't they do something useful, like double or triple the gas tax? Pour serious money into solar power research or something else to make it take less than the duration of my mortgage to earn back in energy savings the cost of installing rooftop solar (and I'm in Florida).
My wife is a professor of English Literature. It's amazing the number of papers she gets where it is obvious the student has simply selected the first choice of those presented by a spell checker: it looks kind of like the word the student probably meant, but means something entirely different. I wish she were here to provide a concrete example, but just try it yourself: deliberately misspell a few words(phonetically, perhaps) and see what your checker comes up with.
It's easier to understand someone who misspells a few words than someone who lets a computer correct their misspellings.
- I can't compete
- You got me runnin' hot
- If you start me up, I'll blow my top
I always thought that was a poor choice of "theme song."The khipu is cool. One of my advisors at Michigan, Tom Storer, demonstrated the Fibonacci sequence to us using one. You knot a string, then tie it to another string, then tie that into another like it . . . wicked. Other combinatorial sequences (Stirling numbers, etc.) can be generated in similar fashion. That must be sixteen or seventeen years ago now--I never thought I'd see these again.
The plaintiff named in TFA took a buyout package in (presumably) a round of layoffs, then was "hired" back as a contractor. She had been working there for ten years as a "temporary worker," doing all those things real employees do, but without the HP bennies (guess what kind of bennies Adecco provides?).
Long-term, full-time work leads to the expectation of conversion to permanent: that's what the complaint is about.
That worked until the soldier painted the General's wife.
Unless, of course, the wife is going to be programming .Net components. Then, by all means, get a WinBLAH box. Otherwise, buy the damn' "cute little Mac!"
I had a phone in my room when I was 11 after I pulled it out of a neighbor's trash, fixed it, found an RJ adapter at Radio Shack and wired that in myself. It was an old Western Electric (?) that must have weighed five pounds.
So I guess any kid who can (re)build his or her own computer ought to be able to have one in his or her room.