Appeal to authority. I maintain that said authority is wrong.
We can try an appeal to history: raising minimum wage has always caused a decrease in available minimum-wage jobs.
We can try *many* appeals to reason.
One appeal to reason is that the amount of jobs is affected by technical progress and population growth, and so simple statistical measures are confounded (this suggests a reason *why* such assertions *can be* wrong). If you don't adjust for the increase in population, your measured data shows confounding: a minimum-wage increase that loses 0.2% of jobs over a 0.3% population growth will register as a 0.0994% job increase. For these same reasons, blunt graphs showing sharp loss of jobs when minimum wage increases are also not concrete proof of minimum wage loss.
Another appeal to reason is the simple logical analysis. I like this one because it dispels the "low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth" myth.
Income is, essentially, all money spent over a given term. If you sell $2,000 of goods and you pay your employees $1,500, your business profits $500; the total spending is $2,000, and the total income is $2,000. Raising wages doesn't change income, because the consumer base still has to spend out of their income.
When you raise some wages--e.g. minimum wage--the cost of production of those products increases. That comes with a corresponding price increase. Say the increase is 0.14 cents for an $8 fast-food meal, and we move 127 billion fast-food meals per year. That's $17.780 billion.
Take note: that's $17.780 billion that were previously spent on other goods. Those goods had to be produced by people--labor time, wages. Those goods are no longer being bought; the production is *completely lost*, and the money is instead diverted to the hands of a set of minimum-wage workers.
At a minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that's 1.23 million jobs as an upper cap of jobs lost. At a wage of $15/hr, that's 0.593 million.
"But wait!", you say. "Now those workers have additional money, and they can spend it to buy things, thus creating jobs!"
Those workers have money--the workers who weren't displaced. They also face slightly higher prices nibbling away at that money. In total, the amount nibbled away at in the entire economy is the $17.780 billion I mentioned before. As well, those workers are drawing their additional money as an annual wage: it doesn't magically fold "back into the economy"; it's *spent*, like all other income. That means it's spent no faster than it was when wages were lower, just that the money is directed away from other jobs.
There is no reason to believe these minimum wage workers have a spending profile which now avoids paying for services which involve minimum-wage labor. Further, if they *did* somehow avoid spending their money back into the minimum-wage economy, the basis of spending for maintaining those very minimum-wage jobs would collapse. Somebody's job has to go away.
The analysis above is based on *demand* economics. The ideal that a raise in wages causes an increase in jobs is based on *trickle-down* economics, whereby someone assumes that businesses just pay out higher wages because prosperity starts at the top and trickles down through the worker via the mechanism of wages. Trickle-down economics is universally mocked by economists because it's not a real theory and has been shown invalid.
In summary: I have provided a basis on which rough analysis of the impact of minimum-wage raises can be wrong due to statistical confounding (i.e. "we have seen X evidence..." is largely reliant on how you analyzed that evidence); I have shown the unresolvable logical flaw in the thinking that minimum-wage increases lead to more job-creating spending in the economy (the money comes from *other* *consumers* who are not spending that particular money on
...has made non-compete agreements unenforceable, but Massachusetts has not.
State lawmakers are considering limiting non-compete agreements to one year, banning them for low-wage workers and for people terminated without cause.
Your assertion:
non-competes are not enforcible.
Even allowing a paid 1-year non-compete makes it much more difficult to build a startup.
You claim I have a lack of reading comprehension because I recognize the current problem is "Indefinite non-competes are wholly enforceable today, and we are looking at limits on those?" while your response is "A 1-year non-compete would be a new thing, because non-competes are non-enforceable"? The current problem space is non-competes are wholly enforceable with no legal controls, and those jurisdictions are looking to restrict them; your interpretation is that those jurisdictions are looking to *strengthen* them.
You fail reading comprehension. Either that or you're invoking a strawman by walking away from the problem space, selecting a *different* problem space, arguing in terms of a different situation, and then applying the conclusion there to the original problem.
It doesn't have to be; it only has to explain scale and practical impact.
People imagine things like a billion dollars being a lot; that might be true in the scheme of Rhode Island's 1.06 million people (~$1,000 per person to fit $1 billion into a year's taxes, ~$2,000 with a 50% labor force), but not in the scope of the United States (~$3.29/year per person, or $5.68 per year from every person in the labor force). A billion dollar salary for the CEO of Comcast or even Apple might be a big ask, too; but $25 million sure isn't.
The point is the practical impact of dismantling a CEO's salary and handing it back to the consumer, the worker, and whomever else is roughly zero. The practical impact of dismantling the culture of high executive salaries is... difficult to analyze. High-salary executives buy goods in markets the other consumer classes can't, and they pack a significant part of their income away. That means altering this structure changes markets around, causing disruption and reorganization.
As a simple example: without taxing away those high incomes *and* with reduced taxes on businesses (remember: Apple hoards $10B more each year), my Citizen's Dividend can achieve an economic meltdown by creating a demand for 18% more jobs than there are people looking to work. This is only fixed by making the working-class poorer, achieved by reducing working hours to a 4-day work week. End result? We're all about as wealthy as we are to start with, except every weekend is a three-day weekend.
Under the described plan, a $3 million income is reduced by 0.4% ($7,000); and a $25 million income is reduced by 2% ($315,000); those reductions are buffed out to 0 in the long term. What might happen if we get these incomes to cut by millions?
You're busy looking at other people and complaining they have too much and it's unfair. You haven't explained what to do about it that would help *anybody* or resolve any problem. I've avoided the whole thing because it's too much risk: I can't predict actual outcomes or impacts along the way, so actions as such against the situation have unknown impacts. One possible outcome is an increase in the spread of poverty by spreading low-end wealth, stimulating population growth in the lowest class, leading to a bigger percentage of the population living at the bottom end; with the information I have, I can't speculate that outcome as being any more or less likely than an overall *reduction* in poverty in the long term. That's what risk means: I can't say what direction the outcome is going in, and I have information which suggests multiple conflicting outcomes of equally-unknown possibility.
Why do you think I went with just latching the minimum standard of living to a fixed, inviolable proportion of the average? Practically zero risks, and all are easily mitigated.
Even allowing a paid 1-year non-compete makes it much more difficult to build a startup.
The problem space given is "non-compete clauses are enforced indefinitely, and so we're proposing a bill to limit them to 2 years and provide 50% severance pay for that period". That's what's actually on the table. As an alternate to the stated problem, I've made zero errors; you have instead said, "Well, uh, the problem doesn't exist, and you're proposing to create a new problem."
At the same time you propose that non-competes are unenforceable, you also propose we should ban them. If they're already banned, why should we take any action?
The answer is simple: they're routinely enforced in the jurisdictions where the problem space exists--a fact you dispute, even though it's a concrete fact.
Increasing the cost of a product by increasing the wages paid in aggregate means that the product's price must hold a higher point. That means fewer products bought, which means fewer jobs making said products.
This is the same reason raising minimum wage causes a net loss in employment.
The whole concept is backwards. People don't realize wage-labor costs are costs to the consumer. It's like all the people talking about how Comcast charges way too much for Internet and Cable while Comcast has an average 10% annual profit--meaning *maybe* they could charge $72 instead of $80 and break even.
Bumping costs like this means somebody has to lose their job; we're transferring unemployment as a way to satisfy our sense of fairness (plus increasing costs decreases purchasable products, increasing unemployment). Limiting the power of non-compete agreements represents a more optimal solution. Correcting the welfare system--*not* mutually exclusive--works even better: these NDA issues are *only* unfair; employment is of limited availability, and losing a few employees to non-compete issues means other employees who would be unemployed instead find jobs, and so solving the fairness issue still leaves the same number of people in the same situations.
One of the reasons I'm always soapboxing a Citizen's Dividend is that particular plan avoids tax raises while easing the tax burden on the working-class and providing a secondary, non-wage income. In comparison to current, it's like collecting unemployment (at $583/month, currently) *while* you're working, without taxes (i.e. like collecting unemployment, but equivalent to collecting $870 instead of $583); plus taxes are a little lighter (at ~$84,000, you're taking home your exact salary, so you're getting $17k more per year in total than current; for a minimum-wage household, it's $6,000 or $14,500 additional income, depending on if it's a one- or two-adult household).
Let's do some modeling.
Under the above proposal, an IT worker who works for 4 years making $84k, saves up the entire difference, and gets laid off has $68,000 saved up. That's savings equivalent to 1 year of $84k salary were he paying today's taxes; compare that to 2 years of 50% salary, as proposed, and account for the $7,000/year income this worker is still receiving, and you get $41,000 spendable money per year versus the proposed $34,000.
At Silicone Valley rates of $144k, it's still only $17k/year difference (the tax brackets do interesting things). So an Apple HQ employee would normally receive $72k minus taxes--roughly $48k/year--and would be knocked down to $41k/year under my proposed solution. Not too terrible a difference, so the problem is suddenly smaller, and more-easily resolved (weakening non-compete clauses is still a good idea; weakening them to a year term limit changes the model to reflect $75k of income, meaning a 1-year term limit on NDAs plus a Citizen's Dividend is financially more advantageous to the laid-off worker of 4 years's tenor).
That coupled with the impacts of such a Dividend on the poor (this plan resolves the 50 million Americans facing hunger and provides greater financial stability to the 25% of qualifying Americans who receive HUD housing assistance, as well as actually providing assistance to the 75% of Americans who qualify for HUD assistance but go on a waiting list *FOREVER*; it also almost-certainly ends all homelessness immediately, and approaches 100% certainty of ending all homelessness and hunger at an extreme rate for each additional year that it fails to accomplish this goal) makes a strong argument for such a plan.
Why treat the fever with tylenol when you can just remove the tumor and cure the cancer?
Why do we even buy products from evil dirty foreigners? The Chinese are probably secret muslamic terrorists. We should build a wall around them and make Kim Jong-Un pay for it.
What did he use to create his work? Did he profit off the creation of the electronica genre by Giorgio Moroder? The modern Blues genre by B.B. King? The piano, invented by some Italian name Cristofori? The guitar, built on the bakc of its predecessor, the Lute?
What image did he take, and who at the time was popular and using that image? Was it grunge? Punk? 80s rock? Does his music have the sound of the popular period music he made his fame in? On top of whose hard work of building fame around a particular style did he slide in and make himself famous?
You, too, could be sued for billions and have your home and car taken and your wages garnished for publishing a blog post insulting someone's shitty hair.
In the context of a pay-per-account service, decent spam control tends to evolve into "your e-mail/ip is blocked and you have to pay another dollar", and eventually into "your spam activity only ever reaches ~5-50 users, and you need ~20,000 per $1 cost to break even". Paywall spam filters are efficient because spammers rely on a model of spending hundreds of dollars to innundate hundreds of millions of users, and you can easily turn that cost into millions of dollars for the same volume exposure if your spam controls are reasonably effective. If your spam controls are Google or Facebook effective, it's no longer a market, at all.
From a service operator perspective, maximizing user satisfaction maximizes annual income, as any effective spam control strategy as such quickly drives spammers away, and the revenue from repeat spam attempts is minimal. For example: even if Facebook managed to squeeze $20 million per year out of spammers this way, they have 1.65 billion active users, meaning the difference between that and no spam account revenue is 2 cents per user. It's not worth losing any users, because a 2% loss represents 2% of users who would associate with other people who might get on Facebook to talk to them! If you think of it in terms of growth, you realize they got to 1.65 billion somehow, and 2% slower growth is a massive amount of lost revenue, so sinking the spammers is worth way more than leading them along with moderate-strength spam control.
The real issue is high-grade spam control tends to be expensive; it also tends to scale well once it's reached a certain threshold, not so well once it's reached a certain higher threshold.
So people complaining about ads just want something to complain about, even though they apparently benefit? (From an economic standpoint, I think the advertisements drain more resources than alternatives, and people would be wealthier paying to use web sites than buying products that roll in a $50 billion ad budget; that requires a greater depth of thinking than I estimate most exercise.)
What if I started a Facebook/Instagram type site with no ads, and with decent spam control, and charged $1/year for a subscription, paid for through Paypal or Amazon and accepting Visa Prepaid?
Yes but the Constitution is dumb. It's broken in many areas and, from a technical perspective, needs improvement; from a less-technical perspective, what Americans want and expect is a *dictator*. They elect a President so *he* can make laws and carry out actions, and criticize him for the acts of Congress. They demand the powerful executive *make* Congress do what he said they'd do. They want one man to fix it all.
When we threw out the Monarchy, we threw out accountability for the people making the rules, and continued to behave as if the guy who isn't allowed to do anything is still the Monarchy.
Really? The government mistreats people sometimes and makes life worse for people sometimes and it's "puzzling" that this leads to anti-government attitudes?
The observations that "Government regulation X is inefficient and incurs costs for no benefit" and "the Government is big and evil and must be torn down! Down with big Government!" are not identical. Government is both beneficial and imperfect.
(if Uber's lawyers are right, and they aren't a transportation company this indicates contractor; if anyone sane is right and they sell cab rides it indicates employee).
This is actually a tricky business.
What if I have 40,000 licensed, independent cab services all comprised of one sole-proprietorship cab driver in New York City? Nobody knows to call 1-800-one-of-40,000-cab-drivers. I create a sort of portal that not only lists all of them, but will locate one, hail him via a smart phone app, and connect the passenger (buyer) with the cab operator (seller). Am I *also* a cab service, or am I supplying the service of locating a cab service?
That's kind of like Travelocity (compare airline rates) or Hotels.com (compare hotel rates), isn't it?
Now what if I do the same with ride-share drivers who aren't cabs, and provide the value-add service of background checks and insurance? I provide no transportation infrastructure (the drivers own their equipment); am I a transportation service, an information service, or an insurance reseller?
The thing is we've already defined travel agencies who appear to sell air travel and hotels as "Travel Agencies" and specifically not as airlines, even if you're using them to find airlines and they're getting a cut from the airline for the customer referral. We're trying to not do that with Uber and Lyft, even though the so-called employee is being referred to a customer by *both* Uber and Lyft, and using the same equipment for both so-called employers.
Layoffs are a result of the consumer market not buying enough of a product to support the productive labor required. If you find a way to make 100 units of a product with 100 employees, you charge 1 employee's wage per product, plus a profit margin; if you find a new way to make 100 units using 50 employees, you charge 1/2 employee's wage per product, plus profit margin. If people respond by buying twice as much, you keep all your employees; if they buy more, you hire more people; and if they buy less than twice as much, you lay off the difference (if they buy the same amount of the product, you lay off 50 employees).
With contract work like Uber, a reduction in demand for drivers results in less work. The process of staff reduction doesn't occur; you just get less work (you might get no work).
In the U.S., minimum wage is $7.25/hr and tipped employees are federally mandated a minimum of $2.14/hr. That means you can charge $11 for your Fish and Chips meal, or you can undercut the competition and charge $10.24 and have your customers give the waitress an extra $2.
Pizza places have become delivery shops by our culture, and so are now charging a $2 delivery fee. This delivery fee pays the wage (say, $8.25/hr) of the driver so it's not rolled into the cost of the pizza (wages are the basic cost of all products). If you're giving a $3 tip, delivery drivers are frequently taking $20/hr. Raising pizza prices to reflect the $20/hr delivery driver would put you out of competition with the neighboring cheaper pizza place, as people evaluate the cost of pizza first, then the cost of delivery (foot-in-the-door persuasion: you've invested effort in examining pizza prices and deciding what you want from the menu, and now you have to factor in a tip and delivery charge and it's more expensive?! Hell it's $2, just go with it).
Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible.
To put this clearly: the median family freed up 20% of their income and used it to buy plasma TVs and gameboys, rather than luxury-class healthcare. That's not even correct: housing dropped by about 50%, and we spent the additional 14% of our income *plus* 5% more on buying bigger houses.
So out of 39% of our income freed up over 50 years, we directed 1% to buying more and better healthcare. The other 38% went to buying more toys and bigger houses in which to put those toys.
The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.
"Expensive-at-first" doesn't means it'll hit the market as expensive as the last breakthrough. You have both the consumer's unwillingness to spend literally half their income on medical insurance (they might buy into the medical care itself when needed; and we can get even-more-expensive treatments into any market by amortizing those unlikely costs via insurance) and the advances in technology lowering the cost of newer technologies.
Remember I said we produced a furnace that made 80,000 tonnes of iron for the same cost as making 400 tonnes of iron prior? We now have machines to build complex machine parts, and even computers to aid engineers in designing complex machines. The cost to develop and produce a complex steel machine today--a new piece of technology--is much lower than the cost to develop and produce a similar complex steel machine in 1790. That's technical progress lowering the cost of newer technologies.
So the next big break through in medicine, what? Gene therapy? It'll be based on synthetic genetics and retroviral treatment, which will be cheaper thanks to more effective DNA synthesis and more reliable retroviral design. Clone organs? The advances in gene therapy and underlying technology will make the new developments allowing cloned organs cheaper--the same technology, if discovered today, will be much more expensive than if we discover it some years down the line when all the basic technology of mucking about with genetics has been streamlined, even though the immediate process is no simpler. This is the pattern of technical progress.
It actually becomes difficult to invent extremely-expensive new technology. You have to come up with completely new, alien processes built on things we can only barely do or can't do at all. Once we've gained the ability to carry out all the underlying tasks, an expensive new piece of technology is just a large amount of small labor, instead of a large amount of large labor. That means "expensive" becomes relative.
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Appeal to authority. I maintain that said authority is wrong.
We can try an appeal to history: raising minimum wage has always caused a decrease in available minimum-wage jobs.
We can try *many* appeals to reason.
One appeal to reason is that the amount of jobs is affected by technical progress and population growth, and so simple statistical measures are confounded (this suggests a reason *why* such assertions *can be* wrong). If you don't adjust for the increase in population, your measured data shows confounding: a minimum-wage increase that loses 0.2% of jobs over a 0.3% population growth will register as a 0.0994% job increase. For these same reasons, blunt graphs showing sharp loss of jobs when minimum wage increases are also not concrete proof of minimum wage loss.
Another appeal to reason is the simple logical analysis. I like this one because it dispels the "low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth" myth.
Income is, essentially, all money spent over a given term. If you sell $2,000 of goods and you pay your employees $1,500, your business profits $500; the total spending is $2,000, and the total income is $2,000. Raising wages doesn't change income, because the consumer base still has to spend out of their income.
When you raise some wages--e.g. minimum wage--the cost of production of those products increases. That comes with a corresponding price increase. Say the increase is 0.14 cents for an $8 fast-food meal, and we move 127 billion fast-food meals per year. That's $17.780 billion.
Take note: that's $17.780 billion that were previously spent on other goods. Those goods had to be produced by people--labor time, wages. Those goods are no longer being bought; the production is *completely lost*, and the money is instead diverted to the hands of a set of minimum-wage workers.
At a minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that's 1.23 million jobs as an upper cap of jobs lost. At a wage of $15/hr, that's 0.593 million.
"But wait!", you say. "Now those workers have additional money, and they can spend it to buy things, thus creating jobs!"
Those workers have money--the workers who weren't displaced. They also face slightly higher prices nibbling away at that money. In total, the amount nibbled away at in the entire economy is the $17.780 billion I mentioned before. As well, those workers are drawing their additional money as an annual wage: it doesn't magically fold "back into the economy"; it's *spent*, like all other income. That means it's spent no faster than it was when wages were lower, just that the money is directed away from other jobs.
There is no reason to believe these minimum wage workers have a spending profile which now avoids paying for services which involve minimum-wage labor. Further, if they *did* somehow avoid spending their money back into the minimum-wage economy, the basis of spending for maintaining those very minimum-wage jobs would collapse. Somebody's job has to go away.
The analysis above is based on *demand* economics. The ideal that a raise in wages causes an increase in jobs is based on *trickle-down* economics, whereby someone assumes that businesses just pay out higher wages because prosperity starts at the top and trickles down through the worker via the mechanism of wages. Trickle-down economics is universally mocked by economists because it's not a real theory and has been shown invalid.
In summary: I have provided a basis on which rough analysis of the impact of minimum-wage raises can be wrong due to statistical confounding (i.e. "we have seen X evidence..." is largely reliant on how you analyzed that evidence); I have shown the unresolvable logical flaw in the thinking that minimum-wage increases lead to more job-creating spending in the economy (the money comes from *other* *consumers* who are not spending that particular money on
Actual summary:
State lawmakers are considering limiting non-compete agreements to one year, banning them for low-wage workers and for people terminated without cause.
Your assertion:
non-competes are not enforcible.
Even allowing a paid 1-year non-compete makes it much more difficult to build a startup.
You claim I have a lack of reading comprehension because I recognize the current problem is "Indefinite non-competes are wholly enforceable today, and we are looking at limits on those?" while your response is "A 1-year non-compete would be a new thing, because non-competes are non-enforceable"? The current problem space is non-competes are wholly enforceable with no legal controls, and those jurisdictions are looking to restrict them; your interpretation is that those jurisdictions are looking to *strengthen* them.
You fail reading comprehension. Either that or you're invoking a strawman by walking away from the problem space, selecting a *different* problem space, arguing in terms of a different situation, and then applying the conclusion there to the original problem.
Outcome could be very, very bad. Why do you think this would have a good outcome? What mechanism do you expect to invoke?
It doesn't have to be; it only has to explain scale and practical impact.
People imagine things like a billion dollars being a lot; that might be true in the scheme of Rhode Island's 1.06 million people (~$1,000 per person to fit $1 billion into a year's taxes, ~$2,000 with a 50% labor force), but not in the scope of the United States (~$3.29/year per person, or $5.68 per year from every person in the labor force). A billion dollar salary for the CEO of Comcast or even Apple might be a big ask, too; but $25 million sure isn't.
The point is the practical impact of dismantling a CEO's salary and handing it back to the consumer, the worker, and whomever else is roughly zero. The practical impact of dismantling the culture of high executive salaries is ... difficult to analyze. High-salary executives buy goods in markets the other consumer classes can't, and they pack a significant part of their income away. That means altering this structure changes markets around, causing disruption and reorganization.
As a simple example: without taxing away those high incomes *and* with reduced taxes on businesses (remember: Apple hoards $10B more each year), my Citizen's Dividend can achieve an economic meltdown by creating a demand for 18% more jobs than there are people looking to work. This is only fixed by making the working-class poorer, achieved by reducing working hours to a 4-day work week. End result? We're all about as wealthy as we are to start with, except every weekend is a three-day weekend.
Under the described plan, a $3 million income is reduced by 0.4% ($7,000); and a $25 million income is reduced by 2% ($315,000); those reductions are buffed out to 0 in the long term. What might happen if we get these incomes to cut by millions?
You're busy looking at other people and complaining they have too much and it's unfair. You haven't explained what to do about it that would help *anybody* or resolve any problem. I've avoided the whole thing because it's too much risk: I can't predict actual outcomes or impacts along the way, so actions as such against the situation have unknown impacts. One possible outcome is an increase in the spread of poverty by spreading low-end wealth, stimulating population growth in the lowest class, leading to a bigger percentage of the population living at the bottom end; with the information I have, I can't speculate that outcome as being any more or less likely than an overall *reduction* in poverty in the long term. That's what risk means: I can't say what direction the outcome is going in, and I have information which suggests multiple conflicting outcomes of equally-unknown possibility.
Why do you think I went with just latching the minimum standard of living to a fixed, inviolable proportion of the average? Practically zero risks, and all are easily mitigated.
Even allowing a paid 1-year non-compete makes it much more difficult to build a startup.
The problem space given is "non-compete clauses are enforced indefinitely, and so we're proposing a bill to limit them to 2 years and provide 50% severance pay for that period". That's what's actually on the table. As an alternate to the stated problem, I've made zero errors; you have instead said, "Well, uh, the problem doesn't exist, and you're proposing to create a new problem."
At the same time you propose that non-competes are unenforceable, you also propose we should ban them. If they're already banned, why should we take any action?
The answer is simple: they're routinely enforced in the jurisdictions where the problem space exists--a fact you dispute, even though it's a concrete fact.
The CEO wage argument again.
Comcast total employees, 2013: 126,000
CEO's $28 million income: $222/employee/year, comparable to giving everyone an 11 cents per hour wage increase.
$40.8 million total compensation: $324/employee/year or 16.2 cents per hour wage raise for everyone. That's 2.23% of the Federal minimum wage.
What have we learned today, children?
No, not quite.
Increasing the cost of a product by increasing the wages paid in aggregate means that the product's price must hold a higher point. That means fewer products bought, which means fewer jobs making said products.
This is the same reason raising minimum wage causes a net loss in employment.
The whole concept is backwards. People don't realize wage-labor costs are costs to the consumer. It's like all the people talking about how Comcast charges way too much for Internet and Cable while Comcast has an average 10% annual profit--meaning *maybe* they could charge $72 instead of $80 and break even.
Bumping costs like this means somebody has to lose their job; we're transferring unemployment as a way to satisfy our sense of fairness (plus increasing costs decreases purchasable products, increasing unemployment). Limiting the power of non-compete agreements represents a more optimal solution. Correcting the welfare system--*not* mutually exclusive--works even better: these NDA issues are *only* unfair; employment is of limited availability, and losing a few employees to non-compete issues means other employees who would be unemployed instead find jobs, and so solving the fairness issue still leaves the same number of people in the same situations.
One of the reasons I'm always soapboxing a Citizen's Dividend is that particular plan avoids tax raises while easing the tax burden on the working-class and providing a secondary, non-wage income. In comparison to current, it's like collecting unemployment (at $583/month, currently) *while* you're working, without taxes (i.e. like collecting unemployment, but equivalent to collecting $870 instead of $583); plus taxes are a little lighter (at ~$84,000, you're taking home your exact salary, so you're getting $17k more per year in total than current; for a minimum-wage household, it's $6,000 or $14,500 additional income, depending on if it's a one- or two-adult household).
Let's do some modeling.
Under the above proposal, an IT worker who works for 4 years making $84k, saves up the entire difference, and gets laid off has $68,000 saved up. That's savings equivalent to 1 year of $84k salary were he paying today's taxes; compare that to 2 years of 50% salary, as proposed, and account for the $7,000/year income this worker is still receiving, and you get $41,000 spendable money per year versus the proposed $34,000.
At Silicone Valley rates of $144k, it's still only $17k/year difference (the tax brackets do interesting things). So an Apple HQ employee would normally receive $72k minus taxes--roughly $48k/year--and would be knocked down to $41k/year under my proposed solution. Not too terrible a difference, so the problem is suddenly smaller, and more-easily resolved (weakening non-compete clauses is still a good idea; weakening them to a year term limit changes the model to reflect $75k of income, meaning a 1-year term limit on NDAs plus a Citizen's Dividend is financially more advantageous to the laid-off worker of 4 years's tenor).
That coupled with the impacts of such a Dividend on the poor (this plan resolves the 50 million Americans facing hunger and provides greater financial stability to the 25% of qualifying Americans who receive HUD housing assistance, as well as actually providing assistance to the 75% of Americans who qualify for HUD assistance but go on a waiting list *FOREVER*; it also almost-certainly ends all homelessness immediately, and approaches 100% certainty of ending all homelessness and hunger at an extreme rate for each additional year that it fails to accomplish this goal) makes a strong argument for such a plan.
Why treat the fever with tylenol when you can just remove the tumor and cure the cancer?
Why do we even buy products from evil dirty foreigners? The Chinese are probably secret muslamic terrorists. We should build a wall around them and make Kim Jong-Un pay for it.
What did he use to create his work? Did he profit off the creation of the electronica genre by Giorgio Moroder? The modern Blues genre by B.B. King? The piano, invented by some Italian name Cristofori? The guitar, built on the bakc of its predecessor, the Lute?
What image did he take, and who at the time was popular and using that image? Was it grunge? Punk? 80s rock? Does his music have the sound of the popular period music he made his fame in? On top of whose hard work of building fame around a particular style did he slide in and make himself famous?
Let's ask Trent whose back his work is built on.
You, too, could be sued for billions and have your home and car taken and your wages garnished for publishing a blog post insulting someone's shitty hair.
In the context of a pay-per-account service, decent spam control tends to evolve into "your e-mail/ip is blocked and you have to pay another dollar", and eventually into "your spam activity only ever reaches ~5-50 users, and you need ~20,000 per $1 cost to break even". Paywall spam filters are efficient because spammers rely on a model of spending hundreds of dollars to innundate hundreds of millions of users, and you can easily turn that cost into millions of dollars for the same volume exposure if your spam controls are reasonably effective. If your spam controls are Google or Facebook effective, it's no longer a market, at all.
From a service operator perspective, maximizing user satisfaction maximizes annual income, as any effective spam control strategy as such quickly drives spammers away, and the revenue from repeat spam attempts is minimal. For example: even if Facebook managed to squeeze $20 million per year out of spammers this way, they have 1.65 billion active users, meaning the difference between that and no spam account revenue is 2 cents per user. It's not worth losing any users, because a 2% loss represents 2% of users who would associate with other people who might get on Facebook to talk to them! If you think of it in terms of growth, you realize they got to 1.65 billion somehow, and 2% slower growth is a massive amount of lost revenue, so sinking the spammers is worth way more than leading them along with moderate-strength spam control.
The real issue is high-grade spam control tends to be expensive; it also tends to scale well once it's reached a certain threshold, not so well once it's reached a certain higher threshold.
So people complaining about ads just want something to complain about, even though they apparently benefit? (From an economic standpoint, I think the advertisements drain more resources than alternatives, and people would be wealthier paying to use web sites than buying products that roll in a $50 billion ad budget; that requires a greater depth of thinking than I estimate most exercise.)
What if I started a Facebook/Instagram type site with no ads, and with decent spam control, and charged $1/year for a subscription, paid for through Paypal or Amazon and accepting Visa Prepaid?
Yes but the Constitution is dumb. It's broken in many areas and, from a technical perspective, needs improvement; from a less-technical perspective, what Americans want and expect is a *dictator*. They elect a President so *he* can make laws and carry out actions, and criticize him for the acts of Congress. They demand the powerful executive *make* Congress do what he said they'd do. They want one man to fix it all.
When we threw out the Monarchy, we threw out accountability for the people making the rules, and continued to behave as if the guy who isn't allowed to do anything is still the Monarchy.
Risk transfer is called "insurance".
Really? The government mistreats people sometimes and makes life worse for people sometimes and it's "puzzling" that this leads to anti-government attitudes?
The observations that "Government regulation X is inefficient and incurs costs for no benefit" and "the Government is big and evil and must be torn down! Down with big Government!" are not identical. Government is both beneficial and imperfect.
(if Uber's lawyers are right, and they aren't a transportation company this indicates contractor; if anyone sane is right and they sell cab rides it indicates employee).
This is actually a tricky business.
What if I have 40,000 licensed, independent cab services all comprised of one sole-proprietorship cab driver in New York City? Nobody knows to call 1-800-one-of-40,000-cab-drivers. I create a sort of portal that not only lists all of them, but will locate one, hail him via a smart phone app, and connect the passenger (buyer) with the cab operator (seller). Am I *also* a cab service, or am I supplying the service of locating a cab service?
That's kind of like Travelocity (compare airline rates) or Hotels.com (compare hotel rates), isn't it?
Now what if I do the same with ride-share drivers who aren't cabs, and provide the value-add service of background checks and insurance? I provide no transportation infrastructure (the drivers own their equipment); am I a transportation service, an information service, or an insurance reseller?
The thing is we've already defined travel agencies who appear to sell air travel and hotels as "Travel Agencies" and specifically not as airlines, even if you're using them to find airlines and they're getting a cut from the airline for the customer referral. We're trying to not do that with Uber and Lyft, even though the so-called employee is being referred to a customer by *both* Uber and Lyft, and using the same equipment for both so-called employers.
So is Expedia.com an airline? Is that sane?
Uber provides more insurance than taxi companies; and they provide proper background checks of as high a quality as the taxi companies.
So you're bidding, and they've got a maximum budget for the bid, and you're over it. Cool. Go pound sand.
Layoffs are a result of the consumer market not buying enough of a product to support the productive labor required. If you find a way to make 100 units of a product with 100 employees, you charge 1 employee's wage per product, plus a profit margin; if you find a new way to make 100 units using 50 employees, you charge 1/2 employee's wage per product, plus profit margin. If people respond by buying twice as much, you keep all your employees; if they buy more, you hire more people; and if they buy less than twice as much, you lay off the difference (if they buy the same amount of the product, you lay off 50 employees).
With contract work like Uber, a reduction in demand for drivers results in less work. The process of staff reduction doesn't occur; you just get less work (you might get no work).
In the U.S., minimum wage is $7.25/hr and tipped employees are federally mandated a minimum of $2.14/hr. That means you can charge $11 for your Fish and Chips meal, or you can undercut the competition and charge $10.24 and have your customers give the waitress an extra $2.
Pizza places have become delivery shops by our culture, and so are now charging a $2 delivery fee. This delivery fee pays the wage (say, $8.25/hr) of the driver so it's not rolled into the cost of the pizza (wages are the basic cost of all products). If you're giving a $3 tip, delivery drivers are frequently taking $20/hr. Raising pizza prices to reflect the $20/hr delivery driver would put you out of competition with the neighboring cheaper pizza place, as people evaluate the cost of pizza first, then the cost of delivery (foot-in-the-door persuasion: you've invested effort in examining pizza prices and deciding what you want from the menu, and now you have to factor in a tip and delivery charge and it's more expensive?! Hell it's $2, just go with it).
Didn't Asimov debunk this, and the response was, "Well what do you know about your own writing?"
Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible.
I can disprove this in one shot.
Circa 1950, 25% of the average family's income paid for discretionary spending and entertainment; circa 2003, 44% spent on same. Health care spending raised from 5% to 6%.
To put this clearly: the median family freed up 20% of their income and used it to buy plasma TVs and gameboys, rather than luxury-class healthcare. That's not even correct: housing dropped by about 50%, and we spent the additional 14% of our income *plus* 5% more on buying bigger houses.
So out of 39% of our income freed up over 50 years, we directed 1% to buying more and better healthcare. The other 38% went to buying more toys and bigger houses in which to put those toys.
The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.
"Expensive-at-first" doesn't means it'll hit the market as expensive as the last breakthrough. You have both the consumer's unwillingness to spend literally half their income on medical insurance (they might buy into the medical care itself when needed; and we can get even-more-expensive treatments into any market by amortizing those unlikely costs via insurance) and the advances in technology lowering the cost of newer technologies.
Remember I said we produced a furnace that made 80,000 tonnes of iron for the same cost as making 400 tonnes of iron prior? We now have machines to build complex machine parts, and even computers to aid engineers in designing complex machines. The cost to develop and produce a complex steel machine today--a new piece of technology--is much lower than the cost to develop and produce a similar complex steel machine in 1790. That's technical progress lowering the cost of newer technologies.
So the next big break through in medicine, what? Gene therapy? It'll be based on synthetic genetics and retroviral treatment, which will be cheaper thanks to more effective DNA synthesis and more reliable retroviral design. Clone organs? The advances in gene therapy and underlying technology will make the new developments allowing cloned organs cheaper--the same technology, if discovered today, will be much more expensive than if we discover it some years down the line when all the basic technology of mucking about with genetics has been streamlined, even though the immediate process is no simpler. This is the pattern of technical progress.
It actually becomes difficult to invent extremely-expensive new technology. You have to come up with completely new, alien processes built on things we can only barely do or can't do at all. Once we've gained the ability to carry out all the underlying tasks, an expensive new piece of technology is just a large amount of small labor, instead of a large amount of large labor. That means "expensive" becomes relative.