I have argued for the planting of fruit trees in our cities.
I speak often of a citizen's dividend: of removing half our taxes (covers the $1.28 trillion of welfare paid out of the federal pocket, of a total $1.62 trillion of welfare) and slapping on a separate tax to collect what amounts to a social security payout for all natural-born Americans over the age of 18 and resident in the country, providing every individual just barely enough to live on. This is not my only plan, however; there are other ways to make high-efficiency gains in the security of society.
One of my frequent suggestions is to stop planting oaks (nectar is toxic to bees) and start planting fruiting trees. Tall trees? Pecans. Small trees? Dwarf prunus (cherry, apple, pear, etc.), plum, persimmon. Bushes? Blueberries, bush cherries, pomegranate. Fill our cities, our parks, our highways, with fruit. We have volunteer organizations who harvest fruit and take it to soup kitchens to feed the hungry; we could allow casual and charitable collection, and prohibit organized collection for commercial purposes. If the trees are bare, it means people are hungry and eating (or birds are stealing your blueberries).
We greenify our streets all the time. The cost to greenify by fruiting trees is similar, as the trees cost as much and are as labor-intensive as any other. We can improve our maintenance programs to maximize yield, but we would derive significant benefit even without this. All this comes at little to no cost, as we will otherwise put other trees in these exact spaces.
Much of this is aggregate knowledge. "Gold Plating" is a project management term roughly meaning "adding things to a project which apparently create value, but which are worthless to the stakeholders" (e.g. adding 40 types of cutting disks to a food processor, when the target demographic only ever use 3 or 4 of those, and the demographic who would use the extra discs needs a bigger motor and a larger cup). We know about safety versus cost from GM and Ford; however, everyone does this: squeezing the last drop of blood from a stone would make that $15,000 economy car a $90,000 economy car that kills maybe 5-10 fewer people over 30 years (or not, since nobody could afford a car at all). And so on.
All stuff we've seen. Why do you think gold is expensive? One does not simply open a mine and extract several tons of gold; it's not that there isn't a lot of gold in the world, but rather that it takes great expense (i.e. human time) to find, extract, and refine (which is a result of there being not very much in the world). Same with oil: if it were so easy to just go get oil out of the ground, someone would challenge Exxon-Mobil and drill their own. Sure, there's mark-up; but mark-up can be avoided by building your own equipment and finding your own wells--which is so hard that no venture will back you, else why isn't Sir Richard Branson--a man who can put a rich white man in space for $195,000--selling us $5/barrel oil from Virgin Mineral?
I've personally never rotated a wrench using friction force. It's always been a pull upwards (bracing) or sideways; sideways pulls are largely done by my body pivoting over some joint (legs, hips, etc.), with gravitational assist. I have, on occasion, lifted myself off the ground.
Dude, sockets are positive-locking. They're not "the finer part of the tool"; they distribute stress among an entire surface, which is distributed to a round barrel. This is why you can shatter a socket that's slightly wrong (e.g. an 8mm socket on a 5/16 bolt) relatively easily: you have six contact points prying at the weakest part of the socket, instead of a fitted socket providing full contact.
Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc. You are supposing that if someone is getting 70% as much food as they need, becomes chronically ill because of it, and dies after 10-15 years of this due to kidney failure, that it's because of kidney failure and not because of starvation (i.e. malnutrition causing degradation of the health of vital organs until they fail).
That is bullshit.
I know you want to cover your eyes and pretend the plight of the poor doesn't exist, and that people are just greedy and lazy assholes who can't even be bothered to get their EBT set up; but the real world doesn't work that way, it's not all roses and butterflies, and it's not cut and dried into geometrically perfect tessellations. The Just World Hypothesis is a piece of shit: people don't get what they deserve, and karma is as real as Santa Clause. Outcomes are the result of a myriad of factors, and sometimes the root cause of a problem is obscured. VERY obscured. That this conveniently allows you to not see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
synonyms: extreme hunger, lack of food, famine, undernourishment, malnourishment
Let's try English, shall we? Undernourishment, lack of food, EXTREME HUNGER. Like 14 million households, not getting enough food; like 7 million households, experiencing extreme food insecurity and pain from hunger.
It's hard to quantify starvation. It's hard to quantify malnourishment. It's hard to quantify death. Estimates of 3000+ per year dead in America by starvation stand right next to estimates of almost 50% of deaths under 5 (28,000 deaths under 5 per year in the United States) being caused by malnutrition--that is, we know people were eating, we know the kids were eating, but they weren't eating enough; we can't exactly say they died of... well, starving to death... but their bodies did stop functioning simply from stress caused by being hungry all the fucking time, essentially BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T FED ENOUGH. We can't exactly point to this in the muck of complications it causes, which brings other health effects, any one of which can be the killing blow, ultimately caused by chronic hunger but not itself chronic hunger, so not technically death by hunger.
In short: people who die because they don't eat enough may not have technically died of hunger, even though they wouldn't have died if they had adequate food security. In the same way, people who die of heart disease caused by smoking are marked as dying by heart disease, rather than "death by cigarettes".
You can be like this woman and argue that dying of complications caused by and related to chronic hunger aren't the same as starving to death, but you'd be intellectually dishonest and not credible.
Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.
The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe.
Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?
Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.
And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.
Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying.
You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.
Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.
Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.
That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.
Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility
How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector?
Those aren't minimum wage jobs.
Also, historically, mechanization, paradigm shifts, and other such major business process changes aren't there to shift labor up the pipe. You're not turning 100 people into 150 people across more services; you're involving 30 people instead of 100 people in the entire process of making a shirt. The point is to pay less in wages by eliminating workers, possibly replacing them with far fewer workers of slightly higher wages (e.g. eliminate 10 $10/hr wokers for 2 $20/hr workers, you pay $40/hr instead of $100/hr for the same result).
Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).
There really isn't an infinite demand market for scientists and engineers. Where would we get infinite money?
That's not an emotional appeal or just an ancedote that showcases the need to pick the right degree that has the ability to pay off college debt.
To speculate on a market, with other people speculating, deciding what limited resource to hedge their future upon, in a mode which will fail if other people select the same limited resource; as opposed to having businesses who understand their own needs develop the work force, hiring entrants and managing their education far more efficiently.
It's a bad plan, but it looks nice because we're physically handing something to individuals. The big businesses are the ones who reap the benefit; we're handing the costs and risks to individuals. Effectively, we're giving individuals shovels and land rights, and telling them we're helping them to mine gold, while the big businesses sit back with piles of cash to buy that gold for cheap off any of the few who find some; this is the alternative to making big businesses expend the resources to find fewer gold mines, prospect themselves, then get heavy machinery and hire miners to dig for gold, even though the businesses have expertise that allows them to more effectively prospect and find gold more often with less time and effort and cost.
You talk a lot but you don't listen too well.
You're mistaken. If you said to me, "Two plus Two is Five," a hundred times, and I continued to argue, it wouldn't be because I don't listen; it would be because I'd heard the mathematical arguments before, I'd examined yours and found nothing new, and I'd determined you're wrong.
I'm listening, and you're not saying anything groundbreaking here. It's all things I've heard before, things I've spent thousands of hours analyzing, and things I've determined don't work that way in the real world. You're saying things, I'm telling you what you're saying is nonsense, and you're assuming I'm not listening because I consistently discount your arguments about cats chasing carrots through the sky as if they have no merit.
"Standing" has been dramatically changed in US law. It now allows people to claim they could be potentially harmed, or could be harmed, or could have been harmed, to make a lawsuit.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people [ population of Argentina, nation] starving to death.
Where are the dead bodies?
Depends on your definition of "starving to death". Conceptually, not eating for 2 weeks and dying is the same thing as eating half as much as you need for 4 weeks and dying. Those chronically unable to get enough food eventually die, over months or years, of "malnutrition"; medically, starvation refers to the most extreme form of malnutrition, whereby health deteriorates rapidly due to grossly limited access to food. Colloquially, we refer to limited access to food (such as during rationing) as "slow starvation", especially when it leads to death. This applies even when a person slowly starves over months or years.
These people are not experiencing the hunter-gatherer problem of having no kill for a day or two, and then taking down a buffalo and engorging themselves; they are not following a feast-and-fast diet. These people are chronically malnourished, and live with continuous health effects; nearly half of them live with worsening health effects, in the range where sheer lack of food is outright killing them slowly. These are the sickly and anemic who are suffering from deficiencies in iron or potassium, from loss of muscle mass and body fat due to sheer caloric restriction, from weakened bones and arthritic joints due to not getting the calcium and fat intake needed to maintain their bodies.
These people are dying, slowly, from being underfed.
That's as much starving to death as simply taking your food away and leaving you in a hole to rot. It's not as dramatic, but cancer isn't as dramatic as a bullet to the head.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
No, it's a demand curve because businesses, on extreme modal average, don't throw tantrums; they operate based on profitability. If you squeeze them, they will pay; and if you keep squeezing them, they will take up a different management technique that is suddenly cheaper than you are; and if you keep squeezing them after that, they simply expire from being crushed to death. They don't just decide, hey, fuck you for minimum wage; we're going to instead spend millions on some other strategy that is going to cost us more and leave us poor, or we're not going to hire people even though we'd be making twice as much money if we did. There are actually rules against that (CEOs get fired for that behavior).
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
Boundaries. A minimum wage raise of 1 penny isn't going to change profitability strategy.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage.
Which makes it less of an impact than a wage increase on the whole workforce.
The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected.
No, wrong. The optimum number of workers is the number of workers that can produce the supply of a good or service to meet the demand at a price below the cost of the good or service, including labor. That's... a lot of gobbledygook, but it's meaningful enough: if that last worker is still giving you the ability to produce as many widgets to meet demands, and the price you sell them for still turns a larger profit versus removing that worker and his output, you still need that many workers.
Again: A minimum wage increase of 1 penny isn't going to do anything.
That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can fi
American Express uses an expert system AI to model a person's credit history and spending patterns, which then determines if a particular charge is fraud; it's more accurate than humans, and provides a full explanation of how it got there, including a list of information it's aware of but doesn't understand and thus hasn't factored in. This AI has no free will, and is not a thinking machine; it appears to make judgments and decisions, but is only a data analysis program. A very fancy data analysis program.
Dr. Sbaitso wasn't actually intelligent, or a doctor.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
What is relevant is the technical impact of minimum wage. My argument is correct: wages do not sit exactly on the threshold of job loss; if they did, then you could just wait a few weeks, and the costs of whatever strategy would eliminate jobs would decrease further, triggering the exact same impacts as raising the minimum wage. Robots get cheaper, new management strategies become better-understood and easier to implement, and so on. The pressure comes from both sides.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
It's not, but it's also not going away. Social welfare has real value: laborers can easily be destroyed in a few short months of unemployment, but they are valuable and can be maintained with a slow drip of income. This is another huge economics argument; it is well known, however, that unemployment insurance is of high value. Old-age pensions are not; Social Security exists as a social benefit, purely on the moral grounds that people who work for 60 years deserve to rest in retirement with no troubles. This isn't necessarily bad; but there's a difference between welfare for economic efficiency and welfare to support what we as a society envision as the quality of life society should make possible.
Accounting for all of that, it's obvious we're not cutting welfare away--it's plain to see that cutting away all welfare would even be economically harmful. I propose welfare improvements which are efficient: I want more return for what we, as a society, invest; I don't want to pay $500 billion more for $500 billion more social safety net, but I might pay $100 billion more to turn our $1,600 billion social safety net into what we would imagine as a $3,500 billion social safety net.
A new system which more efficiently protects the laborer would reduce crimes of necessity (stealing food to live), support economic activity, reduce health care issues (which eventually put load on welfare systems and hospitals, which pass the costs on to everyone else), ad so on. This has obvious benefits: less property damage, less theft, less policing required, less sunk costs in the various welfare systems, less sunk cost in the healthcare system. These are things we pay for when we don't pay for a s
Because it sets some bars that are useful in illustrating a point that is actually real, but that is impossible to convey without creating an artificial situation that exemplifies it. The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives.
It's not a blending though. It's this behavior, and there is a lot of ground to cover on both sides to hit that cross-over point.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." That's an artificial market solution with a dictatorial nobility oligarchy. We try to counter that by minimum wage; it has problems, but they're smaller than the problem of supplying work to desperate workers. My solution eliminates minimum wage, its problems, the problems of qualified welfare, and the problem of desperation, without eliminating the demand for employment; demand for employment increases, compared to our current welfare system, because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
There's been a trend of treating science like speculative fiction. A few dissenters have tried to explain to us that AI is a set of computer algorithms that make intelligent decisions, not necessarily by human-like thought process, but with human-like outcome; but people are fixated on the idea of AI being a warlike species with infinite reach, immediately taking hostile control of all network systems, rewriting firmware to turn anything capable of generating or measuring electromagnetic noise into a transceiver, and turning every piece of electronic machinery into a drone node specializing in the killing of biologicals.
Yeah I see nothing in the Constitution allowing the Federal government to actually criminalize the possession or use of substances like marijuana. The Supreme Court could decide the DEA is unconstitutional, and decapitate it. That could be... chaotic.
Did you see the part where I countered that I paid off my own student debt in 3 years as opposed to your hypothetical 30 year mortgage?
Yes, that's called anecdote. It's cool that your $30k loan could go down in 3 years; it's also cool that the 5 colleges around me have students coming out with $192,000 of tuition over 4 years, plus books, plus lab fees, plus registration fees, and none of these kids have jobs. In the IT field, I had coworkers who were on their 12th year of student loans, with over $100k of balance.
It has been estimated (as of April, 2014) that 75% of college graduates will be paying their student loans in their 50s. In America, many student have over $200k of debt; some have over $400k; and we have a 10-year deferral where interest accrues, which is massively expensive. One of the big cons of loans is the concept of loss of balance: by the time you've half paid a mortgage or a student loan, you've paid way more than the original borrowed sum. The Federal government is putting new regulations in place to cancel student debt after 30 years (England already does this); this isn't a loss because, 30 years in, you'll have paid well more than you borrowed anyway. You haven't paid your contracted obligation, but you've paid the bank the amount borrowed, plus inflation, plus a profit on top.
Welcome to the real world, where we have $1 trillion in student debt in America.
That's not an emotional appeal.
You said we should advocate education in all its forms. There is no justification for such a statement; it leaves open every possible situation, every possible expense, every possible idea. We could advocate education by providing state-funded tuition and housing so that people don't have to work or pay for food and housing while being educated; we could combine this with re-education, in case the market is flooded in your career and so you need to go back to college. In that situation, you could just spend your entire life in college, being paid by the government, and just take 400 degree programs until you die. It would not be productive; it would be state welfare.
You may not be aware of this, but you see education as a thing we give individuals. You don't see college education as a hand-out to businesses, but as a service to the student. Because of this, any suggestion that we should take away state support for college education feels, to you, as if we're advocating taking things away from people. When things are taken away, they must go somewhere; presumably, they go to other people who are not the poor and the middle class. Your immediate reflex is to see this as taking things away from the poor and giving them to the rich.
Think about that for a minute. Then think about what I said about cheap labor. State-supported universal college education is a hand-out to the rich at the expense of the poor.
You crazy? Are you selectively looking at giant corporations that make widgets that have a 30 year shelf-life? There are startups that genesis, rise, fall, and get resurrected in the span of 5 years.
Even a startup that only survives 5 years has a business plan. Often that plan doesn't pan out; but the business won't survive such a massive shift in direction that it needs to fire an entire class of employees and hire a different class. In short: your business isn't going to have to fire half its programmers and hire nurses; your business isn't even going to have to fire half its 3D designers and hire Web designers. Your business operates in a certain market sector with a certain type of operation needing certain styles of operation; growth is lower risk, diversification is higher risk, and complete changes of market are nearly impossible.
I predict that I will need water, light clothes, food, and a compass to cross the desert. If I get into the desert and find an oasis, I may realize I need more water, and stock up. If I haven't p
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
Let's say those businesses can make a profit hiring 100 guys at $10/hr, and will make less of a profit hiring 90 guys at $10/hr, and less of a profit hiring 60 guys at $10/hr. Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys: they make less of a profit hiring 110 guys at $5/hr than they make hiring 100 guys at $5/hr. If they can negotiate $5/hr, they will hire 100 guys; if they are forced to a minimum wage of $10/hr, they will hire 100 guys; and, if minimum wage is $15/hr, the demand slowly tapering off (S-curve) will cause them to only hire 70 guys at $15/hr.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Our current implementation of welfare creates a situation in which you should *not* seek employment, because you may permanently lose welfare. Bouncing into and then back out of employment can disqualify you from receiving welfare you could have kept receiving. Further, the welfare may be more than or only slightly less than the wages; why would you work for a quarter an hour?
An unconditional guaranteed supply of the basic needs of life would avoid this welfare trap. Employment always increases income; however, employment also reduces quality-of-life, and so compensation must be equal to the exertion of employment plus the time. This exchange provides a null impact on a person's life; wealth is increased by using the wages to afford things which increase the quality-of-life during time spent outside work. Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
I ask you: if you had the money to afford a bedroom big enough for a twin bed (roughly the size of a small bathroom), a sitting room slightly larger, a small kitchen, and a bathroom that includes a shower stall (with sink basin in the shower) and a toilet crammed in the corner, would you be happy? Would you spend every dime you have on rent, on meager and tasteless food, on shoddy clothes, and find yourself hardly able to afford a Frisbee to play with? Or would you seek to live in something that isn't slightly larger than a Singapore apartment, something more than half the size of a studio in New York, with enough money to not financially ruin yourself by eating at Burger King four times in one month?
I am rather certain this doesn't undermine and destroy civilization, as you could have essentially the same standard of living if you convinced someone to let you sleep in his tool shed and take a shower and some bread each day in exchange for sucking his dick before and after work. In my system, I've eliminated the dick sucking part.
This is an emotional appeal most people have fallen for. Think about if I can hand you something that is, in itself, a boon: if I give you food, food is good for you, and will help you. Taking that something away is a bad thing. Assume this thing is pure, and in fact good for you to have in all cases.
That's education.
The problem is the circumstance in which you receive it. With college education, we take two burdens from businesses: cost and risk. The risk, in particular, is very context-sensitive: businesses know who they want to hire, and they know what direction their business is moving in; they can manage their human resources effectively by building skills in their employees. Anyone who tells you a business can't predict its need for technical people in 5 years and would be completely ineffective at planning for their workforce effectively has no idea what he's talking about.
This risk, on businesses, equates to hiring entrants for cheap, shifting crap work from highly-skilled labor (expensive) to entrants (cheap), and improving the entrants (relatively cheap, and amortized) so that more complex work can be moved from the highly-skilled labor. This allows you to reduce costs by making more efficient use of your expensive resources, rather than pouring gold over every cheap plastic bit.
On individuals, it's different. Individuals need to pick out what general market will have the most need for their skills after college (in 4 years), and move in that direction. Their ability to switch course is severely eroded after the first year (you can only front load so much gen-ed), and so they must settle on a declared major. For at least three years, they take risk in earnest; the longer they're in school, the higher the risk. If they come out into a market which is now saturated, they may face unemployment; changing careers at any stage induces sunk costs, and more costs are sunk the longer they stay in college. Likewise, a high-demand career may come with an increase in tuition costs to the student, further increasing risk. When the college is funded by tax dollars, the risk is transferred to the taxpayer basis.
With the risk transferred to individuals, businesses see an increase in available trained, skilled labor. This means they can flatten the costs of labor by lowering salaries: Instead of a $100k programmer, a $30k entrant, and $30k ($7.5k/year) paying for the entrant's college education while profiting by moving cleanup and QA off the $100k programmer to the $30k entrant and giving more tasks to the $100k programmer, the business can just hire two $60k skilled programmers. This gives the business two *skilled* programmers, instead of one skilled and on entrant, allowing greater management flexibility and the ability to implement more aggressive business strategies.
You'll notice that providing universal college education effectively reduces people's salaries and increases unemployment risk, while reducing costs to businesses and improving their ability to profit from individuals.
In other words: by giving a college education to everyone, we are disenfranchising and burdening the individual laborer, and giving a hand-out to businesses.
Interestingly, the logic above would indicate that universal education plans as such actually work out better the higher your income level: poor people can't handle these risks, and even a fully-paid tuition ending in having an oversupplied degree is worse than a situation where they only have to get hired as an unskilled entrant with a solid high-school education. Our current system is an absolute abomination, as it puts debt risk on the poor: if we can't guarantee them employment immediately out of college, they can't afford to even try. Any hope of possibly scraping by on a McDonalds salary evaporates when you have to pay your student loan debt on top of all the other shit.
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I have argued for the planting of fruit trees in our cities.
I speak often of a citizen's dividend: of removing half our taxes (covers the $1.28 trillion of welfare paid out of the federal pocket, of a total $1.62 trillion of welfare) and slapping on a separate tax to collect what amounts to a social security payout for all natural-born Americans over the age of 18 and resident in the country, providing every individual just barely enough to live on. This is not my only plan, however; there are other ways to make high-efficiency gains in the security of society.
One of my frequent suggestions is to stop planting oaks (nectar is toxic to bees) and start planting fruiting trees. Tall trees? Pecans. Small trees? Dwarf prunus (cherry, apple, pear, etc.), plum, persimmon. Bushes? Blueberries, bush cherries, pomegranate. Fill our cities, our parks, our highways, with fruit. We have volunteer organizations who harvest fruit and take it to soup kitchens to feed the hungry; we could allow casual and charitable collection, and prohibit organized collection for commercial purposes. If the trees are bare, it means people are hungry and eating (or birds are stealing your blueberries).
We greenify our streets all the time. The cost to greenify by fruiting trees is similar, as the trees cost as much and are as labor-intensive as any other. We can improve our maintenance programs to maximize yield, but we would derive significant benefit even without this. All this comes at little to no cost, as we will otherwise put other trees in these exact spaces.
No, I mostly rant at people on Reddit and IRC.
Much of this is aggregate knowledge. "Gold Plating" is a project management term roughly meaning "adding things to a project which apparently create value, but which are worthless to the stakeholders" (e.g. adding 40 types of cutting disks to a food processor, when the target demographic only ever use 3 or 4 of those, and the demographic who would use the extra discs needs a bigger motor and a larger cup). We know about safety versus cost from GM and Ford; however, everyone does this: squeezing the last drop of blood from a stone would make that $15,000 economy car a $90,000 economy car that kills maybe 5-10 fewer people over 30 years (or not, since nobody could afford a car at all). And so on.
All stuff we've seen. Why do you think gold is expensive? One does not simply open a mine and extract several tons of gold; it's not that there isn't a lot of gold in the world, but rather that it takes great expense (i.e. human time) to find, extract, and refine (which is a result of there being not very much in the world). Same with oil: if it were so easy to just go get oil out of the ground, someone would challenge Exxon-Mobil and drill their own. Sure, there's mark-up; but mark-up can be avoided by building your own equipment and finding your own wells--which is so hard that no venture will back you, else why isn't Sir Richard Branson--a man who can put a rich white man in space for $195,000--selling us $5/barrel oil from Virgin Mineral?
I've personally never rotated a wrench using friction force. It's always been a pull upwards (bracing) or sideways; sideways pulls are largely done by my body pivoting over some joint (legs, hips, etc.), with gravitational assist. I have, on occasion, lifted myself off the ground.
3D printing will be irrelevant in 500 years.
You produce a socket extender with a bolt head if you need to. Plenty of ways around spatial problems.
Dude, sockets are positive-locking. They're not "the finer part of the tool"; they distribute stress among an entire surface, which is distributed to a round barrel. This is why you can shatter a socket that's slightly wrong (e.g. an 8mm socket on a 5/16 bolt) relatively easily: you have six contact points prying at the weakest part of the socket, instead of a fitted socket providing full contact.
Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc. You are supposing that if someone is getting 70% as much food as they need, becomes chronically ill because of it, and dies after 10-15 years of this due to kidney failure, that it's because of kidney failure and not because of starvation (i.e. malnutrition causing degradation of the health of vital organs until they fail).
That is bullshit.
I know you want to cover your eyes and pretend the plight of the poor doesn't exist, and that people are just greedy and lazy assholes who can't even be bothered to get their EBT set up; but the real world doesn't work that way, it's not all roses and butterflies, and it's not cut and dried into geometrically perfect tessellations. The Just World Hypothesis is a piece of shit: people don't get what they deserve, and karma is as real as Santa Clause. Outcomes are the result of a myriad of factors, and sometimes the root cause of a problem is obscured. VERY obscured. That this conveniently allows you to not see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.
starvation
.star'vaSH(e)n/
noun
suffering or death caused by hunger.
synonyms: extreme hunger, lack of food, famine, undernourishment, malnourishment
Let's try English, shall we? Undernourishment, lack of food, EXTREME HUNGER. Like 14 million households, not getting enough food; like 7 million households, experiencing extreme food insecurity and pain from hunger.
It's hard to quantify starvation. It's hard to quantify malnourishment. It's hard to quantify death. Estimates of 3000+ per year dead in America by starvation stand right next to estimates of almost 50% of deaths under 5 (28,000 deaths under 5 per year in the United States) being caused by malnutrition--that is, we know people were eating, we know the kids were eating, but they weren't eating enough; we can't exactly say they died of ... well, starving to death ... but their bodies did stop functioning simply from stress caused by being hungry all the fucking time, essentially BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T FED ENOUGH. We can't exactly point to this in the muck of complications it causes, which brings other health effects, any one of which can be the killing blow, ultimately caused by chronic hunger but not itself chronic hunger, so not technically death by hunger.
In short: people who die because they don't eat enough may not have technically died of hunger, even though they wouldn't have died if they had adequate food security. In the same way, people who die of heart disease caused by smoking are marked as dying by heart disease, rather than "death by cigarettes".
You can be like this woman and argue that dying of complications caused by and related to chronic hunger aren't the same as starving to death, but you'd be intellectually dishonest and not credible.
Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.
The hell? Remember when 80% of the workforce used to be farmers? Then they moved more towards factories. Do you not see that shift from the primary to secondary industry? There will always be some people in the primary industries (I don't think complete automation is really viable), but the bulk of the demand for workers has indeed shifted up the pipe.
Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?
Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.
And... really? You think getting an engineering degree is going to "fail" since other people want those engineering jobs? HA! Well this might just be an anecdote, but it worked pretty well for me. And every other engineer I know.
Good to know no credible research shows an oversupply of the STEM market. There's news that STEM graduates have low unemployment, with half of engineers and computer people not working in STEM jobs, and 75% of STEM graduates overall not working in STEM-related jobs. CIS has found 8 million non-working STEM graduates, and thinks there are 50% more STEM graduates than STEM jobs.
Yeah, you're hearing 2+2=5, but that's not what I'm saying.
You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.
Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.
Wow, corporate control over not only the wages of all their workers, but also the primary force of upward social mobility.... yeah, that paints a pleasant picture of the future.
That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.
Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility
How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector?
Those aren't minimum wage jobs.
Also, historically, mechanization, paradigm shifts, and other such major business process changes aren't there to shift labor up the pipe. You're not turning 100 people into 150 people across more services; you're involving 30 people instead of 100 people in the entire process of making a shirt. The point is to pay less in wages by eliminating workers, possibly replacing them with far fewer workers of slightly higher wages (e.g. eliminate 10 $10/hr wokers for 2 $20/hr workers, you pay $40/hr instead of $100/hr for the same result).
Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).
There really isn't an infinite demand market for scientists and engineers. Where would we get infinite money?
That's not an emotional appeal or just an ancedote that showcases the need to pick the right degree that has the ability to pay off college debt.
To speculate on a market, with other people speculating, deciding what limited resource to hedge their future upon, in a mode which will fail if other people select the same limited resource; as opposed to having businesses who understand their own needs develop the work force, hiring entrants and managing their education far more efficiently.
It's a bad plan, but it looks nice because we're physically handing something to individuals. The big businesses are the ones who reap the benefit; we're handing the costs and risks to individuals. Effectively, we're giving individuals shovels and land rights, and telling them we're helping them to mine gold, while the big businesses sit back with piles of cash to buy that gold for cheap off any of the few who find some; this is the alternative to making big businesses expend the resources to find fewer gold mines, prospect themselves, then get heavy machinery and hire miners to dig for gold, even though the businesses have expertise that allows them to more effectively prospect and find gold more often with less time and effort and cost.
You talk a lot but you don't listen too well.
You're mistaken. If you said to me, "Two plus Two is Five," a hundred times, and I continued to argue, it wouldn't be because I don't listen; it would be because I'd heard the mathematical arguments before, I'd examined yours and found nothing new, and I'd determined you're wrong.
I'm listening, and you're not saying anything groundbreaking here. It's all things I've heard before, things I've spent thousands of hours analyzing, and things I've determined don't work that way in the real world. You're saying things, I'm telling you what you're saying is nonsense, and you're assuming I'm not listening because I consistently discount your arguments about cats chasing carrots through the sky as if they have no merit.
"Standing" has been dramatically changed in US law. It now allows people to claim they could be potentially harmed, or could be harmed, or could have been harmed, to make a lawsuit.
Metadata is data.
Nobody will feed it anymore, and it will face predation.
I'm not a Democrat. I'm a Banana Republican.
With 300 million Americans, that would be 45 million people [ population of Argentina, nation] starving to death.
Where are the dead bodies?
Depends on your definition of "starving to death". Conceptually, not eating for 2 weeks and dying is the same thing as eating half as much as you need for 4 weeks and dying. Those chronically unable to get enough food eventually die, over months or years, of "malnutrition"; medically, starvation refers to the most extreme form of malnutrition, whereby health deteriorates rapidly due to grossly limited access to food. Colloquially, we refer to limited access to food (such as during rationing) as "slow starvation", especially when it leads to death. This applies even when a person slowly starves over months or years.
These people are not experiencing the hunter-gatherer problem of having no kill for a day or two, and then taking down a buffalo and engorging themselves; they are not following a feast-and-fast diet. These people are chronically malnourished, and live with continuous health effects; nearly half of them live with worsening health effects, in the range where sheer lack of food is outright killing them slowly. These are the sickly and anemic who are suffering from deficiencies in iron or potassium, from loss of muscle mass and body fat due to sheer caloric restriction, from weakened bones and arthritic joints due to not getting the calcium and fat intake needed to maintain their bodies.
These people are dying, slowly, from being underfed.
That's as much starving to death as simply taking your food away and leaving you in a hole to rot. It's not as dramatic, but cancer isn't as dramatic as a bullet to the head.
Reaction is very relevant. That's why it is a demand CURVE, not a demand vertical line.
No, it's a demand curve because businesses, on extreme modal average, don't throw tantrums; they operate based on profitability. If you squeeze them, they will pay; and if you keep squeezing them, they will take up a different management technique that is suddenly cheaper than you are; and if you keep squeezing them after that, they simply expire from being crushed to death. They don't just decide, hey, fuck you for minimum wage; we're going to instead spend millions on some other strategy that is going to cost us more and leave us poor, or we're not going to hire people even though we'd be making twice as much money if we did. There are actually rules against that (CEOs get fired for that behavior).
Your math is making an assumption that completely contradicts what a minimum wage does. Your math treats the minimum wage as raising labor costs uniformly across the board, such that optimal profit is achieved with the exact same number of workers.
Boundaries. A minimum wage raise of 1 penny isn't going to change profitability strategy.
The problem with this analysis is that the minimum wage only increases the costs of workers who earn less than the minimum wage.
Which makes it less of an impact than a wage increase on the whole workforce.
The optimal number of workers for profit for the average businesses is going to change, even if you can find a few businesses who are not affected.
No, wrong. The optimum number of workers is the number of workers that can produce the supply of a good or service to meet the demand at a price below the cost of the good or service, including labor. That's... a lot of gobbledygook, but it's meaningful enough: if that last worker is still giving you the ability to produce as many widgets to meet demands, and the price you sell them for still turns a larger profit versus removing that worker and his output, you still need that many workers.
Again: A minimum wage increase of 1 penny isn't going to do anything.
That's like saying no one is unemployed because you can fi
A free-willed AI is an academic problem.
American Express uses an expert system AI to model a person's credit history and spending patterns, which then determines if a particular charge is fraud; it's more accurate than humans, and provides a full explanation of how it got there, including a list of information it's aware of but doesn't understand and thus hasn't factored in. This AI has no free will, and is not a thinking machine; it appears to make judgments and decisions, but is only a data analysis program. A very fancy data analysis program.
Dr. Sbaitso wasn't actually intelligent, or a doctor.
AI is an artificial lifeform at best; in reality, it is an approximation of outcomes.
You wish to argue that what you thought while working at a single Wendy's restaurant is indicative of how all businesses as a whole will react to a minimum wage?
Reaction is irrelevant. A business can react to a moral issue for the owner by shutting down. Hobby Lobby, for example, could close its business or cut hours to below-ACA limits in reaction to the birth control mandate.
What is relevant is the technical impact of minimum wage. My argument is correct: wages do not sit exactly on the threshold of job loss; if they did, then you could just wait a few weeks, and the costs of whatever strategy would eliminate jobs would decrease further, triggering the exact same impacts as raising the minimum wage. Robots get cheaper, new management strategies become better-understood and easier to implement, and so on. The pressure comes from both sides.
More to the point, if the business can gain a greater increase profits by hiring more workers than it can by any other strategy, it will hire more workers. Exact wages are irrelevant; the only mechanism that is relevant is whether adding workers produces the greatest possible profit. If a business can profit $1M/year on 100 workers, and $0.999M/year on 101 workers, and $0.999M/year on 99 workers, it will hire exactly 100 workers; if you raise wages such that the business profits $0.8M/year on 100 workers, $0.799M/year on 101, and $0.799M/year on 99, it will still hire 100 workers. When a new management strategy comes along that allows for profits above what 100 workers can provide, that strategy is selected and workers are eliminated.
Did you manage payroll? Were you and ALL of your coworkers paid exactly minimum wage?
Of course not. Front-line workers were paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr at the time; except for about 30% of us, who were paid $6/hr. Workers below the age of 16 are not legally required to receive minimum wage, so we were paid less. The single manager on shift at any given time was paid in the vicinity of $11/hr ($10.25 up to $11.50); the district manager made more, but I was never able to find his wages or salary.
The money that currently pays for welfare is not a free pot of money. It comes from taxation on the productive.
It's not, but it's also not going away. Social welfare has real value: laborers can easily be destroyed in a few short months of unemployment, but they are valuable and can be maintained with a slow drip of income. This is another huge economics argument; it is well known, however, that unemployment insurance is of high value. Old-age pensions are not; Social Security exists as a social benefit, purely on the moral grounds that people who work for 60 years deserve to rest in retirement with no troubles. This isn't necessarily bad; but there's a difference between welfare for economic efficiency and welfare to support what we as a society envision as the quality of life society should make possible.
Accounting for all of that, it's obvious we're not cutting welfare away--it's plain to see that cutting away all welfare would even be economically harmful. I propose welfare improvements which are efficient: I want more return for what we, as a society, invest; I don't want to pay $500 billion more for $500 billion more social safety net, but I might pay $100 billion more to turn our $1,600 billion social safety net into what we would imagine as a $3,500 billion social safety net.
A new system which more efficiently protects the laborer would reduce crimes of necessity (stealing food to live), support economic activity, reduce health care issues (which eventually put load on welfare systems and hospitals, which pass the costs on to everyone else), ad so on. This has obvious benefits: less property damage, less theft, less policing required, less sunk costs in the various welfare systems, less sunk cost in the healthcare system. These are things we pay for when we don't pay for a s
Why should we make that assumption?
Because it sets some bars that are useful in illustrating a point that is actually real, but that is impossible to convey without creating an artificial situation that exemplifies it. The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.
If labor is cheap, they will use business strategies that take advantage of that abundant resource (and drive up demand) If labor is more expensive, they will find alternatives.
It's not a blending though. It's this behavior, and there is a lot of ground to cover on both sides to hit that cross-over point.
Who is this "we" that are "ensuring" things? Where are the resources coming from? You cannot cheat market value. Trying to manipulate market value with top-down governmental policies will backfire when people take advantage of any perverse incentives created.
It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.
The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." That's an artificial market solution with a dictatorial nobility oligarchy. We try to counter that by minimum wage; it has problems, but they're smaller than the problem of supplying work to desperate workers. My solution eliminates minimum wage, its problems, the problems of qualified welfare, and the problem of desperation, without eliminating the demand for employment; demand for employment increases, compared to our current welfare system, because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.
Because an AI that does what you need an AI to do is not actually an intelligent, free-willed machine.
There's been a trend of treating science like speculative fiction. A few dissenters have tried to explain to us that AI is a set of computer algorithms that make intelligent decisions, not necessarily by human-like thought process, but with human-like outcome; but people are fixated on the idea of AI being a warlike species with infinite reach, immediately taking hostile control of all network systems, rewriting firmware to turn anything capable of generating or measuring electromagnetic noise into a transceiver, and turning every piece of electronic machinery into a drone node specializing in the killing of biologicals.
Yeah I see nothing in the Constitution allowing the Federal government to actually criminalize the possession or use of substances like marijuana. The Supreme Court could decide the DEA is unconstitutional, and decapitate it. That could be ... chaotic.
Did you see the part where I countered that I paid off my own student debt in 3 years as opposed to your hypothetical 30 year mortgage?
Yes, that's called anecdote. It's cool that your $30k loan could go down in 3 years; it's also cool that the 5 colleges around me have students coming out with $192,000 of tuition over 4 years, plus books, plus lab fees, plus registration fees, and none of these kids have jobs. In the IT field, I had coworkers who were on their 12th year of student loans, with over $100k of balance.
It has been estimated (as of April, 2014) that 75% of college graduates will be paying their student loans in their 50s. In America, many student have over $200k of debt; some have over $400k; and we have a 10-year deferral where interest accrues, which is massively expensive. One of the big cons of loans is the concept of loss of balance: by the time you've half paid a mortgage or a student loan, you've paid way more than the original borrowed sum. The Federal government is putting new regulations in place to cancel student debt after 30 years (England already does this); this isn't a loss because, 30 years in, you'll have paid well more than you borrowed anyway. You haven't paid your contracted obligation, but you've paid the bank the amount borrowed, plus inflation, plus a profit on top.
Welcome to the real world, where we have $1 trillion in student debt in America.
That's not an emotional appeal.
You said we should advocate education in all its forms. There is no justification for such a statement; it leaves open every possible situation, every possible expense, every possible idea. We could advocate education by providing state-funded tuition and housing so that people don't have to work or pay for food and housing while being educated; we could combine this with re-education, in case the market is flooded in your career and so you need to go back to college. In that situation, you could just spend your entire life in college, being paid by the government, and just take 400 degree programs until you die. It would not be productive; it would be state welfare.
You may not be aware of this, but you see education as a thing we give individuals. You don't see college education as a hand-out to businesses, but as a service to the student. Because of this, any suggestion that we should take away state support for college education feels, to you, as if we're advocating taking things away from people. When things are taken away, they must go somewhere; presumably, they go to other people who are not the poor and the middle class. Your immediate reflex is to see this as taking things away from the poor and giving them to the rich.
Think about that for a minute. Then think about what I said about cheap labor. State-supported universal college education is a hand-out to the rich at the expense of the poor.
You crazy? Are you selectively looking at giant corporations that make widgets that have a 30 year shelf-life? There are startups that genesis, rise, fall, and get resurrected in the span of 5 years.
Even a startup that only survives 5 years has a business plan. Often that plan doesn't pan out; but the business won't survive such a massive shift in direction that it needs to fire an entire class of employees and hire a different class. In short: your business isn't going to have to fire half its programmers and hire nurses; your business isn't even going to have to fire half its 3D designers and hire Web designers. Your business operates in a certain market sector with a certain type of operation needing certain styles of operation; growth is lower risk, diversification is higher risk, and complete changes of market are nearly impossible.
I predict that I will need water, light clothes, food, and a compass to cross the desert. If I get into the desert and find an oasis, I may realize I need more water, and stock up. If I haven't p
Let's say businesses are willing to hire 100 guys at $5/hour, but min wage is $8/hour, so they only hire 60 guys instead.
Let's say those businesses can make a profit hiring 100 guys at $10/hr, and will make less of a profit hiring 90 guys at $10/hr, and less of a profit hiring 60 guys at $10/hr. Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys: they make less of a profit hiring 110 guys at $5/hr than they make hiring 100 guys at $5/hr. If they can negotiate $5/hr, they will hire 100 guys; if they are forced to a minimum wage of $10/hr, they will hire 100 guys; and, if minimum wage is $15/hr, the demand slowly tapering off (S-curve) will cause them to only hire 70 guys at $15/hr.
People are not dying from burger flipping or running the cashiers.
People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.
While this may sound good, implementations harm those who work and reward those who do not work. Since work is essential to the improvement and maintenance of human civilization, this effectively undermines and destroys civilization.
Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.
Our current implementation of welfare creates a situation in which you should *not* seek employment, because you may permanently lose welfare. Bouncing into and then back out of employment can disqualify you from receiving welfare you could have kept receiving. Further, the welfare may be more than or only slightly less than the wages; why would you work for a quarter an hour?
An unconditional guaranteed supply of the basic needs of life would avoid this welfare trap. Employment always increases income; however, employment also reduces quality-of-life, and so compensation must be equal to the exertion of employment plus the time. This exchange provides a null impact on a person's life; wealth is increased by using the wages to afford things which increase the quality-of-life during time spent outside work. Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.
I ask you: if you had the money to afford a bedroom big enough for a twin bed (roughly the size of a small bathroom), a sitting room slightly larger, a small kitchen, and a bathroom that includes a shower stall (with sink basin in the shower) and a toilet crammed in the corner, would you be happy? Would you spend every dime you have on rent, on meager and tasteless food, on shoddy clothes, and find yourself hardly able to afford a Frisbee to play with? Or would you seek to live in something that isn't slightly larger than a Singapore apartment, something more than half the size of a studio in New York, with enough money to not financially ruin yourself by eating at Burger King four times in one month?
I am rather certain this doesn't undermine and destroy civilization, as you could have essentially the same standard of living if you convinced someone to let you sleep in his tool shed and take a shower and some bread each day in exchange for sucking his dick before and after work. In my system, I've eliminated the dick sucking part.
You should advocate education. In all it's forms.
This is an emotional appeal most people have fallen for. Think about if I can hand you something that is, in itself, a boon: if I give you food, food is good for you, and will help you. Taking that something away is a bad thing. Assume this thing is pure, and in fact good for you to have in all cases.
That's education.
The problem is the circumstance in which you receive it. With college education, we take two burdens from businesses: cost and risk. The risk, in particular, is very context-sensitive: businesses know who they want to hire, and they know what direction their business is moving in; they can manage their human resources effectively by building skills in their employees. Anyone who tells you a business can't predict its need for technical people in 5 years and would be completely ineffective at planning for their workforce effectively has no idea what he's talking about.
This risk, on businesses, equates to hiring entrants for cheap, shifting crap work from highly-skilled labor (expensive) to entrants (cheap), and improving the entrants (relatively cheap, and amortized) so that more complex work can be moved from the highly-skilled labor. This allows you to reduce costs by making more efficient use of your expensive resources, rather than pouring gold over every cheap plastic bit.
On individuals, it's different. Individuals need to pick out what general market will have the most need for their skills after college (in 4 years), and move in that direction. Their ability to switch course is severely eroded after the first year (you can only front load so much gen-ed), and so they must settle on a declared major. For at least three years, they take risk in earnest; the longer they're in school, the higher the risk. If they come out into a market which is now saturated, they may face unemployment; changing careers at any stage induces sunk costs, and more costs are sunk the longer they stay in college. Likewise, a high-demand career may come with an increase in tuition costs to the student, further increasing risk. When the college is funded by tax dollars, the risk is transferred to the taxpayer basis.
With the risk transferred to individuals, businesses see an increase in available trained, skilled labor. This means they can flatten the costs of labor by lowering salaries: Instead of a $100k programmer, a $30k entrant, and $30k ($7.5k/year) paying for the entrant's college education while profiting by moving cleanup and QA off the $100k programmer to the $30k entrant and giving more tasks to the $100k programmer, the business can just hire two $60k skilled programmers. This gives the business two *skilled* programmers, instead of one skilled and on entrant, allowing greater management flexibility and the ability to implement more aggressive business strategies.
You'll notice that providing universal college education effectively reduces people's salaries and increases unemployment risk, while reducing costs to businesses and improving their ability to profit from individuals.
In other words: by giving a college education to everyone, we are disenfranchising and burdening the individual laborer, and giving a hand-out to businesses.
Interestingly, the logic above would indicate that universal education plans as such actually work out better the higher your income level: poor people can't handle these risks, and even a fully-paid tuition ending in having an oversupplied degree is worse than a situation where they only have to get hired as an unskilled entrant with a solid high-school education. Our current system is an absolute abomination, as it puts debt risk on the poor: if we can't guarantee them employment immediately out of college, they can't afford to even try. Any hope of possibly scraping by on a McDonalds salary evaporates when you have to pay your student loan debt on top of all the other shit.
Yeah, I