they get one invention or innovation right, but every invention and innovation has to be understood in the context of the million other inventions, innovations, and social changes that surround it.
In "The World Set Free" (published in 1914), H. G. Wells described a devastating nuclear weapon that continued to "explode" over a period of days or weeks. Very advanced technology, indeed. But they were launched by hand, from biplanes, after the pilot initiated the reaction by biting a fuse.
I think the families of Malaysian Flight 370 might have something to say about that.
I'm sure they would, but the original question was about Google Earth, not ISR.
If you want continuous coverage of all the world's oceans (you would, right; who knows where the next aircraft would disappear to?), then the coverage area balloons from 57.3 million square miles, to about 197 square miles. So, roughly quadruple the number of aircraft required to about 1200. Unit cost would be somewhere between $5 million and $10 million; at the lower number figure $6 billion or so just for the aircraft. Add in ground support equipment, control equipment and people to run the system, and you're starting to talk about some real money. In the history of commercial aviation, a total of 4 commercial passenger airliners have been lost (by which I mean, they disappeared and no trace was ever found), not counting MH370. If MH370 is never found, it will be the first to be lost since 1962.
If they send up enough sats, could they make google maps realtime?
Realtime sounds like you're asking for the video edition of Google Earth. Let's assume you meant "updated frequently" instead. We'll also assume you're not interested in continuously updated images of empty ocean.
Land surface area of our planet is about 57.3 million square miles. An aircraft at 65,000 ft has an observable "footprint" of a circle 600 miles in diameter; that's about 283,000 square miles. So at first blush, it looks like you'd need 203 or so aircraft to cover the land area. But you'd need substantially more aircraft, because equal-sized circles don't pack without a lot of overlap (for example, with a hexagonal pattern, 14 circles of unit diameter are required to cover a rectangle of 8 square units); aside from that, you probably aren't going to get usable imagery at the extreme edges of the footprint. There's also the inefficiency involved in covering small, isolated islands. You can get by with fewer aircraft if you can live with a lower refresh rate and can have each aircraft orbit with a wide radius rather than try to stay in one location. On the other hand, you're going to need a lot of spare aircraft, because even though they're solar powered, they depend on things like motors and batteries and servo actuators to stay aloft and operate through the night time and stay on station, and those things don't last forever.
Then there's the issue of single-event upsets and single-event latchups, which can be a major problem at the altitudes we're talking about. It's also very cold at 65,000 ft, so a lot of stuff that would be OK at the surface is going to have to be heated to stay operational at altitude, which means more batteries and a bigger solar array. Then, although their routine operation would be autonomous, there will have to be some level of human monitoring, because you'd sort of like to avoid having airplanes full of lithium batteries falling into urban areas.
So yeah, it could be done in theory. In practice, it might be too expensive.
Or you could just remember 355/113, accurate to 0.000027%. Or, if you're happy with the accuracy of the shotgun solution, there's always 22/7, which is accurate to 0.13%
Probably for the same reason they listen to celebrities' opinions on all sorts of things they're unqualified to give advice on, from social issues to reverse mortgages.
I am perfectly happy to stipulate that every administration I can remember (that would date back to Eisenhower, by the way), Democratic and Republican alike, has lied through their teeth at every opportunity in order to advance the agenda of the day. Maybe, just maybe, Carter might have been an exception, but he made up for that in other ways. Though what that has to do with the current question is somewhat unclear.
You probably meant Medicaid, but you're at least partially correct -- many (not all; there are plenty of poor people who try really hard to be as responsible as they can) of the people who were able to take advantage of the Medicaid Expansion were not previously insured. That would account for some portion of the missing 5 million people I was wondering about. As for the CBO being surprised about employer plan enrollment, I don't know why they would be surprised. Even when my employer's contribution is taken into account, my employer-provided plan is just about half the cost of equivalent coverage through the ACA marketplace. If I only look at my cost, my current plan is about 20% of the ACA plan cost. Of course, that's just an anecdote and I'm well aware that all employer-provided plans are not equal.
everyone is obsessed with trying to either prove or disprove it's working.
Well, not everyone, but for sure a lot of people, and frankly, I find both sides rather tiring. I'm one of the people who would just like to get their facts straight.
Insurance companies have been reporting that so far, between 76% and 85% of ACA enrolleees have paid their first bills by the due date. It's going to be pretty tough turn that into the 99% you seem to be predicting.
From a study done by Rand, over 9 million people have health insurance than did before.
From the NBC News article you cite:
"Most of the people who got new insurance didn’t buy it on the Obamacare exchanges but rather signed up with an employer, the survey found. Rand says that 8.2 million people have gained insurance from an employer since September — more than 7 million of them who had no health insurance before."
I'm having a little trouble with the arithmetic here. 9 million more people have health insurance than had it before. 7 million people who didn't have insurance before, got it through their employers. 7 million enrolled through the ACA marketplace.
So... 9 mil newly insured, less 7 mil who got their new insurance through employers... that leaves 2 mil who got new insurance somewhere else. But, wait -- 7 mil signed up for Obamacare....
Does that mean that of the 7 million who enrolled through the ACA marketplace, only 2 million didn't previously have insurance? What, did the other 5 million all have their previous policies cancelled for ACA non-compliance?
My first reaction was, the 7.1 million number is about as credible as anything else this administration says about the policies it wants to promote. Then I remembered that this particular subject is the President's legacy achievement, so it's probably less credible than usual.
Did you even read what you referenced? The whole article is about how the Europeans were responsible for the devastation you're trying to put off on a native plague.
Well, no, not the whole article. There's this, which I imagine is what he was referring to: "Little known outside the circle of a few forensic epidemiologists, though, is the fact that the deadliest plague of all in the Americas was very possibly a home grown virus."
Because living in a "stone age" society is generally much healthier than living in a 1st world country.
Right. We're talking about a society where a dental cavity, or an ingrown toenail, or a wound suffered during hunting, or appendicitis, or tonsillitis, will all most likely end in death, where most women eventually die in childbirth, and a 21-year-old person is considered old. Don't confuse your supposedly healthy paleo diet with stone age society.
Unlike many Slashdotters, I have no problem with people who actually like the Metro interface. I personally don't like it at all, but to each his own, right? Now, having said that...
You build up memory of where things are, without having to hunt through multiple level menus.
I have already built up memory of where things are, even though they're several levels down in nested menus. I don't want to build up new memories when the old ones serve the purpose.
You can clean it all up manually, but metro just hides most of it and makes it easier to delete stuff you don't want.
I prefer that my operating system not hide things like documentation, etc. from me. If I don't want something, I'll delete it. But I'd rather know it's there to be deleted, than to be blissfully unaware that it's lurking in the shadows, silently consuming disk space.
Grouping things physically is a nice alternative to sub-menus and allows you to see everything at once
My initial reaction to the Metro Start Page was, "Oh, crap -- they've reincarnated the Win 3.x Program Manager!" You have a nice, low-six-digit user ID. Have you considered the possibility that you're merely enjoying a bit of nostalgia?
But given that 41% of people run with their smartphones
I guess that means that 41% of people who run, carry their smartphones with them. Looking around, I have serious doubts that 41% of people run. In fact, I would guess that 41% of people would have heart attacks if they tried to run, with or without their smartphones.
Obama did not go out and donate to campaigns seeking to restrict gay rights.
You're right. All he did was invite Rick "being gay is a sin" Warren to deliver the invocation at his first inauguration, and later express his disapproval of same-sex marriage. You say, "There's a huge difference between a politician saying something, and someone donating," and I agree. But considering that the donation was $1,000 and the politician saying something was the hugely popular (at the time) President of the United States, I think you're upside down on which carries more weight.
Brendan Eich publicly funded a political campaign to destroy the marriages and families of about 25% of his fellow Californians.
25%? Where did that come from? The share of LGBT folks in California is estimated at about 4%, and there were about 100,000 same-sex households out of a population of roughly 38 million as of 2010, according to this.
Married couples were told that their marriages were invalid. People died while their marriages were invalidated, and their partners got kicked out of the home they had lived in for years because the house was taxed as a gift between two platonic friends.
I'd like to see a citation for that claim. As far as I can tell, the only same-sex marriages that took place in California that were subsequently annulled were the handful performed by Gavin Newsom in 2004. The fact is that the 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place after the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 22 and before the passage of Prop 8 were not invalidated
You really should be more careful; you keep walking into traps. This particular one is called "reductio ad absurdum", and I would like to thank you on behalf of rational Slashdotters everywhere for providing such a pristine textbook example in an effort to establish an equivalency between buying a postage stamp and being forced to purchase an expensive commercial product. I believe the original discussion involved the question of whether or not the Federal government is allowed to explicitly require a citizen to purchase a commercial product, in this case a health insurance policy. The answer to that question is "no". This was tacitly admitted to by the Supreme Court when they side-stepped the entire issue by magically transforming the ACA penalty into a tax (ooh, there's that word again). The rest of your argument about the bootstrapping of practical requirements is really about unintended (or perhaps even intended) consequences of complex legislation. Maybe you should write a letter to your congressman about that.
As it happens, you don't need to have a computer, or a bank account, or purchased paper forms, or a check, or a money order, or a postage stamp, to pay your Federal income tax. The forms are free at the Post Office. You can pay your taxes in person, in cash (and no, they don't accept payment in pennies). Most people consider it less trouble to file electronically or to buy 1st class postage, but there are alternatives available for the ideological masochists among us.
And, you guessed wrong. I'm not a particular fan of "Romneycare", or the ACA, or the Heritage plan upon which they were based, or "Hillarycare" for that matter; nor do I think any of them are "the Devil's work" (what a strange concept). I am rather fond of the health insurance plan I currently have, and I fervently hope that it doesn't fall victim to the continuing churn in public policy.
Thanks for the link. Not clear to me how it relates to matters at hand, but I always enjoy reading summaries of court decisions. I'm not sure about California state law, but there is no shortage of California municipalities that have enacted indecency laws. What is up, by the way, with your fixation on nudity?
To keep the 1968 figures truly constant with today, you'll have to assume 2 parents, one working full time and the other part time at least.
I was a kid in 1968, and judging from your UID, you might have been as well. If so, you should remember that households where both parents worked were not exactly commonplace back then. What was also not commonplace was someone supporting a family on minimum wage. Then, as now, minimum wage earners were mostly young single people. Yes, there are people today trying to support a family on minimum wage. They just don't make up a significant portion of the workforce. I'm sure if feels significant to someone trying to do it, but I'm talking about statistics, not feelings.
They haven't been abused in the workplace enough to lose their sense of self worth yet.
"Self worth" and labor value are not even distantly related. Teenagers should have a strong sense of self worth if they were given a proper upbringing; however, as a class they have very low labor value because they don't know how to do anything of value.
at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG where people choose to work
Ever notice that Star Trek always shows everyone working hard and being productive? My guess is, they don't have reality TV or video games in that universe. Or, maybe they have ways to deal with the purposefully non-productive, that they don't talk about much.
Public indecency laws, which mandate purchase of clothing, predate the Affordable Care Act by decades.
Aside from the fact that they don't explicitly require the purchase of anything, public indecency laws are enacted at the local and (maybe) state levels, not Federal. You have fallen into the same logical trap as those who cite state laws requiring auto insurance. Nice try, though.
Minimum wage USED to be a living wage and teens did just fine.
Here is a table of historical minimum wages. Note that the highest minimum wage in terms of constant 1996 dollars was 1968, when the minimum wage was $1.60. According to this spreadsheet from the US Census Bureau, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 1968 was $3553, which is over $200 higher than full-time pay at $1.60/hr. I used the figure for a family of four because of your reference to "making sure people can feed their kids".
Besides, one thing teens need to learn is to not sell themselves cheap.
No; teens need to learn the true value of their labor. Many of them think their time is worth more than it is actually worth.
I know you're right in the grand scheme of things, esp. in corporate employment, but for a dollar an hour difference I will keep my human.
But it's not a dollar an hour difference. It's a dollar an hour, plus the cost of workers compensation insurance, plus the employer's contribution to payroll tax, plus unemployment insurance, plus general administration and overhead costs, plus other things I haven't thought of. Fully burdoned labor costs can be 50% to 150% higher than wages alone; I would guess that low-paying, unskilled jobs would be at the low end of that range.
Yes, people still use cash. People still use phones to make voice calls. People still commute to work. People still play CDs and DVDs. People still have standard def televisions. People still use cars powered exclusively by internal combustion engines. People still buy things in actual physical stores. People still wear baseball caps with the bills pointed forward. People still take an entire television season to watch a season's worth of television shows. And some people still actually converse with other people live and in person, in real time. I know that some of these things are hard for you to believe, and hard for you to relate to. But they persist nonetheless.
Why all the focus on some archaic form of communication that's more a historical curiosity a few old people cling to than a relevant tool?
Usage statistics seem to say differently. The average adult (i.e., age 18 and over) cell phone owner makes or receives about 5 calls a day. People who send and receive lots of texts also make or receive a lot of phone calls. Cell phone ownership is heavily skewed toward the younger population, so it isn't a bunch of senior citizens making it look this way. With all due respect, perhaps you and your friends are outliers and a little out of touch with the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
they get one invention or innovation right, but every invention and innovation has to be understood in the context of the million other inventions, innovations, and social changes that surround it.
In "The World Set Free" (published in 1914), H. G. Wells described a devastating nuclear weapon that continued to "explode" over a period of days or weeks. Very advanced technology, indeed. But they were launched by hand, from biplanes, after the pilot initiated the reaction by biting a fuse.
I think the families of Malaysian Flight 370 might have something to say about that.
I'm sure they would, but the original question was about Google Earth, not ISR.
If you want continuous coverage of all the world's oceans (you would, right; who knows where the next aircraft would disappear to?), then the coverage area balloons from 57.3 million square miles, to about 197 square miles. So, roughly quadruple the number of aircraft required to about 1200. Unit cost would be somewhere between $5 million and $10 million; at the lower number figure $6 billion or so just for the aircraft. Add in ground support equipment, control equipment and people to run the system, and you're starting to talk about some real money. In the history of commercial aviation, a total of 4 commercial passenger airliners have been lost (by which I mean, they disappeared and no trace was ever found), not counting MH370. If MH370 is never found, it will be the first to be lost since 1962.
If they send up enough sats, could they make google maps realtime?
Realtime sounds like you're asking for the video edition of Google Earth. Let's assume you meant "updated frequently" instead. We'll also assume you're not interested in continuously updated images of empty ocean.
Land surface area of our planet is about 57.3 million square miles. An aircraft at 65,000 ft has an observable "footprint" of a circle 600 miles in diameter; that's about 283,000 square miles. So at first blush, it looks like you'd need 203 or so aircraft to cover the land area. But you'd need substantially more aircraft, because equal-sized circles don't pack without a lot of overlap (for example, with a hexagonal pattern, 14 circles of unit diameter are required to cover a rectangle of 8 square units); aside from that, you probably aren't going to get usable imagery at the extreme edges of the footprint. There's also the inefficiency involved in covering small, isolated islands. You can get by with fewer aircraft if you can live with a lower refresh rate and can have each aircraft orbit with a wide radius rather than try to stay in one location. On the other hand, you're going to need a lot of spare aircraft, because even though they're solar powered, they depend on things like motors and batteries and servo actuators to stay aloft and operate through the night time and stay on station, and those things don't last forever.
Then there's the issue of single-event upsets and single-event latchups, which can be a major problem at the altitudes we're talking about. It's also very cold at 65,000 ft, so a lot of stuff that would be OK at the surface is going to have to be heated to stay operational at altitude, which means more batteries and a bigger solar array. Then, although their routine operation would be autonomous, there will have to be some level of human monitoring, because you'd sort of like to avoid having airplanes full of lithium batteries falling into urban areas.
So yeah, it could be done in theory. In practice, it might be too expensive.
Or you could just remember 355/113, accurate to 0.000027%. Or, if you're happy with the accuracy of the shotgun solution, there's always 22/7, which is accurate to 0.13%
Why do people listen to her?
Probably for the same reason they listen to celebrities' opinions on all sorts of things they're unqualified to give advice on, from social issues to reverse mortgages.
I am perfectly happy to stipulate that every administration I can remember (that would date back to Eisenhower, by the way), Democratic and Republican alike, has lied through their teeth at every opportunity in order to advance the agenda of the day. Maybe, just maybe, Carter might have been an exception, but he made up for that in other ways. Though what that has to do with the current question is somewhat unclear.
and some got on Medicare
You probably meant Medicaid, but you're at least partially correct -- many (not all; there are plenty of poor people who try really hard to be as responsible as they can) of the people who were able to take advantage of the Medicaid Expansion were not previously insured. That would account for some portion of the missing 5 million people I was wondering about. As for the CBO being surprised about employer plan enrollment, I don't know why they would be surprised. Even when my employer's contribution is taken into account, my employer-provided plan is just about half the cost of equivalent coverage through the ACA marketplace. If I only look at my cost, my current plan is about 20% of the ACA plan cost. Of course, that's just an anecdote and I'm well aware that all employer-provided plans are not equal.
everyone is obsessed with trying to either prove or disprove it's working.
Well, not everyone, but for sure a lot of people, and frankly, I find both sides rather tiring. I'm one of the people who would just like to get their facts straight.
Insurance companies have been reporting that so far, between 76% and 85% of ACA enrolleees have paid their first bills by the due date. It's going to be pretty tough turn that into the 99% you seem to be predicting.
From a study done by Rand, over 9 million people have health insurance than did before.
From the NBC News article you cite:
"Most of the people who got new insurance didn’t buy it on the Obamacare exchanges but rather signed up with an employer, the survey found. Rand says that 8.2 million people have gained insurance from an employer since September — more than 7 million of them who had no health insurance before."
I'm having a little trouble with the arithmetic here. 9 million more people have health insurance than had it before. 7 million people who didn't have insurance before, got it through their employers. 7 million enrolled through the ACA marketplace.
So ... 9 mil newly insured, less 7 mil who got their new insurance through employers ... that leaves 2 mil who got new insurance somewhere else. But, wait -- 7 mil signed up for Obamacare ....
Does that mean that of the 7 million who enrolled through the ACA marketplace, only 2 million didn't previously have insurance? What, did the other 5 million all have their previous policies cancelled for ACA non-compliance?
My first reaction was, the 7.1 million number is about as credible as anything else this administration says about the policies it wants to promote. Then I remembered that this particular subject is the President's legacy achievement, so it's probably less credible than usual.
Did you even read what you referenced? The whole article is about how the Europeans were responsible for the devastation you're trying to put off on a native plague.
Well, no, not the whole article. There's this, which I imagine is what he was referring to: "Little known outside the circle of a few forensic epidemiologists, though, is the fact that the deadliest plague of all in the Americas was very possibly a home grown virus."
Because living in a "stone age" society is generally much healthier than living in a 1st world country.
Right. We're talking about a society where a dental cavity, or an ingrown toenail, or a wound suffered during hunting, or appendicitis, or tonsillitis, will all most likely end in death, where most women eventually die in childbirth, and a 21-year-old person is considered old. Don't confuse your supposedly healthy paleo diet with stone age society.
This is the most astounding example of Congressional ignorance I have ever seen. The forbearance of the testifying Admiral is amazing.
Unlike many Slashdotters, I have no problem with people who actually like the Metro interface. I personally don't like it at all, but to each his own, right? Now, having said that...
You build up memory of where things are, without having to hunt through multiple level menus.
I have already built up memory of where things are, even though they're several levels down in nested menus. I don't want to build up new memories when the old ones serve the purpose.
You can clean it all up manually, but metro just hides most of it and makes it easier to delete stuff you don't want.
I prefer that my operating system not hide things like documentation, etc. from me. If I don't want something, I'll delete it. But I'd rather know it's there to be deleted, than to be blissfully unaware that it's lurking in the shadows, silently consuming disk space.
Grouping things physically is a nice alternative to sub-menus and allows you to see everything at once
My initial reaction to the Metro Start Page was, "Oh, crap -- they've reincarnated the Win 3.x Program Manager!" You have a nice, low-six-digit user ID. Have you considered the possibility that you're merely enjoying a bit of nostalgia?
But given that 41% of people run with their smartphones
I guess that means that 41% of people who run, carry their smartphones with them. Looking around, I have serious doubts that 41% of people run. In fact, I would guess that 41% of people would have heart attacks if they tried to run, with or without their smartphones.
Obama did not go out and donate to campaigns seeking to restrict gay rights.
You're right. All he did was invite Rick "being gay is a sin" Warren to deliver the invocation at his first inauguration, and later express his disapproval of same-sex marriage. You say, "There's a huge difference between a politician saying something, and someone donating," and I agree. But considering that the donation was $1,000 and the politician saying something was the hugely popular (at the time) President of the United States, I think you're upside down on which carries more weight.
Brendan Eich publicly funded a political campaign to destroy the marriages and families of about 25% of his fellow Californians.
25%? Where did that come from? The share of LGBT folks in California is estimated at about 4%, and there were about 100,000 same-sex households out of a population of roughly 38 million as of 2010, according to this.
Married couples were told that their marriages were invalid. People died while their marriages were invalidated, and their partners got kicked out of the home they had lived in for years because the house was taxed as a gift between two platonic friends.
I'd like to see a citation for that claim. As far as I can tell, the only same-sex marriages that took place in California that were subsequently annulled were the handful performed by Gavin Newsom in 2004. The fact is that the 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place after the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 22 and before the passage of Prop 8 were not invalidated
.
You really should be more careful; you keep walking into traps. This particular one is called "reductio ad absurdum", and I would like to thank you on behalf of rational Slashdotters everywhere for providing such a pristine textbook example in an effort to establish an equivalency between buying a postage stamp and being forced to purchase an expensive commercial product. I believe the original discussion involved the question of whether or not the Federal government is allowed to explicitly require a citizen to purchase a commercial product, in this case a health insurance policy. The answer to that question is "no". This was tacitly admitted to by the Supreme Court when they side-stepped the entire issue by magically transforming the ACA penalty into a tax (ooh, there's that word again). The rest of your argument about the bootstrapping of practical requirements is really about unintended (or perhaps even intended) consequences of complex legislation. Maybe you should write a letter to your congressman about that.
As it happens, you don't need to have a computer, or a bank account, or purchased paper forms, or a check, or a money order, or a postage stamp, to pay your Federal income tax. The forms are free at the Post Office. You can pay your taxes in person, in cash (and no, they don't accept payment in pennies). Most people consider it less trouble to file electronically or to buy 1st class postage, but there are alternatives available for the ideological masochists among us.
And, you guessed wrong. I'm not a particular fan of "Romneycare", or the ACA, or the Heritage plan upon which they were based, or "Hillarycare" for that matter; nor do I think any of them are "the Devil's work" (what a strange concept). I am rather fond of the health insurance plan I currently have, and I fervently hope that it doesn't fall victim to the continuing churn in public policy.
Thanks for the link. Not clear to me how it relates to matters at hand, but I always enjoy reading summaries of court decisions. I'm not sure about California state law, but there is no shortage of California municipalities that have enacted indecency laws. What is up, by the way, with your fixation on nudity?
To keep the 1968 figures truly constant with today, you'll have to assume 2 parents, one working full time and the other part time at least.
I was a kid in 1968, and judging from your UID, you might have been as well. If so, you should remember that households where both parents worked were not exactly commonplace back then. What was also not commonplace was someone supporting a family on minimum wage. Then, as now, minimum wage earners were mostly young single people. Yes, there are people today trying to support a family on minimum wage. They just don't make up a significant portion of the workforce. I'm sure if feels significant to someone trying to do it, but I'm talking about statistics, not feelings.
They haven't been abused in the workplace enough to lose their sense of self worth yet.
"Self worth" and labor value are not even distantly related. Teenagers should have a strong sense of self worth if they were given a proper upbringing; however, as a class they have very low labor value because they don't know how to do anything of value.
at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG where people choose to work
Ever notice that Star Trek always shows everyone working hard and being productive? My guess is, they don't have reality TV or video games in that universe. Or, maybe they have ways to deal with the purposefully non-productive, that they don't talk about much.
Public indecency laws, which mandate purchase of clothing, predate the Affordable Care Act by decades.
Aside from the fact that they don't explicitly require the purchase of anything, public indecency laws are enacted at the local and (maybe) state levels, not Federal. You have fallen into the same logical trap as those who cite state laws requiring auto insurance. Nice try, though.
Minimum wage USED to be a living wage and teens did just fine.
Here is a table of historical minimum wages. Note that the highest minimum wage in terms of constant 1996 dollars was 1968, when the minimum wage was $1.60. According to this spreadsheet from the US Census Bureau, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 1968 was $3553, which is over $200 higher than full-time pay at $1.60/hr. I used the figure for a family of four because of your reference to "making sure people can feed their kids".
Besides, one thing teens need to learn is to not sell themselves cheap.
No; teens need to learn the true value of their labor. Many of them think their time is worth more than it is actually worth.
I know you're right in the grand scheme of things, esp. in corporate employment, but for a dollar an hour difference I will keep my human.
But it's not a dollar an hour difference. It's a dollar an hour, plus the cost of workers compensation insurance, plus the employer's contribution to payroll tax, plus unemployment insurance, plus general administration and overhead costs, plus other things I haven't thought of. Fully burdoned labor costs can be 50% to 150% higher than wages alone; I would guess that low-paying, unskilled jobs would be at the low end of that range.
people still use cash?
Yes, people still use cash. People still use phones to make voice calls. People still commute to work. People still play CDs and DVDs. People still have standard def televisions. People still use cars powered exclusively by internal combustion engines. People still buy things in actual physical stores. People still wear baseball caps with the bills pointed forward. People still take an entire television season to watch a season's worth of television shows. And some people still actually converse with other people live and in person, in real time. I know that some of these things are hard for you to believe, and hard for you to relate to. But they persist nonetheless.
Why all the focus on some archaic form of communication that's more a historical curiosity a few old people cling to than a relevant tool?
Usage statistics seem to say differently. The average adult (i.e., age 18 and over) cell phone owner makes or receives about 5 calls a day. People who send and receive lots of texts also make or receive a lot of phone calls. Cell phone ownership is heavily skewed toward the younger population, so it isn't a bunch of senior citizens making it look this way. With all due respect, perhaps you and your friends are outliers and a little out of touch with the real world.