I switched from Sprint to US Cellular when I moved to Maine for graduate school. They were the only carrier with decent reception there, and were recommended to me by nearly everyone I asked. I too had a Razr flip phone, and my experience was fine.
Now, a regional carrier works fine for some people, but doesn't really cut it for others. Today, I'm on AT&T and wouldn't even consider US Cellular. That's because I no longer live in Maine and travel (for business and for pleasure) quite a bit. What good is a cell phone if I can only use it in my own neighborhood? It's one thing to rent a phone when you fly to Japan or get a local SIM when you land in France, but nobody wants to deal with this much hassle when they're just driving to the next state over.
May I suggest that next time, if you're a bit confused, you RTFA before jumping straight into the comments and loudly proclaiming how much you don't get it.
I'm sorry, I must have the wrong website. Could you please direct me to slashdot?
The plant uses hydro-electric power to charge up the battery, which would then need a tap-water refill every few months, and a swap (ideally at a local dealership) every 3,000km, since it cannot be recharged as simply as Lithium.
I don't get it. It needs a tap water refill every few months, but needs to be swapped out entirely every month? I drive more than 3000km every month. How is this supposed to be practical? Is this geared towards people that don't drive much at all? Even then, the battery will likely need to be replaced over 100 times during the life of the car. I suppose as long as the battery swap is as quick, easy, and cheap as fueling up at a gas station, this might work. Otherwise, I'm not sure what they're thinking here.
The elimination of labor doesn't necessarily mean that things shouldn't have a cost - unless we get to a point where NO resources are scarce - labor is just one type of resource.
Sure, except that in the end, humans are the only ones that actually want money. Remove them from the loop and suddenly monetary costs disappear.
For example, look at a scarce resource like iron. Today, you can't get iron for free, because it takes lots of people to "create" iron. You've got people mining, people smelting, people forging. These people all demand to be paid, otherwise they stop working. Replace them with automatons, and where exactly does the cost come from? Who do the dollar bills get handed to at the end of the day? Let's say you want some iron, but don't want to pay for it. Couldn't you send your fleet of automatons to go mine some ore from the seafloor, build a smelter, and run the whole process? In this case, this iron wouldn't really have any real monetary cost. That is, there's nobody involved in its production that demands money.
Now, this is a simplified look at how things work. It's evident that these automatons would require an energy source (although, again, this could be free of monetary cost as well, for the same reason the iron could be free), and of course they'd need to be built first to begin with (same everything-is-free logic applies). Naturally, the first generation of such automatons wouldn't be free, since their development would be the result of [compensated] human labor. However, as automation permeates the farthest corners of our economy and the last human workers are displaced by machines, it really doesn't seem like the idea of monetary cost will make sense anymore.
You're missing the point. I'm talking about reality, not rationality. It doesn't matter what is better, or what makes sense. Society is not always rational and doesn't always make decisions based on what is best.
The fact of the matter is that, based on what we know of human history, the poor will start killing the rich once inequity crosses some threshold.
Feel free to talk about how this is stupid or wrong, but I don't think you're going to have much luck changing the entirety of society. I believe that at this point it makes more sense to talk about how to avoid widespread bloodshed than merely pointing out how widespread bloodshed is bad.
I've been on slashdot for long enough to be keenly aware of the 'no true scotsman' informal logical fallacy. Presumably, you're saying all this to suggest that I'm invoking this fallacy in claiming that Stalin's rule was more consistent with what we'd call a dictatorship, not communism as defined by Marx. If that's the case, would you also agree that Somalia and Chad are democratic republics? I mean, that's what they call themselves, after all. It's self evident that under Stalin, the means of production were not owned by the people (the primary tenet of communism), and therefore his rule cannot reasonably be described as communism. If you feel that public ownership of the means of production is not integral to communism despite all indications to the contrary, the burden on you is to explain why you believe that. There are some of us here that refuse to accept some states as communist simply because they fly a red flag and don't shy away from populist rhetoric just as much as we refuse to accept some states as democratic simply because they publish polling results and espouse some big talk about freedom.
AT&T doesn't sell carrier-unlocked phones (at least that's what they told me at my local store). I recommend getting an unlocked AT&T-compatible phone (that's what I did when I got my Moto X from Amazon). That way you'll have the option of swapping in a Scottish prepaid SIM for cheap voice comms without eating your AT&T minutes. Just an idea.
Unilateral, adj.
1) (of an action or decision) performed by or affecting only one person, group, or country involved in a particular situation, without the agreement of another or the others.
2) relating to, occurring on, or affecting only one side of an organ or structure, or of the body.
Unilateral, in this context, means without the agreement of the others. In a discussion of wages, the two parties are the employer and the employee(s). That is, Walmart deciding to raise wages by 50% without the agreement of the employees. It has nothing to do with other companies, since other companies are not involved in this particular situation (employment at Walmart).
Anyway, Costco average wage is $21. Explain to me how they're able to shoulder such an unimaginably large labor burden in such a competitive industry with such tight margins. Explain to me how they can "unilaterally" offer such pay rates without getting driven into the ground by their competition. Explain to me why Costco can do this but Walmart wouldn't be able to.
BULLSHIT 7.5% isn't a lot higher. That is HUGE in an industry where profit margins are low single digits.
No, in this context, 7.5% isn't a lot higher. It's dwarfed by the 50% increase in wages. If we were talking about a 5% increase in wages resulting in a (upper bound) 7.5% increase in cost (a mathematical impossibility), then yes, I would agree with you. However, a 7.5% increase in cost is tiny compared against a 50% gain in wages.
Only if you don't consider the entire economy. You are simply robbing Peter to pay Paul. You increase service sector wages and will cost manufacturing jobs. Some benefit, others don't.
I'm considering precisely the whole economy, whereas you seem to be stuck on a particular sector. I am indeed robbing Peter to pay Paul, but our society is one in which the last few Peters are dying anyway, and there's a whole shitload of Pauls on the way. Yes, making the economy work better for Paul is a good idea, and one that benefits the whole economy overall, despite potentially hurting your pet manufacturing sector (which currently only employs 10% of the work force and is still contracting).
Which are a stupid idea. Tariffs on what? Your plan is to make everything more expensive? Tariffs raise prices for everyone to benefit a smaller group. Tariffs on steel make every car more expensive. Want to create inflation? Go ahead and start a trade war and enjoy the resulting recession.
Tariffs on imports. My plan is to make imports more expensive. Tariffs raise prices on imports for everyone to benefit a smaller group, those who contribute to domestic labor. Tariffs on imported steel make every car made of imported steel more expensive, providing incentives to use domestic steel. I do want to create inflation (as current rates are too low to spur investment), but I don't think a recession would help there. Your logic here is confusing.
The US manufacturing sector accounts for over $3 Trillion annually and has a multiplier effect beyond that larger than any other sector. The only country that has a manufacturing sector even close in size is China. Furthermore just because much of the economy comes from another sector doesn't mean it is a good idea to kill US manufacturing.
It's goinig to die whether we "kill" it or not. Manufacturing is a prime target for automation, as is clear from looking at the last few decades. I notice that you state the importance of manufacturing in terms of dollars, not jobs. Why is that? Is it perhaps because the jobs are disappearing faster than you'd like to admit? Manufacturing jobs aren't disappearing because of Walmart's generous wages, that's for sure.
Perhaps but you've hardly proven that. And bear in mind that I actually support raising the minimum wage. But if you raise it 50% overnight, my company will be out of business tomorrow and we'
I don't live in NYC and never have. I've lived in rural Poland and I've lived in rural Maine (not to mention some questionable urban areas right here in NJ). I'm pretty sure that I've lived in poorer places than you. Perhaps I should be complaining about your sense of entitlement, or about how stupid you are for living in such lavish locales.
Anyway, if we can manage to step away from personal attacks for just a minute, I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that you haven't convincingly explained how living in NYC necessarily makes one clueless and/or spoiled (or, failing that, how it can be accomplished for $30k/year).
I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to actually have a conversation with any of these "lowest-skilled" or "most vulnerable" people. Most of my closest friends work in bars, restaurants, and supermarkets, and they're not in management.
They don't like working. And I don't either. Yes, I know it's not en vogue to admit this. I know we're all supposed to be super eager to roll out of bed and lick our masters' boots each morning, but it just never worked out that way for us. We'd much rather go hiking, or make some music, or do drugs, or stay in bed all day, or any of a million other things. We don't see work as a good thing, but instead as a necessary evil.
Perhaps things are different for you and the people you associate with, so I'll stick to talking about myself and the people I know. We work not because we want to, but because we have to. Because things cost money. Things cost money because they're made by people, and people want money to make things or do things.
So, to go full circle... If we eliminate all the jobs and replace the workers with machines, there is no logical reason for anything to have a cost. Of course, you may argue that this would only eliminate labor costs. However, you'll find that the cost of goods is directly proportional to how much labor must be expended to procure them. Therefore, as labor costs approach zero, so too will material costs. Consequently, a necessary result of universal automation is that all costs approach zero, and the idea of a "job" is obsolete.
Of course, that's a very idealistic way of looking at things. In practice, jobs will gradually disappear, creating a steadily growing class of unemployed (and unemployable) individuals. Meanwhile, wealth will continue to aggregate among the richest of the rich (as they're the primary beneficiaries of increased automation). There's no reason why things must necessarily be this way; on the contrary, it's entirely possible for the rich to unilaterally decide to prevent such a situation from unfolding. However, even minimal insight into human nature would have one believe that this is unlikely to happen, and that instead we will continue expanding the reach of automation until society as we know it breaks apart.
However, I will not let the unbridled greed of mankind undermine the logical soundness of my argument. The elimination of jobs is inherently a noble goal. That there are those among us that would pervert this effort to further their own personal ambitions has no bearing on this fact.
Don't be daft. Of course Walmart would increase prices if the minimum wage were increased just like everyone else. If they had to increase wages 50% UNILATERALLY they would instantly be unprofitable because they couldn't raise prices in that instance.
One minute you claim that a 50% wage hike would cause Walmart to be unprofitable, and the next you claim that they would increase prices. You can't have it both ways, and that's all I was trying to say. Also, any wage increases would be unilateral; Walmart's workforce is not unionized, and therefore all decisions regarding wages are made unilaterally since there is no second party to wage negotiations.
Regarding payroll taxes, you're oversimplifying. Many payroll taxes are regressive, with a cap on taxable income. Fringe benefits that you mention are also regressive (for example, employer's health insurance contributions for employees is not linearly proportional to wage, and doubling wages doesn't double insurance costs). Consequently, a 50% hike in wages does not result in a 50% hike in overhead costs. Additionally, depending on how you're cooking your books, you did already mention a $27.5B hike in labor costs. If the initial $55B in labor costs included this overhead, then the $27.5B increase also includes the 50% increase in overhead (despite the real increase in overhead necessarily being less than 50%).
7.5% isn't a bound of any kind - merely an illustrative simplistic example that the real number is a LOT higher than 1.1%.
But that's my point. 7.5% isn't a "LOT" higher. It's a lot less than the 50% growth in wages that we're talking about. Most businesses would jump at the chance to increase their costs by 7.5% while at the same time increasing their revenues by 50%, and I think we'd all agree that this is a good deal. Why does this not hold true when discussing wage hikes?
It's much more complicated than you are making it out to be. By raising the minimum wage you are increasing costs for all domestic manufacturers (and there are LOTS). This effectively is a subsidy to overseas (read China) manufacturers who do not have wage supports at the expense of domestic ones who do. Manufacturers in the US would have to either lose business or in many cases simply shut down. So to prop up Walmart associates wages you are doing so at the expense of US manufacturing workers. Since they shop at Walmart too that is revenue that Walmart isn't going to get AND you are costing people their entire paycheck to raise someone else's by 50%. Did you think the money would come with no consequence?
1) Tarriffs
2) The domestic service/retail industry dwarfs the domestic manufacturing industry. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
3) The money comes with consequences, and on the whole, it's still a positive.
There's no evidence to support your remaining claims regarding inflation, unemployment, supply chain effects, etc. However, I do agree that it's NOT simply that everyone is magically better off with no downside anywhere. Some people would undoubtedly be worse off, but overall, it would be a benefit to society.
God forbid we take action to prevent a tiny minority from pillaging the entirety of our civilization.
Slippery slope or not, the poors will not stand for this shit indefinitely. The elites can not continue to hoard the wealth forever. There will come a day when wealth distribution becomes more equitable. It is up to the elites to decide whether that will happen peacefully or violently.
This is why your typical store owner doesn't have a kid washing down the sidewalk at the start of the day, and why the parking lot at the strip mall near your house looks like the inside of a dumpster, until the minimal cleaning work by local ordinance can be carried out by a street sweeper service that hits the parking lots of the local businesses as little as legally possible to get away with.
I live in NJ, USA, but I recently went on a trip to Japan. One of the things that I noticed while I was there was how surprisingly clean everything was. How there were always people outside sweeping sidewalks. You never see that type of thing where I live. You claim it's because of our high minimum wage pricing these jobs out of the market.
Japan's minimum wage is at least $8.40/hour (or maybe even $10.90/hr, it's not clear). No, the reason our communities look like dumpsters is because that's how much we value them.
Leszek Kolakowski (a man who grew up much like you, as an ardent Marxist and atheist, only to get hit on the head with a cold bucket of reality from the system that you love)
Although, is it not possible that Pan Kolakowski was hit on the head with a cold bucket of reality by a system that wasn't in any meaningful way Marxist but merely masqueraded as such?
Increasing wages by 50% would make Walmart instantly unprofitable.
Right, if they didn't increase prices to compensate.
I'm not even counting the cost of lost sales from the increased prices or the increased burden (overhead) costs that come with paying higher wages.
Wait a minute, increased prices? I thought Walmart had become instantly unprofitable from the wage hike because they didn't increase prices? A bit confusing, but let's move on...
Increase burden (overhead) costs? Do they need to upgrade their payroll computers to crunch bigger numbers? Do they need to hire extra people to write all the extra 0s on the paychecks? What "burden costs" would increase as a result of an across-the-board 50% pay hike? Are you talking about the employer's share of payroll taxes (I can only assume you're not saying that rent or electricity costs will go up as a result of the pay hike)? If so, is that not already accounted for in the $55B in wages? If so, isn't the increase in payroll taxes already reflected in the $27.5B in new payroll costs (since payroll taxes aren't progressive)?
So no, the effect would be FAR greater than 1.1%.
Indeed, that analysis was debunked long ago. It's more than 1.1%. Your own math seems to set 7.5% as an upper bound, though. 7.5% higher prices for 50% higher wages seems like a fair trade to me. Would you disagree?
Based on BLS CPI/inflation figures, that's only $8.79 in today's dollars, or $18k/year. You can't live off that as a single person, let alone a one income family.
However, according to the average costs you list, rent could be paid with 100 hours of work (138 hours today). An hour of work at minimum wage would yield 5.5 bread loaves (only 3 bread loaves today) or 3.8 gallons of gas (only 2 gallons today). That seems to suggest that inflation over the last 50 years was as much as double what the official figures claim.
Not sure what to make of this. We do need higher minimum wages, though. $7.25/hr is a joke.
$24k/year: studio apartment.
$6k/year: Not quite $20/day for food, clothing, transportation, electricity, telecommunications, entertainment and other luxuries.
$20 won't get you much food in NYC, so you probably won't have anything left to spend on clothing, transportation, electricity, telecommunications, or entertainment. I wouldn't really call that enough to get by, since you can enjoy that type of lifestyle bouncing between homeless shelters and soup kitchens without wasting your time working a minimum wage job. $30k/year might be plenty to get by on in Maine (in fact, I would've felt wealthy if I was making that much when I lived there) or some other cheap area like that, but your ignorance of other (read: more expensive) corners of the country is funny. Of course, these numbers are even more bleak if you've got other mouths to feed.
Do you know C? Any desire to implement such a feature in Linux? Seems like a good idea, and your claim of dramatic performance improvement has got me thinking. Perhaps this would be a good way to dip my toes into kernel hacking, and perhaps I'm not the only one thinking that.
The people buying toasters tomorrow won't be planning on hooking them up to a network either. But those toasters will have IP stacks running in them, simply because the cost of adding that feature will approach zero as time goes on, but the value of having exclusive control over yet another avenue of delivering advertising to your home will remain.
Perhaps I'm being cynical and there's other reasons to put computers in toasters. However, the fact remains, a simple microcontroller is still cheaper than something that can run a full OS like Linux. The price gap is closing, though, and to suggest that this has nothing to do with the growing adoption of full-featured SoCs is ridiculous. That's been the whole saga of computers: as they get cheaper, they get squeezed into more and more places.
The popular adoption of personal computers, by ordinary people, in their own homes was one instance of a significant shift in the role computers played in society. Perhaps the popular adoption of smartphones will be seen as another such significant shift. It seems like the ubiquity of IP-networking in devices traditionally not associated with the Internet will likely also be seen as another significant shift. The main difference will be that instead of adding a large population of people to the Internet, we'll be adding a large population of odd devices. I'm not sure how that will be really useful, but then again many people had difficulty seeing just how the Internet would be useful to common people also.
I still own my Dallas Semiconductor TINI. Runs Java, 40MHz, same size as a stick of RAM, and it's about ten years old. A decade ago, this was the realm of Java.
Smallest.COM? That would be zero bytes, and on DOS 2.11 it would have the funny effect of running the last program you ran, if it was compatible with executing itself in place again.
Slashdot Mirror
I switched from Sprint to US Cellular when I moved to Maine for graduate school. They were the only carrier with decent reception there, and were recommended to me by nearly everyone I asked. I too had a Razr flip phone, and my experience was fine.
Now, a regional carrier works fine for some people, but doesn't really cut it for others. Today, I'm on AT&T and wouldn't even consider US Cellular. That's because I no longer live in Maine and travel (for business and for pleasure) quite a bit. What good is a cell phone if I can only use it in my own neighborhood? It's one thing to rent a phone when you fly to Japan or get a local SIM when you land in France, but nobody wants to deal with this much hassle when they're just driving to the next state over.
May I suggest that next time, if you're a bit confused, you RTFA before jumping straight into the comments and loudly proclaiming how much you don't get it.
I'm sorry, I must have the wrong website. Could you please direct me to slashdot?
Mod parent informative, insightful, and interesting.
The plant uses hydro-electric power to charge up the battery, which would then need a tap-water refill every few months, and a swap (ideally at a local dealership) every 3,000km, since it cannot be recharged as simply as Lithium.
I don't get it. It needs a tap water refill every few months, but needs to be swapped out entirely every month? I drive more than 3000km every month. How is this supposed to be practical? Is this geared towards people that don't drive much at all? Even then, the battery will likely need to be replaced over 100 times during the life of the car. I suppose as long as the battery swap is as quick, easy, and cheap as fueling up at a gas station, this might work. Otherwise, I'm not sure what they're thinking here.
The elimination of labor doesn't necessarily mean that things shouldn't have a cost - unless we get to a point where NO resources are scarce - labor is just one type of resource.
Sure, except that in the end, humans are the only ones that actually want money. Remove them from the loop and suddenly monetary costs disappear.
For example, look at a scarce resource like iron. Today, you can't get iron for free, because it takes lots of people to "create" iron. You've got people mining, people smelting, people forging. These people all demand to be paid, otherwise they stop working. Replace them with automatons, and where exactly does the cost come from? Who do the dollar bills get handed to at the end of the day? Let's say you want some iron, but don't want to pay for it. Couldn't you send your fleet of automatons to go mine some ore from the seafloor, build a smelter, and run the whole process? In this case, this iron wouldn't really have any real monetary cost. That is, there's nobody involved in its production that demands money.
Now, this is a simplified look at how things work. It's evident that these automatons would require an energy source (although, again, this could be free of monetary cost as well, for the same reason the iron could be free), and of course they'd need to be built first to begin with (same everything-is-free logic applies). Naturally, the first generation of such automatons wouldn't be free, since their development would be the result of [compensated] human labor. However, as automation permeates the farthest corners of our economy and the last human workers are displaced by machines, it really doesn't seem like the idea of monetary cost will make sense anymore.
You're missing the point. I'm talking about reality, not rationality. It doesn't matter what is better, or what makes sense. Society is not always rational and doesn't always make decisions based on what is best.
The fact of the matter is that, based on what we know of human history, the poor will start killing the rich once inequity crosses some threshold.
Feel free to talk about how this is stupid or wrong, but I don't think you're going to have much luck changing the entirety of society. I believe that at this point it makes more sense to talk about how to avoid widespread bloodshed than merely pointing out how widespread bloodshed is bad.
I've been on slashdot for long enough to be keenly aware of the 'no true scotsman' informal logical fallacy. Presumably, you're saying all this to suggest that I'm invoking this fallacy in claiming that Stalin's rule was more consistent with what we'd call a dictatorship, not communism as defined by Marx. If that's the case, would you also agree that Somalia and Chad are democratic republics? I mean, that's what they call themselves, after all. It's self evident that under Stalin, the means of production were not owned by the people (the primary tenet of communism), and therefore his rule cannot reasonably be described as communism. If you feel that public ownership of the means of production is not integral to communism despite all indications to the contrary, the burden on you is to explain why you believe that. There are some of us here that refuse to accept some states as communist simply because they fly a red flag and don't shy away from populist rhetoric just as much as we refuse to accept some states as democratic simply because they publish polling results and espouse some big talk about freedom.
AT&T doesn't sell carrier-unlocked phones (at least that's what they told me at my local store). I recommend getting an unlocked AT&T-compatible phone (that's what I did when I got my Moto X from Amazon). That way you'll have the option of swapping in a Scottish prepaid SIM for cheap voice comms without eating your AT&T minutes. Just an idea.
1) (of an action or decision) performed by or affecting only one person, group, or country involved in a particular situation, without the agreement of another or the others.
2) relating to, occurring on, or affecting only one side of an organ or structure, or of the body.
Unilateral, in this context, means without the agreement of the others. In a discussion of wages, the two parties are the employer and the employee(s). That is, Walmart deciding to raise wages by 50% without the agreement of the employees. It has nothing to do with other companies, since other companies are not involved in this particular situation (employment at Walmart).
Anyway, Costco average wage is $21. Explain to me how they're able to shoulder such an unimaginably large labor burden in such a competitive industry with such tight margins. Explain to me how they can "unilaterally" offer such pay rates without getting driven into the ground by their competition. Explain to me why Costco can do this but Walmart wouldn't be able to.
BULLSHIT 7.5% isn't a lot higher. That is HUGE in an industry where profit margins are low single digits.
No, in this context, 7.5% isn't a lot higher. It's dwarfed by the 50% increase in wages. If we were talking about a 5% increase in wages resulting in a (upper bound) 7.5% increase in cost (a mathematical impossibility), then yes, I would agree with you. However, a 7.5% increase in cost is tiny compared against a 50% gain in wages.
Only if you don't consider the entire economy. You are simply robbing Peter to pay Paul. You increase service sector wages and will cost manufacturing jobs. Some benefit, others don't.
I'm considering precisely the whole economy, whereas you seem to be stuck on a particular sector. I am indeed robbing Peter to pay Paul, but our society is one in which the last few Peters are dying anyway, and there's a whole shitload of Pauls on the way. Yes, making the economy work better for Paul is a good idea, and one that benefits the whole economy overall, despite potentially hurting your pet manufacturing sector (which currently only employs 10% of the work force and is still contracting).
Which are a stupid idea. Tariffs on what? Your plan is to make everything more expensive? Tariffs raise prices for everyone to benefit a smaller group. Tariffs on steel make every car more expensive. Want to create inflation? Go ahead and start a trade war and enjoy the resulting recession.
Tariffs on imports. My plan is to make imports more expensive. Tariffs raise prices on imports for everyone to benefit a smaller group, those who contribute to domestic labor. Tariffs on imported steel make every car made of imported steel more expensive, providing incentives to use domestic steel. I do want to create inflation (as current rates are too low to spur investment), but I don't think a recession would help there. Your logic here is confusing.
The US manufacturing sector accounts for over $3 Trillion annually and has a multiplier effect beyond that larger than any other sector. The only country that has a manufacturing sector even close in size is China. Furthermore just because much of the economy comes from another sector doesn't mean it is a good idea to kill US manufacturing.
It's goinig to die whether we "kill" it or not. Manufacturing is a prime target for automation, as is clear from looking at the last few decades. I notice that you state the importance of manufacturing in terms of dollars, not jobs. Why is that? Is it perhaps because the jobs are disappearing faster than you'd like to admit? Manufacturing jobs aren't disappearing because of Walmart's generous wages, that's for sure.
Perhaps but you've hardly proven that. And bear in mind that I actually support raising the minimum wage. But if you raise it 50% overnight, my company will be out of business tomorrow and we'
I don't live in NYC and never have. I've lived in rural Poland and I've lived in rural Maine (not to mention some questionable urban areas right here in NJ). I'm pretty sure that I've lived in poorer places than you. Perhaps I should be complaining about your sense of entitlement, or about how stupid you are for living in such lavish locales.
Anyway, if we can manage to step away from personal attacks for just a minute, I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that you haven't convincingly explained how living in NYC necessarily makes one clueless and/or spoiled (or, failing that, how it can be accomplished for $30k/year).
I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to actually have a conversation with any of these "lowest-skilled" or "most vulnerable" people. Most of my closest friends work in bars, restaurants, and supermarkets, and they're not in management.
They don't like working. And I don't either. Yes, I know it's not en vogue to admit this. I know we're all supposed to be super eager to roll out of bed and lick our masters' boots each morning, but it just never worked out that way for us. We'd much rather go hiking, or make some music, or do drugs, or stay in bed all day, or any of a million other things. We don't see work as a good thing, but instead as a necessary evil.
Perhaps things are different for you and the people you associate with, so I'll stick to talking about myself and the people I know. We work not because we want to, but because we have to. Because things cost money. Things cost money because they're made by people, and people want money to make things or do things.
So, to go full circle... If we eliminate all the jobs and replace the workers with machines, there is no logical reason for anything to have a cost. Of course, you may argue that this would only eliminate labor costs. However, you'll find that the cost of goods is directly proportional to how much labor must be expended to procure them. Therefore, as labor costs approach zero, so too will material costs. Consequently, a necessary result of universal automation is that all costs approach zero, and the idea of a "job" is obsolete.
Of course, that's a very idealistic way of looking at things. In practice, jobs will gradually disappear, creating a steadily growing class of unemployed (and unemployable) individuals. Meanwhile, wealth will continue to aggregate among the richest of the rich (as they're the primary beneficiaries of increased automation). There's no reason why things must necessarily be this way; on the contrary, it's entirely possible for the rich to unilaterally decide to prevent such a situation from unfolding. However, even minimal insight into human nature would have one believe that this is unlikely to happen, and that instead we will continue expanding the reach of automation until society as we know it breaks apart.
However, I will not let the unbridled greed of mankind undermine the logical soundness of my argument. The elimination of jobs is inherently a noble goal. That there are those among us that would pervert this effort to further their own personal ambitions has no bearing on this fact.
Don't be daft. Of course Walmart would increase prices if the minimum wage were increased just like everyone else. If they had to increase wages 50% UNILATERALLY they would instantly be unprofitable because they couldn't raise prices in that instance.
One minute you claim that a 50% wage hike would cause Walmart to be unprofitable, and the next you claim that they would increase prices. You can't have it both ways, and that's all I was trying to say. Also, any wage increases would be unilateral; Walmart's workforce is not unionized, and therefore all decisions regarding wages are made unilaterally since there is no second party to wage negotiations.
Regarding payroll taxes, you're oversimplifying. Many payroll taxes are regressive, with a cap on taxable income. Fringe benefits that you mention are also regressive (for example, employer's health insurance contributions for employees is not linearly proportional to wage, and doubling wages doesn't double insurance costs). Consequently, a 50% hike in wages does not result in a 50% hike in overhead costs. Additionally, depending on how you're cooking your books, you did already mention a $27.5B hike in labor costs. If the initial $55B in labor costs included this overhead, then the $27.5B increase also includes the 50% increase in overhead (despite the real increase in overhead necessarily being less than 50%).
7.5% isn't a bound of any kind - merely an illustrative simplistic example that the real number is a LOT higher than 1.1%.
But that's my point. 7.5% isn't a "LOT" higher. It's a lot less than the 50% growth in wages that we're talking about. Most businesses would jump at the chance to increase their costs by 7.5% while at the same time increasing their revenues by 50%, and I think we'd all agree that this is a good deal. Why does this not hold true when discussing wage hikes?
It's much more complicated than you are making it out to be. By raising the minimum wage you are increasing costs for all domestic manufacturers (and there are LOTS). This effectively is a subsidy to overseas (read China) manufacturers who do not have wage supports at the expense of domestic ones who do. Manufacturers in the US would have to either lose business or in many cases simply shut down. So to prop up Walmart associates wages you are doing so at the expense of US manufacturing workers. Since they shop at Walmart too that is revenue that Walmart isn't going to get AND you are costing people their entire paycheck to raise someone else's by 50%. Did you think the money would come with no consequence?
1) Tarriffs
2) The domestic service/retail industry dwarfs the domestic manufacturing industry. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
3) The money comes with consequences, and on the whole, it's still a positive.
There's no evidence to support your remaining claims regarding inflation, unemployment, supply chain effects, etc. However, I do agree that it's NOT simply that everyone is magically better off with no downside anywhere. Some people would undoubtedly be worse off, but overall, it would be a benefit to society.
I'd have to buy the machine and not hire the worker
There are those of us that see this as a good thing. 1 job down, 130-something million to go.
God forbid we take action to prevent a tiny minority from pillaging the entirety of our civilization.
Slippery slope or not, the poors will not stand for this shit indefinitely. The elites can not continue to hoard the wealth forever. There will come a day when wealth distribution becomes more equitable. It is up to the elites to decide whether that will happen peacefully or violently.
This is why your typical store owner doesn't have a kid washing down the sidewalk at the start of the day, and why the parking lot at the strip mall near your house looks like the inside of a dumpster, until the minimal cleaning work by local ordinance can be carried out by a street sweeper service that hits the parking lots of the local businesses as little as legally possible to get away with.
I live in NJ, USA, but I recently went on a trip to Japan. One of the things that I noticed while I was there was how surprisingly clean everything was. How there were always people outside sweeping sidewalks. You never see that type of thing where I live. You claim it's because of our high minimum wage pricing these jobs out of the market.
Japan's minimum wage is at least $8.40/hour (or maybe even $10.90/hr, it's not clear). No, the reason our communities look like dumpsters is because that's how much we value them.
Leszek Kolakowski (a man who grew up much like you, as an ardent Marxist and atheist, only to get hit on the head with a cold bucket of reality from the system that you love)
Although, is it not possible that Pan Kolakowski was hit on the head with a cold bucket of reality by a system that wasn't in any meaningful way Marxist but merely masqueraded as such?
Increasing wages by 50% would make Walmart instantly unprofitable.
Right, if they didn't increase prices to compensate.
I'm not even counting the cost of lost sales from the increased prices or the increased burden (overhead) costs that come with paying higher wages.
Wait a minute, increased prices? I thought Walmart had become instantly unprofitable from the wage hike because they didn't increase prices? A bit confusing, but let's move on...
Increase burden (overhead) costs? Do they need to upgrade their payroll computers to crunch bigger numbers? Do they need to hire extra people to write all the extra 0s on the paychecks? What "burden costs" would increase as a result of an across-the-board 50% pay hike? Are you talking about the employer's share of payroll taxes (I can only assume you're not saying that rent or electricity costs will go up as a result of the pay hike)? If so, is that not already accounted for in the $55B in wages? If so, isn't the increase in payroll taxes already reflected in the $27.5B in new payroll costs (since payroll taxes aren't progressive)?
So no, the effect would be FAR greater than 1.1%.
Indeed, that analysis was debunked long ago. It's more than 1.1%. Your own math seems to set 7.5% as an upper bound, though. 7.5% higher prices for 50% higher wages seems like a fair trade to me. Would you disagree?
Based on BLS CPI/inflation figures, that's only $8.79 in today's dollars, or $18k/year. You can't live off that as a single person, let alone a one income family.
However, according to the average costs you list, rent could be paid with 100 hours of work (138 hours today). An hour of work at minimum wage would yield 5.5 bread loaves (only 3 bread loaves today) or 3.8 gallons of gas (only 2 gallons today). That seems to suggest that inflation over the last 50 years was as much as double what the official figures claim.
Not sure what to make of this. We do need higher minimum wages, though. $7.25/hr is a joke.
$30k/year in NYC:
$24k/year: studio apartment.
$6k/year: Not quite $20/day for food, clothing, transportation, electricity, telecommunications, entertainment and other luxuries.
$20 won't get you much food in NYC, so you probably won't have anything left to spend on clothing, transportation, electricity, telecommunications, or entertainment. I wouldn't really call that enough to get by, since you can enjoy that type of lifestyle bouncing between homeless shelters and soup kitchens without wasting your time working a minimum wage job. $30k/year might be plenty to get by on in Maine (in fact, I would've felt wealthy if I was making that much when I lived there) or some other cheap area like that, but your ignorance of other (read: more expensive) corners of the country is funny. Of course, these numbers are even more bleak if you've got other mouths to feed.
Well said!
Do you know C? Any desire to implement such a feature in Linux? Seems like a good idea, and your claim of dramatic performance improvement has got me thinking. Perhaps this would be a good way to dip my toes into kernel hacking, and perhaps I'm not the only one thinking that.
Windows 7 came out when they could of had windows visa R2 / Windows visa SE.
I'm a fluent English speaker, but I have no idea what you're saying. Visa the payment processing company or visa the immigration document?
The people buying toasters tomorrow won't be planning on hooking them up to a network either. But those toasters will have IP stacks running in them, simply because the cost of adding that feature will approach zero as time goes on, but the value of having exclusive control over yet another avenue of delivering advertising to your home will remain.
Perhaps I'm being cynical and there's other reasons to put computers in toasters. However, the fact remains, a simple microcontroller is still cheaper than something that can run a full OS like Linux. The price gap is closing, though, and to suggest that this has nothing to do with the growing adoption of full-featured SoCs is ridiculous. That's been the whole saga of computers: as they get cheaper, they get squeezed into more and more places.
The popular adoption of personal computers, by ordinary people, in their own homes was one instance of a significant shift in the role computers played in society. Perhaps the popular adoption of smartphones will be seen as another such significant shift. It seems like the ubiquity of IP-networking in devices traditionally not associated with the Internet will likely also be seen as another significant shift. The main difference will be that instead of adding a large population of people to the Internet, we'll be adding a large population of odd devices. I'm not sure how that will be really useful, but then again many people had difficulty seeing just how the Internet would be useful to common people also.
I still own my Dallas Semiconductor TINI. Runs Java, 40MHz, same size as a stick of RAM, and it's about ten years old. A decade ago, this was the realm of Java.
... Mostly assembly.
And assembly.
Smallest .COM? That would be zero bytes, and on DOS 2.11 it would have the funny effect of running the last program you ran, if it was compatible with executing itself in place again.
Now that is arcane knowledge.