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Hundreds of fast food workers are striking nationwide Tuesday, joining other workers in pressing for a more livable wage. But while some say $15 is a minimum needed to survive, some business owners say dishing out more pay would leave them struggling to keep their doors open.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fast-food-workers-strike-again-nationwide-for-15-an-hour
In New York City, rallies are being held in Harlem, the Financial District and Brooklyn in support of efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, reports CBS New York.
In Los Angeles, the local protests are organized by Service Employees International Union, and include fast-food, home-care and child-care workers, along with other "underpaid" employees, reports CBS Los Angeles.
"Is this the America we believe in? When someone works all day long and they still can't get by," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during an early-morning rally in Downtown Brooklyn. "Does anyone believe that it's easy to get by in New York City on less than $15 an hour?"
Critics say a $15 minimum wage would obliterate opportunity and usher in higher taxes, but de Blasio said the opposite is true -- with more money to spend, low wage workers contribute more to the economy.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 11 2015, @03:56AM
This is exactly why we absolutely need a Basic Income pretty soon. Before long, most of the low-end jobs are going to be automated away. There's simply too many unskilled people for the amount of unskilled work available. The typical advice is for people to get an education, but our education system is a shambles, and many of these people aren't really capable of anything higher-level than this anyway. And finally, what other higher-level work is there, even if they could be trained for it? You only need so many robot repairpeople. And the last thing our society needs is more salespeople to sell us robot-made stuff, or more marketing dweebs, or other such parasitic jobs.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:21AM
I hear that Grishnakh isn't capable of anything higher-level, for example. Grishnakh needs a basic income now to avoid eating several fingers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:26AM
Then stop telling them to go to college and send them somewhere they'll learn something useful.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:39AM
Iraq?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @11:16AM
Possibly. You're less likely to find someone sitting on their ass playing XBox all day there, so there're probably a few skilled people who could use an apprentice.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday November 11 2015, @01:07PM
Depends on your MOS. I have aheard of some who never leave the base and have lots of free time to dick around and yea thy do have laptops and consoles. Many of these were assigned to FOB's or forward operating bases. Those people were colloquially called fobbits.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @01:59PM
Its an interesting generation gap. A quarter century ago I was a REMF. In the olden days there WAS a rear echelon, you see, whereas now a days everyone is an IED or suicide bomber target, so the RE part of REMF no longer means anything.
Ironic today is veterans day, I was talking to a MUCH younger vet who recently got out and almost all the slang and racial epitaphs have changed, its almost a communication breakdown.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:04AM
Then stop telling them to go to college and send them somewhere they'll learn something useful.
What would that be, I wonder? Not everyone can be a theoretical physicist.
As others said, it's often easier to put them on basic income (a.k.a. social security) and forget about their existence. However this creates a few problems. First, it is psychologically damaging; then it builds a ghetto of unwanted, unusable people who are left to live however they want (and one doesn't need to think for more than 30 seconds to imagine how it will end up; hint: you'd need a wall.) Also, those social security monies (or just food/clothes) have to come from somewhere. Nice if you have robots that look like gods to you. But in the meantime - which may last a century - this is not going to be a stable solution.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:31AM
Get them hooked on mmorpgs. They'll waste their whole lives sitting in one spot, be unlikely to reproduce, and be happy the whole time.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:34AM
This is how we will all get lost in the matrix, imho.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:43AM
Speaking of which, Aion is free on Steam now. Graphics are pretty, character appearance is very customizable, and you get wings! I blew way too much of my weekend on it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:40AM
Or perhaps they'll write the next Harry Potter (love it or hate it, it brought billions into the economy), make sought after handmade goods, etc.
The key is to make the income actually high enough to actually get by.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @11:13AM
Skills not education, tftp. You can be dumb as a sack of bricks and become competently skilled at welding or any number of other skilled trades.
As for "basic income"? The only way I'd ever agree to even a dime is if anyone taking it lost their right to vote until they got off of it. If we're going to support them like children, they don't get the rights adults get.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aclarke on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:28PM
There are different types of intelligence. Have you ever tried welding? Are you any good at it? "Skilled trades" are called "skilled" because they require ... skill. Welding isn't just moving a couple things across some metal. Here in Canada to get your tickets as a welder you actually have to go to college and learn a fair amount. Maybe you don't need to know astrophysics or Persian literature, but it does require some brains, as well as the ability to make good decisions on the fly.
As for basic income, I don't think you're looking at it in the right way. I'll start in no particular order.
- The current system is broken. The middle class is being decimated, the poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer. I hope you see a problem with this.
- If you look at why basic income can't work, start challenging those suppositions and assume that those problems and attitudes CAN be changed. Start looking for ways to change the system for the better, instead of assuming all those impediments have to stay the same.
- There are many people who are employed who probably are overall a drain on their employers. They're unmotivated, lazy, dumb, burnt out, or maybe just stuck in the wrong sort of job for their temperament because they need to pay the bills. Is it such a bad idea to to free the workplace from this sort of person? It leaves the rest able to do their jobs, and it also opens up opportunities for others who may be looking for those positions themselves.
- Many of those who are currently employed in the wrong place will go on to be productive in other ways. Perhaps they'll do a better job raising their children. Perhaps they'll look after their elderly parents, go plant a garden, clean up their neighbourhood, or do something else productive. The problem with financial capitalism is that it really only rewards jobs that can be monetized. A capitalistic society doesn't financially value taking care of our elders, so there's little financial motivation to do so. Universal basic income frees up people to work on making society better. Ultimately, a healthier and better-functioning society is a benefit to all of us.
- Some people won't work on making society better. They'll sit around in their underpants at home, smoking weed and watching Ow my Balls. Guess what a lot of those people are already doing. Guess how they're being paid to do that. Government social assistance and/or crime. If you're already paying people to sit around and do nothing through government programs, how about doing it through a government program that might actually be more efficient?
- Some of the people who are going to sit around doing nothing are already sitting around doing nothing in organizations all around the world. Do you really want to keep working with them if there's another alternative?
- As alluded above, there are already a myriad of social programmes meant to look after teenage mums, kids in school, grandparents, blue-eyed amputees between the age of 45-49, whatever. Trying to make a whole lot of programmes for a bunch of special interests is an inefficient way of looking after human needs. One program, combined with a simplified tax structure and other changes aimed at streamlining the fact that you're going to start looking at peoples' economic and social needs in a different way, may actually cost less than you might think.
- You might disagree with this, but in my opinion all humans deserve basic dignity. It's not right that some of us are getting richer and more comfortable while others in our same country are dying on the street because they lack the basic care they need. This is the case whether they're mentally or physically healthy or sick, lazy or hard-working, young or old. I don't want to be the one who, directly or indirectly, denies at least an opportunity to someone because, for example, they're mentally handicapped, bipolar, or whatever, and can't properly hold onto a job.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:01PM
Yup and not especially. My welds hold and every now and then I'll whip out a pretty one but not consistently enough to get paid for it.
Skills are not intelligence though. Having skills has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is simply the ability to learn. For instance, I learned how to weld properly (enough to do it, not enough to be paid to do it) very quickly. I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I just don't have the motor control to do so. That's a muscle memory issue not an intelligence issue.
Now the knowledge that comes along with being a badass welder, I'm not downplaying that. It's just that with enough effort, it's something that most people can learn if they put enough time and effort into it. It's valuable, specialized knowledge but it's not rocket surgery.
I absolutely do not. The rich getting richer does not make the poor get poorer. Wealth is not finite. Wealth, both personal and universal, is limited only by the human mind's ability to create. You and you alone (the evils of involuntary taxation aside) determine how much wealth you will create and how your wealth will be allocated.
Example: I code for SN here. Every bit of code I create is wealth because it, hopefully, is capable of making life a little bit easier or otherwise better for everyone who comes to the site. I do this for free because I find enough value returned to myself by having a good site and keeping my coding chops sharp. I receive value, all the other users receive value, the company receives value in the form of cash from subs, our hosting company receives value from us paying our bills, and so on and so forth. Wealth was thus produced from my mind and has added to the total sum of wealth in the world.
Currency? That's simply one means of keeping score of how much wealth you have stored for easy exchange and it's not even a very good one.
Do you have a car? A TV? A computer? How many mobile devices? The ability to instantly communicate with anyone on the planet? Central heat and air? Hot water? A refrigerator? The poor of today are insanely wealthy in comparison to the top 1% of a hundred years ago or even thirty years ago. The poor in the US are even a damn sight more wealthy than the poor of our neighbor Mexico. Relatively speaking, the US has no poor and I'm really getting sick of hearing that I'm a bad person if my heart doesn't bleed for them.
Merging all programs into "basic income"? Fantastic idea. Still with the you do not get to vote stipulation. If you are a drain on the nation, you should not get to choose its direction.
All humans are welcome to basic dignity. Dignity is not something you are given though; dignity is something you start out with and can either choose to keep or choose to drop in favor of comfort. They throw dignity out the window the first time they accept a handout. That makes them a bum and bums are without dignity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:51PM
"Wealth is not finite. Wealth, both personal and universal, is limited only by the human mind's ability to create."
True (as with Julian Simon); however, a society made of humans will not work well if a few (greedy, unenlightened) humans have 99.999%+ of everything and so can buy the laws in their favor, where said laws can include imprisoning all the rest (including you) for, say, posting on the internet without an appropriate license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license [wikipedia.org]
Or, for that matter, reading the internet without a license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom [wikipedia.org]
Or reading anything else for that matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 [wikipedia.org]
See also:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com]
And also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html [pdfernhout.net]
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation. ..."
But even if you don't buy any of that, studies show more egalitarian societies tend to have happier wealthy people. Also, other studies show most families lose their great wealth within three generations, so what's the point?
Given the enclosure and privatization of most the land by the government (to enforce land rights), one can argue peopel have a right to soem of the fruits of the land by right of citizenship as part-owners in that national enterprise of enclosing the commons.
Also, all humans share in our collective cultural inheritance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit [wikipedia.org]
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the “cultural inheritance of society” as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.[8] Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs ultimately relate to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas carefully distinguished between value, costs and prices. He claimed that one of the factors resulting in a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' near-obsession about values and their relation to prices and incomes.[9] While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also considered values as subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus he rejected the idea of the role of money as a standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that money should act as a medium of communication by which consumers direct the distribution of production."
See also:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways [psychologytoday.com]
"On the basis of such observations, Christopher Boehm proposed the theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a practice that he labeled reverse dominance. In a standard dominance hierarchy--as can be seen in all of our ape relatives (yes, even in bonobos)--a few individuals dominate the many. In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them.
According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos. Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (or she, but usually it's a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior. If teasing doesn't work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn't exist. That almost always works. Imagine what it is like to be completely ignored by the very people on whom your life depends. No human being can live for long alone. The person either comes around, or he moves away and joins another band, where he'd better shape up or the same thing will happen again. In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm presents very compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @10:58PM
tl;dr
Also, don't make arguments to me with other people's words. Especially not in video format. A quote or two is fine but I'm not going to read fifty pages or watch half an hour of people spouting idiocy for the sake of an Internet argument.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 11 2015, @07:10PM
There are different types of intelligence. Have you ever tried welding? Are you any good at it? "Skilled trades" are called "skilled" because they require ... skill. Welding isn't just moving a couple things across some metal. Here in Canada to get your tickets as a welder you actually have to go to college and learn a fair amount.
Unfortunately, the majority of the welding jobs have already been automated.
We're just an effective pipe-laying machine away from the rest going...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:25AM
Ever been in a Bobcat (skid-steer) factory? I got to see one and there were hardly any humans in it. That was in 2001.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @01:20PM
then it builds a ghetto of unwanted, unusable people who are left to live however they want (and one doesn't need to think for more than 30 seconds to imagine how it will end up; hint: you'd need a wall.)
Its a racial / cultural thing. You give everyone retirement at 65 and they in general don't turn too deviant. Or you've basically described lower than tenure level academia, they have occasional issues but nothing too bad. This is also basically a bad K-12 school district, nothing too awful happens there, and if you take away mandatory physical proximity and mandatory insane guards (aka teachers) and insane guard management, K12 education isn't that bad of an experience.
One argument I've always heard about social security style basic income and Medicare style socialized medicine is its not rocket surgery to just lower the minimum application age by two years for every calendar year or five years or however fast or slow you need it culturally and budgetar-ily.
Long into the future, plus or minus civilization collapse, we're still going to have both medicare and social security and endless media battles about how we need or don't need socialized medicine and basic income. Of course the general population need not be told that in the old days you qualified for SS at 67 instead of when you got your high school diploma, or that you had to be 65 to get medicare in the old days and now you get it the day you roll off your parents income tax statement as a dependent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by buswolley on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:06AM
(1) There is office/legal/management work.
(2) There is research/engineering work.
(3) There is skilled labor (e.g., in manufacturing, construction)
(4) There is "unskilled" labor.
In America there are jobs for (1), (2), and (4).
see the problem?
subicular junctures
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:41AM
Exactly. I say this from a pinko-commie-lefty standpoint, but the whole $15/hr thing is a bandaid for the real problem which is a complete lack of decent paying blue-collar work in America due to the fact that we exported it all. McDonalds should be a training-wheels job for high school or college kids -- something to learn about work and earn a little beer money. The fact that people are actually trying to live on these types of crap jobs is the problem, not that they pay crap.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:53AM
They're not trying to live on it by choice, they're trying to live on it because they have no other choice if they want to live, as there are no other jobs.
(Score: 4, Touché) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 11 2015, @11:54AM
That's kind of exactly what I said.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:35PM
With all due respect to you and AC I think what AC might have been getting at is there is a lot of Orwellian doublespeak and they're not "trying to live" they are "actually living" off minimum wage and its not "off minimum wage" but "off minimum wage and a ton of govt benefits like EBT etc".
So the hard core marxists, never seen a government program they don't want to expand, all want the minimum wage to stay at $7.25 or heck even lower it back to $3.35 because the government can take $20 in tax revenue and national debt and provide the employee with $5 of food stamps etc, meaning the cat ladies in the government get to spend the delta of $15 on accounting and paper pushing and salaries for social workers and all that crap.
Meanwhile the hard core capitalists want to eliminate socialism and have a fair and free market, so they want a minimum wage of $15/hr and get the government out of their employees lives. They find it offensive that someone like me, who buys nothing from McDonalds or Walmart, is having the crap taxed out of me so the .gov can pay the employees living expenses instead of their theoretical employer McD or walmart. Why should, say, the CEO of (insert your favorite real restaurant here) be happy that he's personally being taxed so that his competition doesn't have to pay a fair wage so the .gov can help his competition undercut his own real restaurant?
In the endless discussion of basic income, I think we're missing the forest for the trees that what is actually being rolled out in the united states is a new communist system of serfdom. You have no rights anymore and have to pretend to work a crap job for crap pay, but the .gov will pay the balance for your food, housing, medical care, cell phone, all that stuff. Its a new lifestyle model. Its been in progress for a couple decades and expands by a couple million people every year in the USA. Eventually we'll all work for minimum wage, which won't provide even a tenth of what it costs to actually live, but that's OK because we'll all be wards of the state. Note how this dovetails nicely with other government policies like not providing services or benefits to people without drug tests or with drug convictions, sure you can try to live "in the free market without government support" but if everyone is a ward of the government under the new socialism, you won't be able to survive. Then the .gov can implement endless social engineering on its "freeloaders" or "wards of the state". Expect all kinds of behavior codes, weird mixtures of neopuritan christianity vs SJW signalling, etc. On the positive side the economy looks ready for collapse and during the hyperinflation getting literal government cheese for all and McJobs for all might mean the difference between coming out the other side as a unified nation vs basically a collapse and civil war. So shitty as it looks, the new lifestyle model for american peasants is none the less better than doing nothing or several of the alternatives.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 11 2015, @03:06PM
So the hard core marxists... want... [stuff completely at odds with what they really want]
Meanwhile the hard core capitalists want... [stuff completely at odds with what they really want]
And NASA wants to rebuild Saturn V so it can take the green cheese away from the Moon Nazis.
Eventually we'll all work for minimum wage, which won't provide even a tenth of what it costs to actually live, but that's OK because we'll all be wards of the state.
Eventually, we'll run out of a low cost workforce globally and the competitive pressure on developed world labor will ease up. I figure that'll happen around 2050-2070, depending on what Africa does. Whether your country is on top or bottom of the pile at that time will depend in large part on the labor policies and legal infrastructure you have. A high minimum wage is a guaranteed way to have a lot of permanently unemployed and unskilled people.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @03:25PM
I think you're confusing what they want with weird corporate propaganda. If .com owns .gov, you're going to hear really weird nonsensical stuff from the two parties in .gov. My stuff makes sense, what the "lets boost quarterly profits" crowd says the politicians want is likely a pipe dream in the sense that it is formed completely out of large quantities of marijuana smoke.
Eventually, we'll run out of a low cost workforce globally
I donno man, the poor always reproduce the fastest leading to more poor, and for millennia whomever is the dominant empire has always been pretty good at creating new poor areas.
I kinda agree with your general outlook in that internationalization needs cheap infinite oil (which we don't have) and safe transport (no somali pirates on every coast in the world). Both trends look REALLY bad for the future. The future is containerships that can't run because of the cost of oil, which is good because every non dictatorship country and every dictatorship country not aligned with ours will pirate anything that none the less sails by. Emphasis on sails, BTW.
Africa is dead man walking. For a good laugh look at some population growth graphs showing Africa having 4 billion people by 2100 or other pure WTF. What they intend to eat and drink is carefully avoided in the discussion. Africa of the future is likely to have a lower, not higher, population than now. The Chinese are replicating parts of the western experience such as industrialization and having a great depression, and one other thing they're trying is imperialism and colonization, everyone's gotta try it once and get it out of their system, and they're trying it in Africa. So the African of the future is likely to be starved to death (aka not there) or be a Chinese immigrant along the lines of the former white output of South Africa.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 11 2015, @03:40PM
My stuff makes sense
To rehash, hard core Marxists want lower minimum wage because it decreases the power of labor. No, actually they want the other thing. Similarly, hardcore capitalists want higher minimum wage because they want higher wage costs. No, actually they want the other thing.
Before asserting that your stuff makes sense, make sure it makes sense.
Africa is dead man walking. For a good laugh look at some population growth graphs showing Africa having 4 billion people by 2100 or other pure WTF. What they intend to eat and drink is carefully avoided in the discussion. Africa of the future is likely to have a lower, not higher, population than now.
If that's true and it may be, then 2050 is closer to when wage competition eases up.
I kinda agree with your general outlook in that internationalization needs cheap infinite oil (which we don't have) and safe transport (no somali pirates on every coast in the world). Both trends look REALLY bad for the future. The future is containerships that can't run because of the cost of oil, which is good because every non dictatorship country and every dictatorship country not aligned with ours will pirate anything that none the less sails by. Emphasis on sails, BTW.
Oil isn't magically disappearing overnight, it'll just get more expensive. And shipping stuff by sea is really cheap even with more expensive oil. As to piracy, there's a fix for that, but it requires someone to get their hands dirty, say like the European powers did in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:03PM
To rehash, hard core Marxists want lower minimum wage because it decreases the power of labor. No, actually they want the other thing.
Um, OK.
I'll try some numbers. Some people like numbers. I'm cool with that.
Postulate it costs $14/hr income to live. Just stay with me here, its just a number, even if you'd prefer $30 or $3 or whatever. I just didn't want to use a variable "X" to keep the math simple, I want a nice easy number. Its sort of like a basal metabolic rate, if you eat under 1500 calories for too long you eventually die, you're burning 1500 from food or stored fat or you have genetically engineered green skin and do photosynthesis it doesn't matter you're burning 1500 to stay alive. Thats the concept here.
If the legal minimum wage is $7 then the welfare queen corporation pays $7 and the government chips in $7 worth of entitlements. No I don't want to debate the morality of entitlements in general or in specific examples or their costs. I just want easy math to get the point across. So the government being bloated and inefficient it needs to pull in like $70 worth of tax money from productive workers. So when someone eats a $5 chezeburger, it actually costs $6 to provide that burger and the government takes my money at gunpoint in the form of taxes, wastes most of it, and hands $1 my money to the worker because the workers employer is a no good Marxist commie welfare queen corporation.
If the legal minimum wage is $14, then the cheapest crappiest honest capitalist free market corporation pays all $14 of the cost of living for their human drone and the government chips in ... zilch. nothing. nada. Because this is a free market capitalist scenario not a "corporation as welfare queen" scenario. So the government being bloated and inefficient compared to the private sector and having to raise $0 for entitlement program expenses, it raises taxes of $0 ... oh wait, I'm liking this. So when someone eats a $6 chezeburger, it actually costs $6 to provide that burger and the person eating it pays the full price, not demanding that I, via the government taxes, chip in an extra buck or so. Also $70 of tax dollars not raised, means at least $70 of real economic activity, so the entire country is wealthier. Some people don't want america to be wealthy, they want america to fail, of course, we generally, unfortunately call them "leaders". So there's that problem.
So the marxists want a low minimum wage because they like higher taxation of the "right" people, employment by the .gov of cat lady types, and they like socialization of the economic system.
Meanwhile the free market capitalists want higher minimum wages because they like low taxes and the resulting economic growth and the effects of that growth, less government employed cat ladies telling them what to do, and generally feel its fairer to have people pay what stuff costs without government subsidies and also like not having to compete with competitors who are corporate welfare queens. Its just a win-win all around.
Now because .com and .gov have merged, AND because you haven't heard welfare queens squeal until you try to take away their .gov free cheese, you get endless 1984 style doublespeak about how "true scottsman" fallacy "real capitalists" want lower wages so the economy becomes ever more socialized and taxes always increase and free markets are evil and all that BS.
There are serious stock market type issues. For example, Walmart is a huge welfare queen and their entire sector is based on the idea that the government should pay about half their payroll costs. And that has certain stock price issues WRT comparison to something like IT, where the .gov doesn't chip in anything at all for your average $150K/yr software dev. So removal of corporate welfare would have some stock price impact etc.
Even more crudely, obviously walmart only has to pay millions to .gov reelection funds to get billions in payroll subsidies in the form of entitlement programs. So since they own the politicians they purchased, you can assume they're strongly against change.
You're not going to hear the whole story if you only hear the Marxist welfare queen corporation side in the multinational megacorporation controlled media.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:33AM
Mmm. Cheese. I know of a cheese stick in the fridge. I must eat it now.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by Kawumpa on Wednesday November 11 2015, @11:56AM
One major problem with exporting all or almost all skilled labor to other countries is that you also lose all creativity and innovation possible in this area. So while a company might gain a short term cost advantage it sacrifices a long term competitive advantage. On aggregate an economy loses much of its middle class and economic stability. Something that we can witness in quite a few industrialised nations, the US being a prime example.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 11 2015, @11:06AM
Go call a plumber/contractor/electrician/welder and tell me that again after you've paid them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:40AM
I do my own plumbing, contracting, electrical and welding.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:41AM
I went to two years of tech school for machining and it worked out fairly well for me. I would not encourage my sons to follow in my footsteps however. It's gotten so that unless you're one of the best you're treated only a little better than a fast food worker. And yes, automation is making fast inroads on machining jobs. What employers want/need now are a small number of very skilled and experienced people to make the robots go, but there are fewer paths to develop those skills and they don't want to pay you to develop them. I'm thinking the industry is going to require mind uploading or memory copying to preserve skills and experience unless strong-enough AI can be implemented before too many of us retire or die off.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 12 2015, @04:07AM
I'm thinking the industry is going to require mind uploading or memory copying to preserve skills and experience unless strong-enough AI can be implemented before too many of us retire or die off.
No, it won't.
The skills and experience simply *won't* be preserved. The BRIC nations will reinvent this stuff and they'll preserve it, while our society looks either like Somalia or Mad Max.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @06:03AM
People who go to college/university so they can get a good job and make more money really shouldn't be there in the first place. It should be for people who are primarily interested in gaining a deep, academic understanding of the universe, not for people with petty, shallow ambitions. Encouraging all these people to go into higher education just causes the colleges and universities to dumb it down further so they can make more money and also fills the environment with people who aren't really interested in education; most colleges and universities weren't that great to begin with, so this is especially disastrous. If people want free college, we should first vastly raise the standards of all existing colleges and universities that have poor standards so as to kick out all the losers, but I am sure most would not like that.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 11 2015, @08:45AM
That would be fine if you can also convince HR departments that few jobs actually NEED college graduates rather than them claiming they need H1-Bs because there are no citizens who can do the job.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 11 2015, @10:31AM
You are conflating two different problems.
The H1-B situation needs to be addressed by giving H1-B's improved access to green cards and job switching. If they are good enough to fly halfway round the world to work for you, surely they are good enough to make a home in your country.
The HR situation with requiring degrees for everything would be self correcting if you could actually do that to the colleges. At the moment, I think the degree requirement is simply a basic check that you are not a complete moron, and that you can actually concentrate on working for ten minutes at a time.
Also, the government likes the current situation because parking everyone at college for three or four years is equivalent to reducing the unemployment rate by approx 10 percentage points. Mostly direct removal of workers, but there are also all the jobs created to babysit them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 11 2015, @09:59PM
I'm fine with more green cards and no H1-Bs. The point is to leave the various HR departments no option but adjusting expectations.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday November 11 2015, @09:08PM
If people want free college, we should first vastly raise the standards of all existing colleges and universities that have poor standards so as to kick out all the losers, but I am sure most would not like that.
Actually, (free education)+(raised standards)=(desirable long term outcomes for humanity).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 11 2015, @10:49PM
Your point reminded me of this Emerson quote:
Higher education should be the means for those who love learning to expand their horizons and create new knowledge through discovery and synthesis. It shouldn't be a diploma mill for semi-literates to say that they have a piece of paper in hopes of increasing their pay package.
Pushing everyone to go to college has created so many perverse incentives for the schools, the students and the greedy folks who prey like vultures on the gullible and needy.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:52PM
Why do they think automating away the jobs of burger flippers is easy, but automating away the jobs of Wall Street Bankers who do nothing more than play with spreadsheets all day is impossible? Because it ain't. It's quite the opposite. I've done it. I once automated an entire division at the Northern Trust Bank. They were so stunned they summarily fired me.
Think of all the money we could save by automating away the jobs of each and every person in the finance industry. Literally trillions. So that's where the big wins are, not in getting rid of burger flippers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 12 2015, @04:05AM
Well you just answered the question yourself. It won't happen (before the burger-flippers) because it'd piss off too many powerful people. The people at the bottom of the totem pole (being unskilled workers) have the least power to protest their job being automated away, so their jobs will go first.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:52AM
Occasionally a score of five is not high enough.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek