Fluxx is cool - it’s like a more structured version of this. IIRC it does have a theoretically finite rules space, but there are many, many unique fun combinations of rules, and it feels like you’re devising your own. I highly recommend it!
You might think that, but pretty much all studies show that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
It’s this already debunked by the famous Danish McDonald’s example?
This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics.
Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs:
$30 of the price goes to labor
$30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on”
$30 of the price goes to inputs (materials)
$10 of the price goes to profit.
Let’s say wages go up by 20%.
Labor goes up to $36, now your price is $106.
Wages went up by 20% but your price went up by 6%.
Maybe we have to add the labor of the input materials, but a lot of input materials have low labor costs than finished products in the restaurant industry. E.g., a tortilla from a tortilla factory doesn’t have 30% of its price represented by labor cost, since it’s made on an automated assembly line. Still, for ease, let’s just say our input materials went up by ~6% to $32
At the end of the day your total cost of your product went up 8% but all the employees got a massive 20% raise with net positive income.
This is really disingenuous and doesn't debunk anything. Who claimed that wages going up 20% would raise the overall price of the product 20%? I'm sure you can find someone on Twitter who said that because you can find any dumb thing on Twitter, but it's not a main argument.
It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.
I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople.
Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8.
My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant industry wage breakdown.
For example, the S&P 500’s average labor cost as a percentage of revenue is only 12%.
I haven’t even brought up the fact that people making wages that are too low to survive on already use government benefit programs, like how Walmart is the largest employer consumer of food stamps in the country. Minimum wage could be one mechanism among others to reduce corporate welfare. Walmart doesn’t deserve to have its labor costs be subsidized by the taxpayer.
You can imagine a person who thinks McDonalds' only cost for making a hamburger is the labor and they get the beef and bread for free. But hopefully there aren't many of those people.
And it's a distraction from the main point. Without needing to look at any specific math, higher labor costs will be generally passed onto the customer because profit is not allowed to go down. That's not a defense of low wages, it's just an illustration of where the power lies.
If I live in India the PlayStation 5 isn’t magically price reduced to $100 just because my income is lower. Similarly, it doesn’t magically become $5,000 if I live in Monaco.
A PS5 is sold globally and subject to arbitrage. If someone from Monaco can easily purchase a PS5 from India for $4500 less, they or a reseller, likely will, preventing that level of price discrimination.
A game only sold on Steam so there's essentially no competition? Regional pricing based on what the market will bear is common. People in India actually do pay a whole lot less for the exact same game on Steam than someone in say, the US.
Locally purchased goods/services are somewhere in between, but the less price sensitive customers are, the less likely they're going to shop around for a deal effectively reducing price competition between businesses on the low end at least (people will still travel 60 miles to save $2000 on a $40,000 car even if they won't go two blocks to save $1.00 on a $5 carton of eggs).
Of course that's a factor. The article doesn't get into causes much, but this anecdote provides a bit of color and gives a vague sense of the scale of a few factors:
> Onions that cost $9 a sack before COVID now run $80. Beef is up more than $2 a pound, adding $6,000 to his monthly costs. Labor adds another $3,000.
Minimum wage goes up and buying power goes down as a result. This is the exact spiral that was predicted and dismissed as wrongthink. It has turned into another example of the Law of Salutary Contradiction:
The Law of Salutary Contradiction states that when an event or policy is initially dismissed as impossible or a conspiracy theory, it is later acknowledged as occurring—but framed as beneficial and morally justified.
This is false. When making a prediction like "X goes up and thus Y goes down", it matters what the relative changes are. The naysayers of increases in minimum wage say things like "if minimum wage goes up by $2.50, the cost of a fast food burger will become out of reach". In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal, and its price need only go up by a couple of cents in response (if, indeed, given the parent corporation's profits, it needs to go up at all).
Most serious studies of minumum wage effects conclude that while it does create upward price pressure, the results are small changes. It is essentially a redistributive, rather than inflationary, mechanism.
> In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal
Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal.
Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.
Employees involved in logistics are already likely earning more than minimum wage. Those involved in processing and farming likely do not live in the same jurisdictions.
Anyway ...
The basic idea is pretty simple: if you work 40 hours a week on minimum wage, you should be able to rent a reasonable condition 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment relatively close to where you work.
That's not a "slogan", it's an idea that's been nominally central to The American Dream for more than a half century (but also largely untrue for the last few decades in many metropolitan areas).
The current expert consensus is that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
That’s just a way for sulking conspiracy theorists to say “I told you so” after they’ve moved their own goalposts 50 times and have broken-clocked their way into validating their own genius.
P.S. There are way too many variables for you to draw that kind of causation from the correlation, and you’re very naive to think you could.
For most poor people, raising the minimum wage doesn't mean increasing their income, but rather reducing it to zero. It literally prohibits workers from working for low wages, effectively putting them out of job.
Oh, the real Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) we certainly have a little rivalry and antipathy going on, but generally, very little. The other commenters here hinted at it: there are other towns and cities too. When people often say “the Twin Cities” they really mean the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, which is a seven-county, 3 million person region. There aren’t just two identities — there are several dozen identities — but they’re so small and nuanced that the distinction is often dropped or forgotten, or simplified (downtown vs. outside downtown, city vs. suburb, old vs. new developments, etc.)
Never heard of Minne-tucky before, but yeah, outstate or rural Minnesota would be that.
It seems to me that the 7-segment font would work better in all lowercase, specially if you don’t need to differentiate letters from numbers. A lowercase E would be easy, a lowercase G would basically be a 9, and you could do a two-story lowercase A.
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