That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.
This is actually the policy argued for by the Catholic Church in various documents; but it results in an obvious inequality that makes many angry - two people doing the exact same job, and the single man is paid less than the married family man.
(The reality is we pretend we don’t have that, then rebuild it badly with bandaids - child tax credit, earned income tax credit, daycare credits, MFJ deductions, healthcare, etc).
>People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage.
Look, I get where that is coming from. But no one deserves anything, even clean air. Instead, you pay for things with other things (e.g. clean air in exhchange for slightly more expensive cars).
A (shitty) job is better than no job. Minimum wage should be lowered. You gotta help people with something else. For instance by allowing to build higher density housing.
But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days? Might want to check what the grocery store you worked at in 2010 is really paying these days. I’d bet good money it’s significantly more than $7.25/hour.
Doesn't the fact that 98.9% of all workers earn more than the minimum wage kinda highlight that it's really not necessary for the federal government to increase it? Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance to actually _find_ workers who'll accept the minimum wage, hence the fact that hardly anyone is paying it.
A federal-level minimum wage doesn't make sense, precisely because what is considered minimum wage in LA isn't the same as what's considered minimum wage in rural Louisiana, and vice-versa. The fact that 98.9% of workers manage to receive more than the minimum wage strongly suggests the market forces have done a pretty good job of determining what a viable minimum wage for various parts of the US is (including apparently parts where $7.25/hour works).
> But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days?
Yes.
> Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance
No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly impossible to find someone from Indianapolis (pop. 879k, 2024 est.), and the number of Americans is much larger than the number of working Americans.
> No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people.
It's 1.1%, an incredibly small portion of the entire working population. There's never any follow up like "where in the country does this occur?" which may reveal that it's actually a livable wage. Or other follow up questions like, "does this number include illegal aliens who are happy with being paid $7.25/hour tax free?"
You're also ignoring _how_ it came to be that 98.9% of all workers manage to get paid higher than the minimum wage without it being mandated. Are the companies doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or have market forces instead found what the _actual_ viable minimum wage for various localities truly is?
Table 3. Their methodology is addressed in the technical notes.
> You're also ignoring _how_ it came to be. . .
No. You asked a specific question and I was bored enough to help you look up a result. I’m not here to engage with whatever ideological problems you have going on in the subtext.
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
... what people are willing to pay for it... when the corporations already achieved regulatory capture and can force a partly state subsidized work force to take shit underpaid jobs. It's like a handout to corporations.
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
Governments are on both sides of supply and demand: their powers to tax and spend mean they can put their metaphorical foot on the metaphorical scales to tip the balances whichever way they want, to a large degree, with rapid effect.
Central planning is only one of many ways to do this, it can also be managed more locally; and Soviet-style central planning is only one many ways to do central planning, most large businesses even in capitalist nations are also somewhat-centrally planned by the C-suite.
Corporations do do central planning, but they do so at the high risk of becoming unmanageable and then they fall, and a competitor replaces them. Government central planning just raises taxes to cover the inefficiencies, until eventually the economy collapses.
Even regarding the scale of the organisation, there is lots of overlap between governments — at all levels, from countries, through states, to incorporated municipal governments — and businesses. You could reasonably compare Foxconn to Iceland or Wyoming (I would also list a US city, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP gives me a lot of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas rather than cities, that seems like it would extend beyond the bit with the tax collection rules?)
Labor rights have been a raging success. 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage, sick leave, vacation leave (in non-shithole countries).
>BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to.
What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion? Free market is a free market only when there is competition based on the product, not how rich your investors are.
There is evidence the workers are being exploited everywhere if you bother to spend a second looking. Like the parent said, your apologism of capitalists is disgusting.
so much success that now you need two working adults to support a family of 4 while 60 years ago a working man could support a much larger family with a single income.
> What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion?
Funny you should ask. There was a famous case from the beginning of the last century where German bromide producers price-dumped it the U.S. in an effort to undermine Dow's efforts in the same direction. The result? They failed miserably.
Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.
If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty. I would prefer a world in which everyone is rather rich (or at least well off), a world that no system other than capitalism is even close to providing.
> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.
Capitalism? Yes.
"Free market capitalism"? No.
While regulated capitalism is very effective at aligning everyone's interests, a free market operates without the intervention of government or any other external authority, and rapidly decays into a market for lemons[0] — or worse, arbitrarily negative contractual obligations, which is how serfdom functioned.
Even when the governments start off by only intervening to prevent those two issues, with minimum quality requirements and prohibitions against unfair contracts, they often find themselves having to also intervene directly in the markets, everything from the US ban on trading onion futures[1] to printing and destroying currency to keep inflation in a particular range designed to encourage the spending of money rather than its hoarding on the one hand without also preventing people from saving on the other, and even to intervene in the employment market because 100% employment drives a spiral of wage inflation that the system as a whole would not be able to cope with etc. etc.
Same deal as the Laffer curve: zero regulation is bad, micromanagement is bad, people argue about where the peak in the middle is.
It's not an on/off switch, of course, but rather a sliding scale. The free-er your markets are, the better the results. Till recently, USA was in top with both, in sharp contrast to, say, the EU who pro-regulation and anti-business.
But the tariffs are an interesting experiment, with some non-economical geopolitical goals thrown in, so we'll see how it goes.
Not as it is usually defined. Many places take inspiration from free market capitalism, like Javascript takes inspiration from C, but have developed their own systems. The US model is usually referred to as mixed-market capitalism and the EU model is generally thought of as a social market economy.
Of course, that's just semantics. While there is value in using shared terminology, you can make up any definition you want on the spot. You could call the old Soviet system "free market capitalism" if you really want to. The world is your oyster.
This is great! Even without the LLM agent, async communication is so nice for low cog distracting customer service calls and holds. Why can't everyone just have an async comm universal chat interface? I guess this bridges the gap where the tech is legacy and or there is human involved. Can't wait to try it out!
this is so obvious when you think about it. Historically sharing audio has been so incredibly difficult because of the DRM of music and its history of sharing since napster. video always gets the pass.
That was my
logic when I came to developing this. Thanks for the comment. We should be able to
own our own audio vs it being trapped in iOS or Whatsapp or Messages.
Exactly. The past 163 days have only been about hurting people and cutting things down. There's no hopeful or optimistic rhetoric. Its just hate after hate after hate and blame.
You cannot build a great country on this. But you most certainly can tear one down.
As Lincoln said I hope I have god on my side but I must have...
Same choice faces everyone but there are no Lincolns around. Its a nation of hustlers, podcasters and youtubers who dont really fight for anything other than views, upvotes and likes.
I'm not sure, I think maybe that's the younger generation. But there are amazingly strong people here. I mean, I certainly don't know any podcasters, streamers, or tick tockers. Do you? We do have a problem with celebrity worship in this country, but I think that might be coming to its logical conclusion.
the first 'ai disaster' will be a corp shirking responsibility by blaming their unchecked automatic bureaucratic processes on ai. Look no further at what HERTZ did sending out automated arrest warrants for erroneous causes, leading to dangerous confrontations with armed police. Luckily no one was killed, but innocent law abiding people were very traumatized.
This was without 'ai' but the blame was nearly close, "oops automated process did it!"
The 'artificial intelligence' has been here (starts with B). Kafka wrote about it comically.
Do not act like cars are the only way for transport. Less cars means more modes of transport. More options means mobility. Cars and their parking and road infra exceed at providing ON DEMAND transportation. Beyond that their storage and use and prioritization makes other modes of transportation less able. - So its the other way around. Less cars, more mobility
