Having started at the bottom, I think the most important thing for people in this situation is to be able to get the next higher paying job, then the next higher paying job. Minimum wage should be temporary - so this study is kind of stupid.
In my experience, my worst enemies were exhaustion, the crab-in-the-bucket attitude of my peers, and an inability to build a resume and to network out to the people who wanted what I could do. Ultimately I couldn't escape poverty until I could buy enough gear to work up north. That money made it possible to pay for an education.
To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder. If safety makes this harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
> Minimum wage should be temporary - so this study is kind of stupid.
I see this type of attitude/comment frequently whenever the minimum wage comes up, but I've never seen any kind of justification for it.
If these aren't "real jobs" that deserve "real pay" then why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?
If you have a minimum wage job, your priority should be to find a better paying job. There is no fairness here and nobody cares about your problems like you do. Don't let the political attitudes or fashionable views of your friends effect your own agency, you need to look out for your own economic interests right now.
I think the study is kind of stupid, since the minimum wage category is a temporary category with extremely high variability, it's not a fixed target. So the base assumption that it stays put long enough to study doesn't hold water for me.
I think a lot of the confusion here comes from a conflict between people talking in personal mode and societal modes. As an individual, you absolutely want minimum wage to be temporary, and if you are smart and lucky you can usually make this happen.
You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.
>>It's not intended to provide a family with a living wage;
Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:
Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
I don't see any particular reason to pay attention to century-old rhetoric. I think "intended " was a poor word choice; see my other response. Also, I could live on minimum wage today but I'd hate it.
I'm just making an observation in the sense of "the purpose of system is what it does", not writing a treatise on the history of rhetoric around minimum wage. Maybe "intended" was a poor word choice on my part. Minimum wage can't easily feed and house 3 dependents in many places as it stands today.
"In my [Franklin D Roosevelt] Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
Increased job-mobility won't increase the number of higher paying openings though. Even if everybody at the bottom of the pyramid is laser-focused on making it up, the number actually succeeding won't really change, except perhaps through indirect effects. If anything, making people more content at the bottom would make it easier to raise for those who do want.
The number of people actually employed at minimum wage is quite small (usually low single digit percentage of total employment), though it does vary by location. If you add in some amount over minimum wage the number goes up (significantly), but if you add in tips and the like it goes down a lot. From what I've seen, the median amount of time people spend in that salary range is less than six months (of continuous employment).
"To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder"
There is no "the poor"... rather its just people that do not have any other options. Primarily, higher education or certified skilled trades are the only effective way out of minimal income survivor economics.
In my opinion, people working at fast food chains making the minimum legally allowable wage work harder than any CEO or academic I've met over the years.
I would recommend this book as it quantifies how income disparity impacts young Americans development:
"Outliers: The Story of Success Paperback" (Malcolm Gladwell, 2011)
Notably, naively explaining passive income from assets to minimum wage workers is not usually a productive conversation. Rather, folks are just projecting their own perspective on people in a different situation. =3
> To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder.
This. The same or more attention should be paid to ensuring there are plentiful, affordable homes, and a ladder of jobs from one level to another, as is paid to social safety nets.
This is great, until they receive a debilitating injury that puts them on disability for the rest of their lives, get a mountain of medical debt, or lose the breadwinner.
> If safety makes [job mobility] harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
I'm sorry, what?! Given the options between, opportunity for a promotion at some point, and not being injured by your job. You would prioritize maybe promoting people over preventing people from getting injured?
First, when given two options, and asked to decide, the first thing every engineer should do is ask, "why not both?". But also, Perhaps you should consider listening to fewer podcasts from Lord Farquaad?
Looks like the derivative of the angle is continuous.
When you drive around a street corner in a car, you start by turning the wheel to turn a little, then more, then less, then you drive straight again. This looks like that kind of curve.
It's subtle. Zoom to the middle of the sample image and compare (the vertical part of) the curve of the two top corners. You will notice like... 5 pixels of difference, then the curve gets aliased in the smooth version. I would like to see it in an actual site though.
If you think this is interesting, see what happens when you try and edit the page of Susan Gerbic; the leader of the Guerilla Skeptics. She runs a gang of over 150 Wikipedia members who have taken over 1500+ articles. They are like the deletionist described in the article, but operate as an open conspiracy advancing an atheist-materialist point of view. They actively recruit new members, run them through extensive training about the Wikipedia ecosystem and how to dominate it as a team.
That article was written in 2018, since then they have been trashing on a retired admiral: Timothy Gallaudet. They have been disparaging David Grusch, who spoke under oath to the American congress and have undone the work of Nobel laureates trying to edit pages about physics. And yes, they are dominating, a team of editors will beat out an individual contributor on Wikipedia. I don't really care about their position, but they are an open conspiracy, and it's an interesting story.
We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave some human monuments out there so the next civilization can know about us.
Naw the JWST won't stay there after it loses power.
> The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.
Lagrange Point orbits still require station-keeping. Anything 'parked' there will eventually float away from it, unless the position is actively maintained.
The nice thing about methane is that it's not too energy dense, so you can sell it to your population like gasoline. You may not want to give the population mini-nukes or vacuum energy generation from EVOs.
We don't need to use solar panels though, we already have exceedingly cheap energy generation in the form of nuclear power. We also have inexpensive ways of transmuting the nuclear waste.
We don't really have a environmental problem, we have a regulatory problem; it is impossible to develop any of this new technology because we have made it infinitely expensive by law. We have also made non-technical environmentalism the height of fashion, and now its used as the spiritual engine for the political-left. For those of you who are concerned that this process is net neutral, there is nothing stopping us from using a similar process to pull the carbon out of the C02 and use it for construction, or to just bury it.
The key to a better future is to reconsider our attitudes toward energy innovation and to remove the activists from our regulatory boards and to re-write our laws to make it possible to innovate and build. We teach our kids that they are doomed, maybe we should encourage them to study nuclear and plasma engineering instead.
You have to transport the energy you're generating from nuclear, and the US is a massive country with tons of sprawl. Solar doesn't need a grid. Sure it's not 24/7—besides making better batteries we can use less energy. That's political suicide to mention in this country though so we keep kicking the can down to the next generation. At some point humans will be forced to make do with less, but for now it's all a gravy train.
The key to a better future is to stop letting the boards of ExxonChevronShell completely own energy policy. Their own research surfaced the problem over half a century ago and their immediate reaction was to bury it and fund studies that downplayed it. In other countries it would be called corruption, but we call it lobbying.
I don't know what this "non-technical" environmentalism means, but have you ever stopped to consider that people are capable of opposing nuclear for reasons that aren't technologic? Almost all currently existing nuclear power generation in the US is privatized. Private companies only have a responsibility to the shareholders. Maybe such short-term optimization with something capable of long-term consequences doesn't sit right with people?
Sure enough we have spent 40 years following the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and have yet to build a proper, isolated location in which to store spent nuclear fuel. We store 88,000 metric tons of the stuff on-site at various reactors and the amount is increasing. France, Canada, and the Nordic countries are all further along that process than us despite our head-start. Two US generations have already kicked the can down the road for nuclear waste management, so I'm not sure "removing activists" will let "boards innovate and build".
Unsubsidized nuclear power is unfortunately really expensive everywhere independent from regulation and runs into the same problem from the opposite direction. You don’t save much money when you turn it off but energy demand isn’t constant so nuclear gets even more expensive per kWh the longer it sits idle. Worse you need to take them offline for long periods as in weeks for maintenance, refueling, etc.
Locally you can have a lot of nuclear like France, but only when you can import and export power to low nuclear countries/regions. Batteries can also smooth demand, but if you’re just filling batteries then solar is a lot cheaper. People talk about unreliable Solar, but you can build 4x as generation per year solar power for less than building nuclear. At 4x overcapacity or even 1.5x solar is suddenly vastly more reliable.
Nuclear reactors are cheap. What is expensive is regulatory compliance, and regulatory boards changing the rules while the reactor is being constructed in place. A way around this is to buy a pre-fab reactor that has already made it through regulatory and was fabricated in a factory.
Building the reactor is a small fraction of the total cost. People love to talk about small modular reactors as if that’s the only cost but they still need actual turbines to generate power, electrical equipment, cooling, pumps, complex high pressure plumbing, giant buildings, spent fuel ponds, etc so the reactor’s themselves are not even the full construction cost to get power let alone the actual lifetime cost.
Equipment breaks down so you need to maintain, repair, and eventually replace it. Which is a large reason why you need roughly 500 people per GWh to run the things even without any regulations. You need not raw ore but concentrated u235 in complex and expensive to build fuel rods etc. You need lot’s of land near an abundant water source to cool them which is exactly the kind of places people want to live. Even when it breaks you still need to decommission them.
And that’s ignoring the need for someone to take on the risk of failure. Even when the public isn’t harmed nuclear accidents destroy expensive equipment and are expected to clean up. Accidents on average cost several Billion per GW, you might find cheaper insurance but don’t bet on it without subsidies.
The problem with nuclear is that there is no cheap form factor of nuclear reactors available right here and now, it's all "in the future...". Current NPP designs have painfully high CAPEX, way more so than solar.
And just slashing regulatory requirements to make it cheaper strikes me as unwise.
Especially when the increases in regulatory requirements have been driven by experience, with actual accidents and with near misses that could have been serious accidents.
The solar stuff that's "in the future" can be estimated by extending the historical experience curve for PV. Doing that, solar delivers at below $0.01/kWh by the time it's fully rolled out.
Do you think people with money want to invest in nuclear power plants with that economic Sword of Damocles hanging over the technology?
If there is proof that they are training their commercial AI from private professional source code it could feed a COLOSSAL class action lawsuit. I understand that 1-3 percent of the American GDP goes to lawyers who work on contingency for these kinds of class actions. These guys eat what they kill, and they feed on corporations. That doesn't mean that Microsoft won't try it.
In my experience, my worst enemies were exhaustion, the crab-in-the-bucket attitude of my peers, and an inability to build a resume and to network out to the people who wanted what I could do. Ultimately I couldn't escape poverty until I could buy enough gear to work up north. That money made it possible to pay for an education.
To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder. If safety makes this harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.