7 ms·

This thread really paints a bad picture for the mindset of a lot of people in the high-earning technology industry. That someone would argue against every job

This thread really paints a bad picture for the mindset of a lot of people in the high-earning technology industry. That someone would argue against every job being enough to afford a roof over your head just due to their own need for validation of their importance is frankly sickening.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
malvosenior 8y ago
There are very real reasons to object to an artificial floor to salaries (minimum wage) that have nothing to do with validation. How expensive do you really want your burger to be? Operational costs get passed on to the consumer after all. Raising the minimum wage just increases the rate of inflation leaving everyone holding the bag. Also, jobs should pay what they are worth to the business and nothing more. Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. Maybe we should be talking about realigning education to give people valuable skills instead of pushing for the non-skilled to get an artificial raise that evaporates in meaning due to inflation. EDIT I'm really surprised by the push back on this from a community of entrepreneurs. Anyone who has run a business will tell you that you can't just raise salaries without increasing costs. It's Econ 101 but apparently that's not the general sentiment here. I hear a lot of complaints about how things "should" be and what's "fair" but the math and reality isn't there to support that. Some jobs just don't have much economic value and pretending that's not the case isn't going to solve anything. It's nice to imagine a situation where janitors and fast food employees can have a middle class lifestyle but who is supposed to pay for that? When the costs of good raise dramatically, their additional pay will get sucked up by inflation. Again, Econ 101.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > How expensive do you really want your burger to be? Operational costs get passed on to the consumer after all. Raising the minimum wage just increases the rate of inflation leaving everyone holding the bag. This doesn't make sense to me. If it were possible to raise the price of that burger, why wouldn't it already be raised, regardless of operational costs? A business's costs to produce a good typically does not have much to do with the price customers are willing to pay for it.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    You're talking about margin and fast food is definitely a low margin business (barring soda). If salaries increase, the business will literally have to raise the price of goods sold or go out of business. That's different than raising the price to achieve a higher margin (and opening your self up to competition from people who can operate with a lower margin).
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      If a rational business owner could raise prices and make more revenue, they would, regardless of what their costs are. Why would they wait for their costs (salaries) to increase?
      - cheald 8y ago
        Because your competition's costs are increasing by the same amount at the same time, and their ability to compete on price is hindered by the increase in costs to the same degree yours is.
    - sgift 8y ago
      Margins of fast food industry businesses are somewhere between 6 and 9% in the median. So ... I call bullshit on "have to raise"
    - jimbofisher1 8y ago
      Corporate profits are at all time highs while wages have stagnated since the 70s, you sir are full of it.
      - briandear 8y ago
        Actually the idea that compensation has stagnated since the 1970s is misleading. See this study from Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute for a detailed look at this assertion that “wages have stagnated”: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/65351/2000331-Beyond-the-Wage-Stagnation-Story.pdf https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/65351/...
- lightbyte 8y ago
  >Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. Unless you are advocating for age discrimination in pay, the fact that a "high school student" can be the one working at McDonalds is irrelevant. McDonalds employees an extremely wide age range of people. Does the 60 year old working the cash register (I've seen countless of these lately) who can't get a job anywhere else deserve to live on the street because you don't think they are important enough to rent?
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with how "important" anyone thinks it is. It's just math and the reality of running a business.
    - lightbyte 8y ago
      If your business can't afford to pay employees a reasonable wage it is a failed business.
      - pixl97 8y ago
        Why not also a failed society?
        ovao 8y ago
        It is both, to some degree. If our society was willing, for example, to pay $14 for a Big Mac, it's possible a McDonald's cashier working in San Francisco could be paid a livable wage. When a Big Mac sets you back only $4 in a nearby city, however, the idea of charging $14 becomes an intractable problem.
      - triviatise 8y ago
        simply not true because there is no definition of reasonable. A more applicable phrase is if you cant afford to pay employees a wage that employees that can do the job will accept, then it is a failed business. Is it reasonable that a family of 4 is entitled to a 2 bedroom house? America is 5% of the worlds population but consumes 25% of the worlds resources because what we consider to be poverty in the US is wealthy or at least middle class living to much of the world. My inlaws had 4 families in a single family home (Approximately 2500 sq ft). Each family had at least two kids (one had 3). Plus their grandmother lived there. They grew some of their own food, never ate out, cooked everything from scratch. There was always an adult (or older kid) to watch the kids, so no daycare costs. All are well adjusted. When someone lost their job, there was a tremendous amount of support and no one ever had food insecurity, was homeless, had to leave their kids alone etc. The kids grew up in a fun household and the place was very clean and kept up. 2 of the families saved enough to move out so now there are 3 families left, and the grandma moved back to their originating country. The two oldest kids left for college. My point there is no consistent definition of "reasonable".
- cortesoft 8y ago
  As an individual, improving your education and skills can help solve your employment issues. However, it is not so simple as a society. Even if we had a magic wand that could suddenly make everyone in the world an expert on every subject, we would still need people to work at McDonald's flipping burgers. We don't have enough highschool students to fill those jobs. There are going to be adults supporting themselves and their families that are going to be working those jobs. Improving the skills of people doesn't suddenly change the makeup of what work needs to be done in a society. Sure, in the long run, we can use those advanced skills to improve automation and make obsolete more of those lower skilled jobs, but that isn't going to happen overnight.
- ball_of_lint 8y ago
  Not everyone can be a highly skilled worker, and even people with valuable skills can and do end up jobless or working at minimum wage. While I think a Universal Basic Income or stronger welfare is a better solution to the problems of homelessness and poverty, raising the minimum wage is a step in the right direction and one that is far more likely to be accepted by our lawmakers.
- knuththetruth 8y ago
  >Also, jobs should pay what they are worth to the business and nothing more. Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. If this is your argument, you’re going to have to explain why business owners are entitled to the surplus value created by their workers’ labor. This arrangement seems to be currently enforced with all kinds of threats of violence and deprevation(loss of healthcare, housing, etc), all of which are barbaric by the standards of any other developed country.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    > If this is your argument, you’re going to have to explain why business owners are entitled to the surplus value created by their workers’ labor. They arent.
  - nwatson 8y ago
    Starting a business isn't an obvious proposition, and an entrepreneur takes a lot of risk and puts a lot of startup money (their own or OPM / investors' money) on the line. I've never been that business person / VC and do resent occasionally that my software creativity and grit fuels their occasional outsized returns. However, they had the vision and so get the "surplus value" ... and I get a comfortable-enough lifestyle in return, especially given that lately I earn a somewhat-Bay-Area salary after having moved to North Carolina. If I were renting in the Bay Area I'm sure I'd be looking to get out, and since I sold our condo (unfortunately too soon, in 2013) there, I'm forever priced out of ever returning -- I won't pay the inflated rents there. I look at four of my relatives who started a Salesforce consultancy, especially my younger older brother who started the whole ball rolling. Though a full-time Boeing 757 pilot for a major airline, he got a software degree, specialized in Salesforce work, started working with others, hired an initial team, and introduced several family members to the whole gig. The relatives founded a partnership and had around 40 billable, very good, consultants working with them, and had committed to longer term real estate leases. They had some marquee clients and a good reputation. Then they hit what hits a lot of family businesses -- intractable personality conflicts. (I'd joined this partnership briefly in 2013 but then bowed out after several months since I guess SFDC consulting isn't my thing and greenfield software constructing/craftsmanship is, and mostly because I sensed those personality troubles brewing.) So ... my younger older brother and younger brother both were left winding down this once-promising consultancy, taking low pay, risking a bunch of collateral (e.g., homes) they thought they would lose at one point, and eking out a low, but at least in the end positive, return. They each would have done significantly better just working on their own for the four years ... and I benefited financially by sticking with the startup world. So ... I'd like to take a flyer some day on starting my own business one of these years, and I won't feel bad about taking some outlandish returns. If things turned out real well I think I'd pay "my team" more than had been promised them. But I've seen the risks founders take and admire that, and they deserve their gains.
- ouid 8y ago
  Not only high school students get paid minimum wage. On minimum wage you cannot even afford a room in the bay area. The economy is driven by demand. Economic prosperity is the result of EXACTLY the same thing that causes inflation. Dollars wanting to get spent on things that don't exist yet. However, I will say that the problem is more easily solved by simply building more housing, but everyone who owns property resists that because shortages drive up the price of the thing they own. Imagine if there was a shortage of food, and the people with good refrigeration units and lots of stored grain were drafting and passing legislation against growing new crops. That is the housing situation in the bay area.
  - triviatise 8y ago
    Many people who own property absolutely want to put more units on. Others who own property want to stop it because of NIMBY. Lets say you have a single family home worth $2 million and you replace it with an 8 plex. You can sell each unit for $1M and still make a killing while also dramatically increasing the affordability of the area. The answer is simple, but the NIMBYs are stopping it due to "neighborhood character"
  - triviatise 8y ago
    we do have that legislation against growing new crops today... The farm bills pay people to not grow crops. Historically speaking, the interstate commerce clause of the constitution was eviscerated as part of the new deal for exactly this reason. <<An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The US government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than the limits that he was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce... among the several states"). The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us.... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'"[5]>>
- jupiter90000 8y ago
  There are skills that are very valuable in society that pay very little. For example, maybe a software engineer gets married and has kids. Those kids go to school so the software engineer can go to work all day. The teachers and school staff are most likely getting paid way less than the engineer. Then one of those kids ends up with a mental health disorder or drug addiction. They see a social worker who helps them and gets paid much less than the engineer. Then on the weekends the engineer wants to have fun with her family and goes out to eat at a fast food place, gets a lawn service so they don't need to do their own yardwork. Those people may be getting paid minimum wage. So these people who are making the lifestyle you have possible, should not be allowed to afford a place to live because what they do is not valuable? Is that what you're saying?
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    > So these people who are making the lifestyle you have possible, should not be allowed to afford a place to live because what they do is not valuable? Is that what you're saying? People will get paid what the market will bear. Supply and demand and all of that. There is no "should", it doesn't enter the equation and as you can see with minimum wage, any attempt to out smart the market will result in inflation/deflation...
- jimbofisher1 8y ago
  Given that Corporate profits have been at all time highs recently I think their responsibility to their workers is obviously being circumvented in order to increase shareholder value. You are stuck in this Corporation first mindset. You ought to get out of it.
rubicon33 8y ago
The problem isn't that we need to raise salaries to meet housing. The problem is a housing problem. We need to reduce the cost of housing so that people can afford a roof over their head.
charleslmunger 8y ago
There's two ways to reach the desired state here (no full time employed individual cannot afford housing) - increase pay, and decrease housing costs. The trouble with increasing pay is that the rents themselves are set by the market - the bay area has dramatically under built housing for decades, and is still not building much. Raising pay for everyone is essentially a giveaway to current landowners - rent will just rise to absorb the new money flowing into the same amount of housing units. This effect can be observed (at a much higher scale) in the Mountain View housing market - landlords adjust their rent increases with the google stock price. Better solutions include: 1. Get rid of single-family-home zoning for large swathes of the bay area. 2. Incentivize developers to build more units per site, rather than fewer - https://www.sfhac.org/state-density-bonus-arrived-san-francisco/ https://www.sfhac.org/state-density-bonus-arrived-san-franci...
closeparen 8y ago
A floor on the minimum allowable job is not a floor on the minimum possible standard of living. $0/hr and homeless is also an option. Now, a UBI or job guarantee that pays the cost of our desired minimum standard of living - then we might have something.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

malvosenior 8y ago

There are very real reasons to object to an artificial floor to salaries (minimum wage) that have nothing to do with validation. How expensive do you really want your burger to be? Operational costs get passed on to the consumer after all. Raising the minimum wage just increases the rate of inflation leaving everyone holding the bag. Also, jobs should pay what they are worth to the business and nothing more. Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. Maybe we should be talking about realigning education to give people valuable skills instead of pushing for the non-skilled to get an artificial raise that evaporates in meaning due to inflation. EDIT I'm really surprised by the push back on this from a community of entrepreneurs. Anyone who has run a business will tell you that you can't just raise salaries without increasing costs. It's Econ 101 but apparently that's not the general sentiment here. I hear a lot of complaints about how things "should" be and what's "fair" but the math and reality isn't there to support that. Some jobs just don't have much economic value and pretending that's not the case isn't going to solve anything. It's nice to imagine a situation where janitors and fast food employees can have a middle class lifestyle but who is supposed to pay for that? When the costs of good raise dramatically, their additional pay will get sucked up by inflation. Again, Econ 101.

ryandrake 8y ago
> How expensive do you really want your burger to be? Operational costs get passed on to the consumer after all. Raising the minimum wage just increases the rate of inflation leaving everyone holding the bag. This doesn't make sense to me. If it were possible to raise the price of that burger, why wouldn't it already be raised, regardless of operational costs? A business's costs to produce a good typically does not have much to do with the price customers are willing to pay for it.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  You're talking about margin and fast food is definitely a low margin business (barring soda). If salaries increase, the business will literally have to raise the price of goods sold or go out of business. That's different than raising the price to achieve a higher margin (and opening your self up to competition from people who can operate with a lower margin).
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    If a rational business owner could raise prices and make more revenue, they would, regardless of what their costs are. Why would they wait for their costs (salaries) to increase?
    - cheald 8y ago
      Because your competition's costs are increasing by the same amount at the same time, and their ability to compete on price is hindered by the increase in costs to the same degree yours is.
  - sgift 8y ago
    Margins of fast food industry businesses are somewhere between 6 and 9% in the median. So ... I call bullshit on "have to raise"
  - jimbofisher1 8y ago
    Corporate profits are at all time highs while wages have stagnated since the 70s, you sir are full of it.
    - briandear 8y ago
      Actually the idea that compensation has stagnated since the 1970s is misleading. See this study from Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute for a detailed look at this assertion that “wages have stagnated”: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/65351/2000331-Beyond-the-Wage-Stagnation-Story.pdf https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/65351/...
lightbyte 8y ago
>Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. Unless you are advocating for age discrimination in pay, the fact that a "high school student" can be the one working at McDonalds is irrelevant. McDonalds employees an extremely wide age range of people. Does the 60 year old working the cash register (I've seen countless of these lately) who can't get a job anywhere else deserve to live on the street because you don't think they are important enough to rent?
- malvosenior 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with how "important" anyone thinks it is. It's just math and the reality of running a business.
  - lightbyte 8y ago
    If your business can't afford to pay employees a reasonable wage it is a failed business.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Why not also a failed society?
      - ovao 8y ago
        It is both, to some degree. If our society was willing, for example, to pay $14 for a Big Mac, it's possible a McDonald's cashier working in San Francisco could be paid a livable wage. When a Big Mac sets you back only $4 in a nearby city, however, the idea of charging $14 becomes an intractable problem.
    - triviatise 8y ago
      simply not true because there is no definition of reasonable. A more applicable phrase is if you cant afford to pay employees a wage that employees that can do the job will accept, then it is a failed business. Is it reasonable that a family of 4 is entitled to a 2 bedroom house? America is 5% of the worlds population but consumes 25% of the worlds resources because what we consider to be poverty in the US is wealthy or at least middle class living to much of the world. My inlaws had 4 families in a single family home (Approximately 2500 sq ft). Each family had at least two kids (one had 3). Plus their grandmother lived there. They grew some of their own food, never ate out, cooked everything from scratch. There was always an adult (or older kid) to watch the kids, so no daycare costs. All are well adjusted. When someone lost their job, there was a tremendous amount of support and no one ever had food insecurity, was homeless, had to leave their kids alone etc. The kids grew up in a fun household and the place was very clean and kept up. 2 of the families saved enough to move out so now there are 3 families left, and the grandma moved back to their originating country. The two oldest kids left for college. My point there is no consistent definition of "reasonable".
cortesoft 8y ago
As an individual, improving your education and skills can help solve your employment issues. However, it is not so simple as a society. Even if we had a magic wand that could suddenly make everyone in the world an expert on every subject, we would still need people to work at McDonald's flipping burgers. We don't have enough highschool students to fill those jobs. There are going to be adults supporting themselves and their families that are going to be working those jobs. Improving the skills of people doesn't suddenly change the makeup of what work needs to be done in a society. Sure, in the long run, we can use those advanced skills to improve automation and make obsolete more of those lower skilled jobs, but that isn't going to happen overnight.
ball_of_lint 8y ago
Not everyone can be a highly skilled worker, and even people with valuable skills can and do end up jobless or working at minimum wage. While I think a Universal Basic Income or stronger welfare is a better solution to the problems of homelessness and poverty, raising the minimum wage is a step in the right direction and one that is far more likely to be accepted by our lawmakers.
knuththetruth 8y ago
>Also, jobs should pay what they are worth to the business and nothing more. Why should a high school student working for McDonald's be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area? That's not some sort of right. If this is your argument, you’re going to have to explain why business owners are entitled to the surplus value created by their workers’ labor. This arrangement seems to be currently enforced with all kinds of threats of violence and deprevation(loss of healthcare, housing, etc), all of which are barbaric by the standards of any other developed country.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  > If this is your argument, you’re going to have to explain why business owners are entitled to the surplus value created by their workers’ labor. They arent.
- nwatson 8y ago
  Starting a business isn't an obvious proposition, and an entrepreneur takes a lot of risk and puts a lot of startup money (their own or OPM / investors' money) on the line. I've never been that business person / VC and do resent occasionally that my software creativity and grit fuels their occasional outsized returns. However, they had the vision and so get the "surplus value" ... and I get a comfortable-enough lifestyle in return, especially given that lately I earn a somewhat-Bay-Area salary after having moved to North Carolina. If I were renting in the Bay Area I'm sure I'd be looking to get out, and since I sold our condo (unfortunately too soon, in 2013) there, I'm forever priced out of ever returning -- I won't pay the inflated rents there. I look at four of my relatives who started a Salesforce consultancy, especially my younger older brother who started the whole ball rolling. Though a full-time Boeing 757 pilot for a major airline, he got a software degree, specialized in Salesforce work, started working with others, hired an initial team, and introduced several family members to the whole gig. The relatives founded a partnership and had around 40 billable, very good, consultants working with them, and had committed to longer term real estate leases. They had some marquee clients and a good reputation. Then they hit what hits a lot of family businesses -- intractable personality conflicts. (I'd joined this partnership briefly in 2013 but then bowed out after several months since I guess SFDC consulting isn't my thing and greenfield software constructing/craftsmanship is, and mostly because I sensed those personality troubles brewing.) So ... my younger older brother and younger brother both were left winding down this once-promising consultancy, taking low pay, risking a bunch of collateral (e.g., homes) they thought they would lose at one point, and eking out a low, but at least in the end positive, return. They each would have done significantly better just working on their own for the four years ... and I benefited financially by sticking with the startup world. So ... I'd like to take a flyer some day on starting my own business one of these years, and I won't feel bad about taking some outlandish returns. If things turned out real well I think I'd pay "my team" more than had been promised them. But I've seen the risks founders take and admire that, and they deserve their gains.
ouid 8y ago
Not only high school students get paid minimum wage. On minimum wage you cannot even afford a room in the bay area. The economy is driven by demand. Economic prosperity is the result of EXACTLY the same thing that causes inflation. Dollars wanting to get spent on things that don't exist yet. However, I will say that the problem is more easily solved by simply building more housing, but everyone who owns property resists that because shortages drive up the price of the thing they own. Imagine if there was a shortage of food, and the people with good refrigeration units and lots of stored grain were drafting and passing legislation against growing new crops. That is the housing situation in the bay area.
- triviatise 8y ago
  Many people who own property absolutely want to put more units on. Others who own property want to stop it because of NIMBY. Lets say you have a single family home worth $2 million and you replace it with an 8 plex. You can sell each unit for $1M and still make a killing while also dramatically increasing the affordability of the area. The answer is simple, but the NIMBYs are stopping it due to "neighborhood character"
- triviatise 8y ago
  we do have that legislation against growing new crops today... The farm bills pay people to not grow crops. Historically speaking, the interstate commerce clause of the constitution was eviscerated as part of the new deal for exactly this reason. <<An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The US government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than the limits that he was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce... among the several states"). The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us.... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'"[5]>>
jupiter90000 8y ago
There are skills that are very valuable in society that pay very little. For example, maybe a software engineer gets married and has kids. Those kids go to school so the software engineer can go to work all day. The teachers and school staff are most likely getting paid way less than the engineer. Then one of those kids ends up with a mental health disorder or drug addiction. They see a social worker who helps them and gets paid much less than the engineer. Then on the weekends the engineer wants to have fun with her family and goes out to eat at a fast food place, gets a lawn service so they don't need to do their own yardwork. Those people may be getting paid minimum wage. So these people who are making the lifestyle you have possible, should not be allowed to afford a place to live because what they do is not valuable? Is that what you're saying?
- malvosenior 8y ago
  > So these people who are making the lifestyle you have possible, should not be allowed to afford a place to live because what they do is not valuable? Is that what you're saying? People will get paid what the market will bear. Supply and demand and all of that. There is no "should", it doesn't enter the equation and as you can see with minimum wage, any attempt to out smart the market will result in inflation/deflation...
jimbofisher1 8y ago
Given that Corporate profits have been at all time highs recently I think their responsibility to their workers is obviously being circumvented in order to increase shareholder value. You are stuck in this Corporation first mindset. You ought to get out of it.

rubicon33 8y ago

The problem isn't that we need to raise salaries to meet housing. The problem is a housing problem. We need to reduce the cost of housing so that people can afford a roof over their head.

charleslmunger 8y ago

There's two ways to reach the desired state here (no full time employed individual cannot afford housing) - increase pay, and decrease housing costs. The trouble with increasing pay is that the rents themselves are set by the market - the bay area has dramatically under built housing for decades, and is still not building much. Raising pay for everyone is essentially a giveaway to current landowners - rent will just rise to absorb the new money flowing into the same amount of housing units. This effect can be observed (at a much higher scale) in the Mountain View housing market - landlords adjust their rent increases with the google stock price. Better solutions include: 1. Get rid of single-family-home zoning for large swathes of the bay area. 2. Incentivize developers to build more units per site, rather than fewer - https://www.sfhac.org/state-density-bonus-arrived-san-francisco/ https://www.sfhac.org/state-density-bonus-arrived-san-franci...

closeparen 8y ago

A floor on the minimum allowable job is not a floor on the minimum possible standard of living. $0/hr and homeless is also an option. Now, a UBI or job guarantee that pays the cost of our desired minimum standard of living - then we might have something.