bhupy

71 ms·

541.
by bhupy 6y ago
> The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, and a handful of states are only just now breaching $15/hr. At this rate by the time a federal increase happens we'll already be another 20 years behind. But even m
542.
by bhupy 6y ago
Yes, and product improvement is largely attributable to R&D, rather than assembly-line-level production. Those gains disproportionately flow to high skill white collar workers.
543.
by bhupy 6y ago
Well, while it's important that the minimum wage is $24/hr (or $15/hr), none of these results tell us whether the better way to do that is to mandate that employers pay that full wage, or for the government to fill in the bla
544.
by bhupy 6y ago
Yup, you're right. The real median personal income in the US, today is $35,977 -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the median number of annual h
545.
by bhupy 6y ago
It's also misleading to look purely at the taxes paid on corporate profits. That's not the only way that corporations are taxed. In 2019 Amazon paid $2.4b in federal payroll taxes and customs duties and $1.6b in state and local ta
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by bhupy 6y ago
> Your just being deliberately obtuse as always When you’re backed into a corner, you appear to resort to name calling and hostility, as always. I’m directly addressing your arguments by showing you that reality is a lot more complicated
547.
by bhupy 6y ago
Just because I don’t bring up politics with my barber, doesn’t mean that either of us don’t care about political issues. The proposal here is to compartmentalize. If I don’t know someone’s political stance, my default isn’t to assume that t
548.
by bhupy 6y ago
> A problem arises when the appetite for 'bad ideas' aren't merely trivial things like whether Rust is better than C++ but rather consist of ideas over which of ones neighbors should be discriminated against, persecuted, i
549.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Firstly, people should have a right to know which entity is authoring these ideas, so that they can be held accountable and any past reputation and potential biases taken into account. Just as importantly, the public should know which
550.
by bhupy 6y ago
> This is absurd. That the US is a country where business, markets, profits have been prioritized over people is blatantly obvious for everyone that's not a free market fundamentalist where every single instance of a negative outcom
551.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Are you claiming that online advertising doesn't work I'm not the GP, but I think the idea is that advertising isn't coercive . When I see an ad for a Swiffer WetJet, I'm not immediately compelled to go out and buy
552.
by bhupy 6y ago
> First, it's like choosing between two communication providers, both of which know there is no other choice and silently split market between them. Except that's not what's happening with search engines. They compete with
553.
by bhupy 6y ago
If that were to happen, then banning political ads would violate the First Amendment.
554.
by bhupy 6y ago
It depends on who the consumer is. Are we talking about end-users, or advertisers? As far as end-users are concerned, there absolutely are alternatives: Bing and DuckDuckGo. It doesn’t really matter that they have low market share, there is
555.
by bhupy 6y ago
> I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now. Yes, that is exactly the point I'm making. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, civ
556.
by bhupy 6y ago
There's a Freakonomics episode that talks about this -> https://freakonomics.com/podcast/secrets-german-economy-stea... TL;DR, the prevailing theory is that it's cultural. > SUEDEKUM: Culturally, there
557.
by bhupy 6y ago
China. they've got the notorious "9-9-6" hours. "9 AM to 9PM, 6 days a week".
558.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the
559.
by bhupy 6y ago
> How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan? Because getting shot in Afghanistan (especially during a war) is a random event, and the risk is s
560.
by bhupy 6y ago
1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't afford treatment, it would be different than if I straight up sh
561.
by bhupy 6y ago
> This criticism and comparison is ridiculous It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate. > And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare. Right, an
562.
by bhupy 6y ago
Of the items in that list < 100 years old, the vast majority came about through violence via revolution, civil war, genocide, or regime change. That's a bug, and not a feature. Peaceful restructuring of government is rare, and when
563.
by bhupy 6y ago
> Mineral exploration & refining, media, technology, finance & banking, military industry, online retail... what % of the economy are we at with just these? Mineral exploration: https://www.manta.com/mb_35_E31F37V
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by bhupy 6y ago
> If you count having lost effective control of a significant part of their country as a government having failed, there are plenty. Losing control of a significant part of a country isn't comparable to private enterprise failure, i
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by bhupy 6y ago
> I mean, in theory, democracy ensures that inefficient leaders lose office, except that reality rarely lives up to theory. It's not just replacing inefficient leaders that's an important mechanism for "efficiency", i
566.
by bhupy 6y ago
It's extremely rare. Ask yourself how many companies from the 20th century are now defunct vs government programs (or governments in general). You can probably count on one hand the number of governments that have "gone out of b
567.
by bhupy 6y ago
Key difference being that there’s actually some mechanism for private enterprises to fail and go out of business.
568.
by bhupy 6y ago
Because if the majority of people spend some time in the top quintile (54% spend at least 3 years in the top 20%), it means that the majority of people experience the same (or similar) set of opportunities available to the top quintile inco
569.
by bhupy 6y ago
You’re absolutely correct that, while one may spend time in the a higher percentile, they may then fall back to a lower percentile for the remainder of their life. Nevertheless, it’s an important analysis because if the majority of people r
570.
by bhupy 6y ago
I’m not sure I’m missing anything. To recap this conversation, I cited net tuition data that calculates per student tuition, and pegs public 4 year in-state tuition average at ~$11,000 per student . You responded by suggesting that unive

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