glenra

43 ms·

271.
by glenra 12y ago
> did you really put an "if" there? Yes, I put it there because a large fraction of minimum wage workers are teens who live with their parents or are otherwise in a living situation where they aren't the only breadwinner.
272.
by glenra 12y ago
If workers are so desperate that they can't not work, then putting them out of a job by making it illegal to work for low wages is especially cruel. If you doubt that the minimum wage causes unemployment, how do you explain that th
273.
by glenra 12y ago
I initially got the numbers from the right-side box here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's The larger number I used includes as "employees" people who work for non-company-owned franchises and li
274.
by glenra 12y ago
> surely you don't suggest we should allow majority of workers to be exploited because some weakly profitable restaurants might fail? Who is exploiting whom here? Most restaurants fail. Nearly all restaurants lose money in the fir
275.
by glenra 12y ago
The current value is also too high. There should be no such thing as a minimum wage.
276.
by glenra 12y ago
Doesn't really answer my point. An average increase in costs of 5% or even 3% is still enough to kill restaurants on the margin. For instance, suppose you are a McD franchise owner whose restaurant has 50 "crew members" (so
277.
by glenra 12y ago
> in my experience with libertarians so far, they are most disinclined to do any math. i don't see any math here either. Fine. Suppose we want to increase the minimum wage by at least $5/hour. Let's see if that's po
278.
by glenra 12y ago
One "libertarian assumption" is that it's worth doing a little math to figure these sorts of things out. Usually if you do that math you will discover that neither profits nor high top salaries are anywhere near large enough
279.
by glenra 12y ago
> software bugs, ability to be hacked, snooped upon by NSA, also go along way. You're already trusting a car driven by software that could conceivably "be hacked" to hurt you. Algorithms already control things like ant
280.
by glenra 12y ago
> We might waste the time of the kids that are going to end up flipping burgers, but we don't waste the time of the brighter kids. I would have said we really waste the time of the brighter kids. (Though we waste their motivatio
281.
by glenra 12y ago
I'm distinguishing "unsafe" from "doesn't work". Having "just a fraction of the ingredient on the labels", even if true, doesn't automatically make a product "clearly not safe". The stu
282.
by glenra 12y ago
> Oh by the way "the informed consumer" just doesn't happen. 95% of people just grab something off the shelf and expect it to be safe and effective. You're ignoring the informational role of retail brands. Consider
283.
by glenra 12y ago
It's worth considering that UL certification is an example of what happens when government doesn't regulate - it evolved initially as an entirely free-market mechanism to solve a real problem that regulators hadn't addresse
284.
by glenra 12y ago
I'm positive third-party sources are findable to answer at a minimum "what is this supplement supposed to do and who is supposed to take it and why do people think it's useful". I'd expect to find that stuff best la
285.
by glenra 12y ago
Right, that might have been the problem. The thing I had noticed as an issue is that if you walk down the "supplements" aisle at Whole Foods or whatever, you'll find hundreds of pill bottles with cryptic labels (eg, "Ton
286.
by glenra 12y ago
Hmm, I just did a spot-check and medicine (including alternative medicine and supplements) seems to be getting better - the articles I recalled being terrible have improved. Climate is still pretty broken - the article on "climategate&
287.
by glenra 12y ago
> For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces something that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has awful prose. That's not really true unless you include the talk page. On any suffic
288.
by glenra 12y ago
The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports"
289.
by glenra 12y ago
Landsea's point is that the IPCC was making alarmist official statements that had no basis in fact and ran counter to the underlying scientific literature. Landsea was the relevant expert on the subject and even he couldn't stop t
290.
by glenra 12y ago
Reading the first link you posted, its only mention of "tipping point" is to say: > Although the summary of the report doesn’t expressly use the term “tipping point” to described the changes in climate, it acknowledges that in
291.
by glenra 12y ago
> Most researchers say that actually IPCC is rather conservative in its views not the other way around. Sure, if you're listening to people like David Suzuki you'd have that impression. But on the other side there are people
292.
by glenra 12y ago
California had a grade-school program in the 1970s called MGM - "Mentally Gifted Minors" - which focused on the top 2% (IQ 132+). It was cool, but IIRC at my school it basically replaced a single class period per week - I think it
293.
by glenra 12y ago
> The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now. To say "it's irreversible now " is to imply there was ever a point that it wasn't, a point at which there was somethin
294.
by glenra 12y ago
The IPCC's job is basically to find or invent ways to claim the sky is falling and continually declare "it's worse than we thought" regardless of what the data says. They've been doing this for long enough that by n
295.
by glenra 12y ago
Some studies have found that illegal drug users earn more than average and are more productive than average. Though in searching for the relevant studies, the first thing I found was this followup: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com&
296.
by glenra 12y ago
You don't think drug laws were zealously enforced during Prohibition in the 1920s? Or during the 1950s? I'm just not seeing it. There have been moral panics over drugs leading to ludicrous overreach (at various levels of governmen
297.
by glenra 12y ago
Wait, last 40 years? What makes that your metric? Marijuana was outlawed in 1937, heroin in 1925. And the Black Panthers were in part a reaction against hamfisted selective enforcement of dumb laws - including drug laws - by the powers-
298.
by glenra 12y ago
People "stealing to get their fix" ought to essentially disappear once getting a fix drops to 1/10th the price (so much less money is required) and once a reliable source is easily obtained (so you don't have to spend a
299.
by glenra 12y ago
The other way to figure it is that ~220 out of 75k teachers affected suggests a waste factor of 0.3%. (which agrees with your number if teacher salaries are about 1/3rd of the operating budget.) It's still substantial because in a
300.
by glenra 12y ago
> it should be noted that this policy started to be dismantled 4 years ago Sure, if by started to be dismantled you mean "was completely unchanged other than they stopped assigning the thumb-twiddling teachers to big rooms&#x2

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