an hour ago
Needs to be dynamic. Maybe it's too hard for politicians to understand, but it needs to be tied to something. We can't keep raising it every few years to an absolute amount. This is a good start and I wish them the best but it's short term thinking like every other one of these bills. I also think it's weird to use the living wage as a basis since they'll only make it up to that number in 6 years?
6 hours ago
What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?
5 hours ago
What about people receiving astronomically high wages that vastly outstrip their labour value?
an hour ago
The fact that someone is willing to pay them that much suggests that your valuation of their labor is not universally shared.
3 hours ago
3 hours ago
The thing is, what I’m asking about is not unrelated. It is the inverse situation - which curiously nobody seems to care about.
And I say ‘curiously’ with some sarcasm, because it is very obvious why the focus is always disproportionately on needing to justify minimum wages for the poor, normally with ridiculous economic value arguments, but not extreme wages for anyone else - which is apparently fine and has zero negative consequences
3 hours ago
Small minds think alike
4 hours ago
If a business can't pay it's employees enough to live on it shouldn't survive.
3 hours ago
This suggests that a person below this threshold would be entirely dependent on a social safety net (family, government, charity), instead of having a job with a partial dependency.
3 hours ago
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4 hours ago
Labour theory of value should first be applied to management staff who produce nothing of value before employees that at least contribute something.
5 hours ago
> whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value
Same thing we’ve been doing for other fields like software engineers - just pay them more.
5 hours ago
I presume that was sarcasm, given how much trouble people are having finding software engineering jobs at the moment...
5 hours ago
It’s not the ability to find jobs. It’s the ratio of pay to value delivered.
Nearly every app or website I use today is broken, slow or hostile to the user. Show me the value for the pay.
4 hours ago
If bad software still generates revenue, that's the value. I'm speaking as someone who has used awful software that some ignorant boss bought for our organisation.
3 hours ago
tl;dr:
Every minimum-wage supporter would actually be fine with the extremely reasonable position of paying everyone in proportion to the replaceability of their actual work and then letting businesses that don't know how to provide value just go out of business. Raising the wage floor is just an imperfect-but-actionable proxy for that because nobody is willing to honestly explore curbing the excesses of the executive and investor classes.
> "What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?"
Can I assume that you're referring to the executives? Just kidding. Of course you aren't.
You can either mandate that people get paid commensurately with the difficulty of replacing their actual labor (as opposed to merely of their position[0]) or you can raise the floor and hope that it approximately achieves something close enough, but you must pick one.
[0]:
The position of CEO of a company has great value, someone needs to make those decisions. But the actual labor of a CEO can often be trivially done by even the least intelligent and least motivated employee. They are eminently replaceable. And yet the CEO gets paid in proportion to the position rather than their labor.
Right now executive pay is artificially high relative to their actual labor as "the cost of doing business" and laborer pay is artificially low relative to their actual labor as "the way to stay in business". Why does that seem ok?
6 hours ago
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5 hours ago
I remember when Uber was cheap. Then they weren't and people went back to walking and cycling. Americans wouldn't get it.
4 hours ago
If you read the article you would know it is literally about Americans who walk to work in the snow because they can't afford gas.
31 minutes ago
$25 is difficult to manage even in California, with millions of customers. I can't see how its economically feasible in Alaska.
6 hours ago
Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone.
Is anyone here familiar, to comment?
4 hours ago
Alaska has generally two categories of places. Nome, mentioned in the URL, is a fly-in community that can receive barge shipments on the ocean during a short summer season. There is literally no road that goes there.
Not that cost of living is cheap in the rest of Alaska but the fly-in dependent communities are a whole other thing than the places that have a road ultimately connected to the Yukon, BC and the rest of continental north america by road.
The transport costs to get just about anything to the fly in communities is similar to Nunavut. Plenty of examples in Canadian media of $29 bottles of orange juice and similar.
4 hours ago
The problem with doing that in Alaska is that there is not really a funding source for… anything. No income tax, typically little to no sales tax, low property taxes… the state’s other income source is a tax on the oil companies that drill and export from Alaska, which gets turned into the quasi-mini-UBI Public Fund Dividend.
3 hours ago
Or the people who don't like living in a remote area with high prices could choose to move somewhere else? The US is huge.
2 hours ago
Nome, Alaska is a majority indigenous community as are many fly-in towns in Alaska, so you're basically saying something as tone-deaf as "why don't the indigenous people just abandon the place they've lived for thousands of years just because "modern" settled life showed up in the form of the United States of America".
Yeah, it's costly and difficult to live there, but that's their home.
2 hours ago
These teenagers aren't thousands of years old. Neither are their parents.
The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area seem to simultaneously believe that these people:
- have a right to the benefits of what you call '"modern" settled life', AND
- cannot be inconvenienced by the things that make that life possible (like density)
2 hours ago
> The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area
If the United States federal government wants to maintain a legitimate claim to sovereignty over much of rural Alaska, which is very sparsely populated, it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle.
Similarly there's something like 41,000 people in Nunavut, and the Canadian government spends a shitload every year subsidizing all their communities' existence. But the alternative is worse, if you remove the population there's a danger that other interested parties might try to lay claim to it for themselves. It seems we're already seeing that with the US trying to claim Greenland for itself based on the concept that nobody is doing anything useful with it.
2 hours ago
"it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle."
I don't think that's true.
See the middle paragraph of page 46 here: https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/permanent-court-of-i...
The ICJ said that sovereignty over "thinly populated or unsettled countries" can be sustained with very little actual exercise of sovereign authority. It upheld sovereignty over unsettled portions of Greenland. They later used the same principle talking about islands that were "uninhabited or not permanently inhabited".
You seem to be saying there's a general requirement that every part of sovereign territory must maintain a resident population AND that the government must provide certain 'basic services' there. But that doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the ICJ.
If what you said were true, then no state could claim sovereignty over an unhabited place. But that's not true. The ICJ ruled that Malaysia had sovereignty over Ligitan, even though the island has a population of zero. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/103163
2 hours ago
I somehow doubt that the major world powers that might have the capability or inclination to occupy a depopulated Alaska or Nunavut would put much credence in or be scared by a strongly worded opinion issued by the ICJ. One of them is busy trying to invade their European neighbor right now with bloody results. The other one is on a major island building project in the South China Sea turning sandbars and coral reefs into air bases to claim the oceanic territory.
an hour ago
When you said "It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle." I assumed you were talking about the legal aspect. That's why I responded the way I did.
Now I understand you're talking about not about the legality, but the practicality. That's even easier to refute I think: if a world power wanted to annex that part of Alaska, the ~4000 current residents of Nome wouldn't be much of a deterrent, even with their hunting rifles.
an hour ago
No, they certainly wouldn't, but in the realpolitik of war, they would provide the justification for the USA to engage in an armed response to retain the territory. Basically think of the two scenarios of what would happen in the Falklands in 1982 if either:
a) the islands were claimed by the UK but also completely unpopulated and were occupied by Argentina
or
b) what actually happened, the islands were occupied by almost entirely UK-descent, English speaking subjects of the Crown, resulting in subsequent military action that had broad and overwhelming public support in the UK.
3 hours ago
But there are people there