Apparently 30% at the time the current minimum wage laws were passed. Sad really.
We are about 2 generations past that being a viable fix. Minimum wage could never be set to a livable one because food and housing are so overinflated. You would have to implode the entire economy. The only way to fix the mess we are in is to transfer the wealth back from where it was originally stolen. Since that’s not on the table the only thing left is to overthrow the government. Just facts.
California minimum wage is $15. But if you burn 4 gallons of gas every day commuting to and from work that’s still 2 hours a day wasted on gas. Then rent for your one bedroom apartment is $1800 so that’s another 30 hours a week, 40 hours a week after tax is taken out. Then did you want to eat? That’s another 15 hours a week…
Mandatory Minimum Profit Sharing is even better than minimum wage. Because then it’s tied to an individual business, and there can be no complaints that it would put them out of business. Because if their business is failing so hard it can’t turn a profit then that would mean they are allowed to pay workers less, but if no worker agrees to that low of a wage then that business deserves to fail. If instead they are lying and have big profits, they are forced to pay the workers more. It then actually becomes a free labor market.
Yes if you do the math it’s $24. But that’s using the Fight For 15 protest organization as a starting point. If you go by historical minimum wage, it’s actually supposed to be $29 now.
Edit: Also, FWIW, a minimum wage that isn’t localized by state economies and tied to inflation is kind of worthless.
Maybe mooltipass does what you are looking for? It’s open source hardware too.
Grocery workers fight grocery stores for fair pay. Grocery stores have very thin profit margins because most of it goes to food distributors and real estate / energy costs. Food distributors have very thin margins because most of their profits goes to producers and real estate / energy costs. Producers have very thin margins because most of their profits go to companies like Monsanto and Con Agra.
There are institutions and large shareholders of institutions who own shares in every step of that chain and extract all the profits so that the workers at every stage have absolutely nothing relatively even though they are doing all the…ehm… Work.
So yes. Very much late stage capitalism story. There are few things worse than food supply. Healthcare is the biggest contender surely.
The thing that most content creators don’t get, and fall victim to, is that those platforms are created with the sole purpose of being the place where people go for content. This way, the platform gets a piece of not only any profit from the content which is successful, but also gets mindshare, and cachet from even failure to find content. That “almost what I wanted but not quite” feeling gets associated. So people keep coming back to the failure platform, hoping that one day the content they want will be there.
I don’t think direct democracy is a good idea, at least not with our current structure. The problem is dumb and easily manipulated people, if you think them voting for representatives that work against their own best interests is bad wait until you see the damage done by voting for actual laws against their best interest. I’ll even give an example: prop 22 in California. There are so many other examples but that one is just so clear cut and over the top.
What I think is better is decentralized federated models. The USA was originally a confederation and then federation of States. It’s in the name. Thing is, back then states were only expected to be a couple million or less citizens. Now cities are that size. And yet even today there are states with less than 500k citizens.
I think a restructuring based on population and land area (territory) is in order.
It’s ok if a small town votes that trans people can’t use a certain bathroom, or they vote that some race is not allowed to move in. But when such laws affect large land masses or large populations then there is a problem.
Things like air particulates affect the entire globe, that should be governed at a global level. There are all kinds of things in between.
Yes but now this is a political issue. How are you going to stand between big business’s and its thirst for AI? The usage is growing exponentially and IMO will soon be dominant and the rest of the economy becomes more efficient.
It has always been a political issue. We had 3 generations to fix the problem. Corruption and lack of leadership resulted in the massive failure mode we are experiencing.
Now we need drastic changes quickly. We could be completely fossil fuel free in 5 years, but we’d need to basically retool everything and a billion lifestyles would have to change. (worth pointing out that the change would result in much more comfortable, happy and healthy lives) Now you could argue that’s impossible but I argue it’s the only possibility. Business as usual WILL result in the collapse of society and over a billion lifestyles will have to change anyway. (worth pointing out that this forced change would result in uncomfortable unhappy and potentially unhealthy lives, and even many deaths) That’s just the reality we live in.
That’s a misleading statement because the efficiency calculations are done with assumptions based on current load, usage patterns, and supergrid as prerequisites.
To do a proper efficiency calculation we need a page 1 rewrite of how we handle energy entirety, as I described. I can prove I’m right with maths.
Also, aluminum not steel. Because you only need 1 meter bladespan when only generating one household of energy.
As for industrial needs, they can be handled by nuclear. Trying to scale up wind or solar is just too environmentally destructive.
But again, the key here is not to keep generating more and more energy, or using existing base loads as a starting point, we need to reduce energy usage drastically. It’s so wasteful right now.
Using common metals for the blades and rare-earthless turbines for the generation, doing only small-scale installations such as on homes and distributing true excess through neighborhood microgrids (no supergrids). Also storing minor excess using flywheel or gravity batter rather than chemical battery. Most of these are systemic improvements and not specific to wind but I want to make sure you’re not picturing giant wind farms. Because as I said in my other post the biggest problem is supergrid thinking.
To put a point on it, an efficient home can be powered by a single wind turbine and possibly a solar panel for heavy usage appliances such as laundry machines, which is another problem that can be mitigated with further simple engineering solutions.
Wind power can be done in an environmentally friendly way wrt the equipment, it just currently isn’t. Just like nuclear could be but currently isn’t. Another problem with wind that no one ever talks about is that sucking that much energy out drastically alters weather patterns (in most but not all cases). Wind is crucial to how weather works. But even bring up the topic and you’d be called a tinfoil hatter.
More importantly than finding ways to generate more energy, we need to be using less. Grid energy itself encourages wastefulness. Homes need to be insulated. Unnecessary travel (such as office work, and yes even ‘shopping’) are practices that must be ended. Those 2 things alone would reduce energy usage by 80%+.
But anyways… Like I said, even mentioning such things gets people very hateful. They don’t want to even consider change.
Just click the title again.
The link is https://thekernal.xyz/5-Great-Web-Browsers-For-Linux/
It’s naive to talk about more or less taxes.
Somehow it’s ok to spend 100s of billions of tax money on military hardware that no one needs or wants for the sole purpose of keeping those factories going and the towns employed, but spending half as much on a basic income for those people with no middleman taking a cut is wasteful and unreasonable.
A lot of time that doesn’t even matter much. A lot of what gig app companies do is straight up illegal fraud. That’s even after they bought themselves a law to allow them to abuse their workers 1000 different ways legally.
Banks constantly charge illegal fees and commit all kinds of fraud. Sometimes they are fined but mostly they just get away with it.
And so on.
Edit: news flash-- we don’t live in a civilized society and there is no rule of law.