In my state (Idaho) they can (and do) pay less than minimum wage if you are a tipped employee. [1]
"Most" who are in those positions tend to make at least minimum wage, if not more, but that is not a guarantee, and it is harder to claim tips as "stable income" when trying to get credit/housing.
Median wage/rent is hard to apply. Totally different results if you look at what the typical renter makes (at least in my area).
Minimum wage is one thing...but when it takes 3-4x minimum wage to stay at 0 every month things get difficult.
I'm not in NC, but Walmart starts associates at $14/hr and will (almost) hire anyone. A quick check shows they have tons of open positions throughout the state, full time with benefits.
That's a good slight of hand you pulled there. Most of the demographics here won't have taken a path through college that equips them with the specific knowledge to catch it.
(I'm not gonna spoil it, I wanna see if anyone else can figure it out)
I'm making zero. I have been in IT, a developer (but out of date mostly VB and SQL), managed dev teams, managed IT departments. Unfortunately I have a record and it's hard to get someone to give me a second chance plus now I'm over 50 and too old/overqualified for the minimum wage jobs. Would love to hear your ideas.
Shit, people don't even make minimum wage in states with tipped minimum. Bartenders be getting less than that, and people aren't drinking like they use to.
I'm very interested in hearing the opportunity you can give someone who's willing to work for $14.50/hr though.
"Go tell that to the middle school travel team in my neighborhood."
Why are you even making this comment? The comment you responded to was obviously talking about median wages of the entire US population. Real Wages are near all-time highs - it's just a fact, you can look up the data yourself.
Havent you got states that haven't increased the minimum wage, just for inflation, in decades? Don't most people live in cheap wooden houses on top of all this? Isnt all your livestock full of chemicals to counteract the unsanitary factory conditions they must be processed in so the average American can even afford it in the first place? Doesnt half your country still hate blacks?
And finally, why do so many people kill themselves in America? Can't be that great. Don't know of many hunter gatherers offing themselves
If you think that you're simply incorrect. For the average person in a Western country, life is dramatically better anytime in the next hundred years, including the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
> Not to mention that the exponential growth of solar panels is basically stabilized in climate right now.
Sadly, growth of PV can only deal with part of the problem. We're making PV fast enough now that, given panel lifetimes, in 30 years 100% of current electricity demand will be met with specifically PV, and we're also making wind turbines and nuclear reactors and stuff.
The "and also" means we'll probably also be fine electrifying land transport.
Air transport (also fast-and-reliable sea transport) is somewhat harder to make renewable, but theoretically possible. Metal extraction from ore can be done electrolytically.
Concrete's not limited by electricity, it's an independent thing to be solved. So is meat farming. Progress exists on these, yes, but my point is they're not solved just by us being on the home stretch for electricity.
I don't think your "worst possible" case is calibrated correctly.
The worst possible case is global famine and food chain collapse. Food wars, water riots. Starvation in the literal billions.
Living in a Western country won't solve the problems of "crops can't grow anymore" or "keystone species in the food chain are extinct". We'll starve and die in mass numbers just like everyone else.
Even if we had billions dead from starvation worldwide (huge if), life in a western country in 2060 will be better than life for almost anyone born in 1800 anywhere on earth.
Under this principle no human has ever been able to consent to anything in the history of the world. Certainly 99.99% of humans.
This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.
No human can _100%_ consent to anything (… probably: free will is tricky). Coercion is a continuum, not a binary.
I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.
But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.
That is wonderful. What makes billionaires valuable to society is that the act of trying to make a business worth a billion dollars that people want is really, really hard. It essentially punches you in the face constantly. You have to power through a bunch of really tough situations. There has to be a really strong reward at the end to make it worth it. Otherwise everyone would just toy around with free projects.
Hopefully the billionaires are happy with the reward at the end of the tunnel.
I suspect they may envy the laymens position in life eventually. You loose alot becoming wealthy in the monitary sense. There are many ways to define richness and wealth beyond what society defines it as.
One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.
You could say that, but you also don't have to concede it.
In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.
For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.
This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.
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