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Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

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Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#191

Post by tootahe45 »

kristopolous wrote: post #115
holler wrote: post #9

ok but how much would a sandwich cost?

New Zealand prices for Subway, after converting currencies are more or less the same as American prices (+/- $.50 - the ingredients are slightly different) The people controlling the price of the sandwich are also the ones who want to pay their workers less. We shouldn't cower and run at the thought of the bosses using strategies to fight back by comically jacking up their prices and then cynically blaming it on the…

Beware a lot of shady employment practices going on in the low-wage sector of NZ, always people getting busted for paying lower than min wage to foreigners. I've personally never seen a kiwi working at either Subway in my city, and i get it quite often.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#192

Post by gher-shyu3i »

stretchwithme wrote: post #64

A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.

While what you point out is definitely true, a very important cause of the wealth gap in todays world that barely anyone talks about is the accepted engagement in lending money with interest (i.e. usury). It's heavily built in to the society today. It's not for no reason that this practices (along with derivative practices) is prohibited in the major 3 religions.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#193

Post by xupybd »

EdwinLarkin wrote: post #182
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZ pay in general is very poor compared to other developed countries in my opinion. When you compare SF tech salaries to NZ tech salaries it's just ridiculous though. I would say SF TC is 4x or more than NZ salaries (Stock grants are not common) for similar positions.

SF salaries are ridiculous compared to anywhere else. Not even Switzerland can compare. The only places where you can earn just as much as you do in SF is consulting anywhere in the rich world or those few positions in Chinese megacities. I am actually surprised SF did not lower salaries exactly for this because there's nowhere else to go if you want to at least keep your SF salary.

If you put the average software developers salary in NZ into USD you get $50211.93.

From https://www.payscale.com/research/NZ/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#194

Post by gher-shyu3i »

127 wrote: post #157
Negitivefrags wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alturnative is letting things fail. It causes a lot of pain in the short term with people losing their jobs and general economic fallout. This causes a lot of suffering. But on the other hand, the rich will lose more, and during the rebuilding a different set of people will gain the upper hand and end up on top. It's hard to get the political will to actually allow what needs to happen to fix wealth inequality.

Inflation is wealth transfer from those who hold government fiat (the poor and the middle class) to those who hold assets (the rich). Deflation is the same thing in reverse. Makes it pretty clear why the government is fighting deflation so hard.

Don't forget that the government on purpose disconnected the currency from precious metals (gold, etc.) in order to facilitate usurious lending, which allows the government to print money at will to pay off its debts, inflating the currency at the cost of the hard work of the citizens.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#195

Post by gher-shyu3i »

CameronNemo wrote: post #99
Guthur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Gaps are not even remotely what we should be focussed on and are purely based on jealous or indirect aggression. Concentrate on living standards and opportunity that will help far more people than trying pull down a vanishingly small number of people.

I agree that concentrating on living standards is a good idea, but I also think massive wealth and income inequality is a barrier to truly free society. I hope it continues to stay in focus alongside other issues.

Then solve the true underlying problem: move away from the usurious financial system to a proper one.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#196

Post by gher-shyu3i »

rStar wrote: post #86
Guthur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Gaps are not even remotely what we should be focussed on and are purely based on jealous or indirect aggression. Concentrate on living standards and opportunity that will help far more people than trying pull down a vanishingly small number of people.

billionaires are criminal by definition, and their existence proves the absence of a (econ 101 style) market in whatever industry they came from. we can only fix this problem through efficient regulation of monopolies.

No it doesn't. I'm not pro socialism, communism, nor capitalism (as defined today). However, we can have proper societies with great standards of living, while having extremely rich people (i.e. billionaires). It's been done in the past, and no reason why it can't be replicated other than people not wanting to address the true underlying causes of the messed up financial system we live in today.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#197

Post by tootahe45 »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #31
xupybd wrote: post #14

NZ just raised our min wage to $20 an hour. I work at least 50 hours a week. A teenager at MacDonalds now earns a good fraction of my income if they work the same hours. Despite my 4 year degree, near decade of experience and the responsibility's that I hold.

This sort of thinking is corrosive to society at large. It’s not a zero-sum game. But, if you must, take heart in the fact that the teenager will never make more than $minimum in that job, where presumably your income will continue to rise commensurate with experience.

In many ways he is losing out. Rent for example increases with ability to pay (in NZ at least), so if govt raised welfare payments and min wage, his rent could go up without seeing a wage increase.

I do think it's OP fault for not taking action though, not the govt. It's like my dad who has complained he is underpaid for the past 10 years yet still doesn't switch job..

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#198

Post by TeMPOraL »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #189
TeMPOraL wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the other hand, the rich will lose more Will they, though? Going by absolute value, perhaps, but that's nowhere near the whole story. Yes, if owners of a megacorp lose $100M, they've lost more than all their employees combined - but they still have a $1B between them in other assets, offshore bank accounts, whatnot, so they stay rich , while their employees suddenly find themselves in a life-threatening emer…

If you are going to make the argument that the rich losing large sums of money doesn’t matter much, couldn’t you use the same line of reasoning to argue that the rich gaining large sums of money doesn’t matter much either?

My argument is that if you take a billionaire and take away 90% of their wealth, they're still filthy rich. If the way you do this is by taking away 90% of everyone's wealth, you'll make everyone except the rich suffer badly, and when the dust settles, the rich will still be ahead. Allowing for large-scale failures like these only creates lots of unnecessary suffering and burns a lot of money.

As for whether "the rich gaining large sums of money doesn’t matter much either" - if you're asking if it doesn't matter much either to them then yes, this is the flip side of the marginal value of money point. A person with $1000 in the bank will be much happier about getting extra $100 than a person with $1M. It's one of the core (if not the core) argument towards reducing income inequality - moving some money from the rich to the poor is a net increase in happiness and value in society.

One strong caveat being, building things that require big capital expenses, like factories or specialized machinery or infrastructure. These things require being able to front up a lot of money, and at the same time, they don't mesh well with democratic decision-making. So you want to have some way in a society for an individual, or a small group of individuals, to be able to take control over large amounts of money - otherwise factories and bridges and utilities just won't happen. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to allow that small group of people to capture the entire wealth they generated, though.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#199

Post by tootahe45 »

akvadrako wrote: post #146
Tade0 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But robots don't actually replace these workers. In the case of McDonald's the kiosks only generated more throughput, actually adding work, so all the staff assigned to taking orders was put into other work. Meanwhile self-checkout, while actually reducing throughput somewhat, made it possible for the workers to take on other tasks in the store - of which there are many.

There isnt that many jobs in a grocery store that need many people. Stocking shelves and cleaning mostly. Once those are automated there will be a lot less jobs.

If the jobs were that easy to automate they would have been automated at the current rate. Min wage going from $18-20 doesn't suddenly make that all-in-one supermarket bot doable. Automating real world jobs is hard and often not viable especially for dynamic work. Even the no-brainier automation like self-checkouts are actually not saving much apparently. (could be false, heard it on a anti-min wage channel).

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#200

Post by imtringued »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #152
f6v wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? It seems it was more about religion being used to subdue people.

> What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? It seems it was more about religion being used to subdue people. I'd argue the advent of centralized currencies did more harm than any and all standing armies combined. When you think about what a parasitical entity does in biology, you realize that simply killing a host is not evolutionary advantageous--their are 3 types of parasitism, not to be confuse…

Centralized currency is just a policy decision, so we are back to blaming leaders.
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