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 flamingkillamajig wrote:

I dunno maybe i'm just weird. I'd always figure if a policeman tells me to do something and they're on duty that i should just do as they say. Just be calm and don't do anything irrational or stupid. I don't think that's a strange things to do. Even if you're in the wrong wouldn't resisting arrest/being pulled over be that much worse?

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

I dunno maybe i'm just weird. I'd always figure if a policeman tells me to do something and they're on duty that i should just do as they say. Just be calm and don't do anything irrational or stupid. I don't think that's a strange things to do. Even if you're in the wrong wouldn't resisting arrest/being pulled over be that much worse?

Depends. If a police officer is like "Hey, please don't go through this area, it's a crime zone" then yeah, that makes sense. Same with if they pull me over.

But there's a lot of misconduct out there. You're not obliged at all to entertain a cop on a bad day's power trip, nor should you allow a badge to be used to remove your constitutional rights (for example, your right to protest in a non-violent manner).

Asterios wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

I dunno maybe i'm just weird. I'd always figure if a policeman tells me to do something and they're on duty that i should just do as they say. Just be calm and don't do anything irrational or stupid. I don't think that's a strange things to do. Even if you're in the wrong wouldn't resisting arrest/being pulled over be that much worse?

I actually called the 'shut the **** up' comment. That was pretty freaking funny i will admit.

@Killionaire: I mean i understand that cops can be jerks sometimes and some is unwarranted but at the same time i'm not going to give them crap when they're in front of me and able to lay the punishment/tickets down.

I wouldn't doubt that there are cases of police brutality or power trips but still that's something to report when the people in question are away from you. If you feel wronged get a lawyer or talk to the police station. See if you can glance their name to report them later. I understand some people freak out even when they're not in the wrong but you have to learn to relax then.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

Asterios wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

I dunno maybe i'm just weird. I'd always figure if a policeman tells me to do something and they're on duty that i should just do as they say. Just be calm and don't do anything irrational or stupid. I don't think that's a strange things to do. Even if you're in the wrong wouldn't resisting arrest/being pulled over be that much worse?

I actually called the 'shut the **** up' comment. That was pretty freaking funny i will admit.

@Killionaire: I mean i understand that cops can be jerks sometimes and some is unwarranted but at the same time i'm not going to give them crap when they're in front of me and able to lay the punishment/tickets down.

I wouldn't doubt that there are cases of police brutality or power trips but still that's something to report when the people in question are away from you. If you feel wronged get a lawyer or talk to the police station. See if you can glance their name to report them later. I understand some people freak out even when they're not in the wrong but you have to learn to relax then.

yeah all Cops are not perfect they are humans in a very stressful job wondering if the next guy they pull over is going to shoot them, people always get down on the cops and claim they are targeting Blacks, yet according to the Guardian a very pro black lives matter " leftist" news site and so forth, twice as many whites then blacks were killed just this year alone: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database, but evidently according to the Black Lives Matter movement the police are killing more Blacks, and at times like this I wonder.

 whembly wrote:
on August.

That's for that BBC post.

The changes to labor laws doesn't seem to warrant all that violence though (even though I'm not sure if it'd help with the unemployment issues)... which is why I asked if there were other, underlining issues.

Easy enough to say sitting in America where workers have and expect rights on par with a sack of potatoes. When people have these things they get attached. Imagine say if legislation was about to pass regarding door to door government gun seizures, how would you expect folks to react?

Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

Sounds like the problem is the widespread exploitation of workers that's going on in underdeveloped parts of the world, rather than France' labor protection laws. All countries in the world should endeavor to have working conditions similar to what's in France.

flamingkillamajig's point is merely hearsay anecdotal evidence. It would be useful to get some hard data.

Worker rights are pretty good in Germany, and they're the biggest exporter of cars in the world.

Reason is, it's not just workers' legal rights that cause companies to make these decisions. It's a whole spectrum of things including infrastructure, political and economic stability and the population of educated workers.

Workers' rights are pretty terrible in Somalia but you don't see anyone locating any kind of industries over there.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

Sounds like the problem is the widespread exploitation of workers that's going on in underdeveloped parts of the world, rather than France' labor protection laws. All countries in the world should endeavor to have working conditions similar to what's in France.

people keep saying exploitation of workers and don't realize those manufacturing jobs going overseas pay them really well considering the alternative is working in the fields for a mere pittance.

 whembly wrote:
on August.

That's for that BBC post.

The changes to labor laws doesn't seem to warrant all that violence though (even though I'm not sure if it'd help with the unemployment issues)... which is why I asked if there were other, underlining issues.

Well consider the following scenario...


After a terror attack Obama issues a state of emergency, which among other things, prohibits protests, set curfews, limit peoples movement and gives the police the right to perform house searches/arrests without a warrant. This state of emergency gets drawn out to 6 months, which during Obama pushes forward a new law that forbids private ownership of guns, which cant be protested against now because hey! State of emergency right?

Try to imagine the reaction to that

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 whembly wrote:
on August.

That's for that BBC post.

The changes to labor laws doesn't seem to warrant all that violence though (even though I'm not sure if it'd help with the unemployment issues)... which is why I asked if there were other, underlining issues.

Well consider the following scenario...


After a terror attack Obama issues a state of emergency, which among other things, prohibits protests, set curfews, limit peoples movement and gives the police the right to perform house searches/arrests without a warrant. This state of emergency gets drawn out to 6 months, which during Obama pushes forward a new law that forbids private ownership of guns, which cant be protested against now because hey! State of emergency right?

Try to imagine the reaction to that

Yep. That would be even more true if Americans had elected a Republican president. Hollande does the complete opposite of what he was elected for.

Things got pretty hairy in Rennes yesterday, with police breaking a group of protesters by driving in the crowd at a slow pace while teargasing everyone. Some journalists were hit by nightsticks too.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

Sounds like the problem is the widespread exploitation of workers that's going on in underdeveloped parts of the world, rather than France' labor protection laws. All countries in the world should endeavor to have working conditions similar to what's in France.

Problem is it only would take one country saying no with the ability to manufacture well enough and allowing many companies to set up shop. Honestly i don't mind some things improving somewhat but it can't get too good.

Btw as far as low wage workers go i'd imagine factory workers work the hardest for what they make. Labor jobs aren't easy and doing constant work and some days having to work fast is tough. I mean i look at people in sales just lazily leaning on a counter and think 'Are you really deserving of equal pay to my factory job?' and honestly don't think so (i do work in a factory btw).

I could go into a whole rant about the minimum wage thing. I mean you have to look at this from the business owner's perspective too. I mean what happens if they have to raise wages and can now for instance only afford 4 low wage workers instead of 5 and the 5th is now laid off. What if instead to bring their profits back up they have to increase the price of the goods made. If goods costs more and this is across the board wouldn't all that money you make from the minimum wage increase matter less? Not only that but if somebody hypothetically makes 8 dollars per hour and now it's raised to 10 dollars per hour. What are you going to do for people that worked 10 dollars per hour before? Are you going to raise their wages as well somewhat or are they going to make the same amount as the minimum wage worker even though their job probably required more skill. If you choose to keep their wages the same you screw them over. If you increase their wages too it kind of sets forth a whole system of pay increases meaning everybody gets more but everybody pays more because goods need to be more expensive so a person can be competitive with their business going up against other businesses.

At the end of the day though it'd just be easier for the company to go to another country with crappier worker's rights. I mean i'm sure they then need to ship goods to certain places and those countries come with their own host of issues but if your country isn't attractive to businesses they'll leave. At least as far as manufacture goes and possibly technical support and similar but things like grocery stores, fast food and retail will stay. Issue being you won't be producing goods but just consuming them which is a problem.

Anyway this is just how i figure this would work and is by no means a full guide to how it works. Enlighten me if there's more to it than that.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

Detroit was never going to be saved. The economics that centralised car manufacturing in Detroit was always going to disappear whether it paid high union rates or close to nothing. The economics of the industry changed so that focusing around a single city didn't make sense, and didn't work anymore. Lots of manufacturing left Detroit... but not that much of it went overseas, mostly it went to other states in the US that had local production advantages. US peak car manufacturing was 13 million, it now makes 12 million - it just doesn't make them in Detroit anymore.

The other part of the issue is that the US car manuacturers lost to Germany and Japan and the rest because a long history of success led to some very lazy business practices among US manufacturers. Excessively generous deals with the unions were part of that, but you can also factor in design mistakes and some woeful business practices. In to the 1970s there was little computerisation of accounts among US manufacturers, one story I remember was, I kid you not, an estimate of total sales that was made by counting up the value of a few hundred receipts, seeing how tall that stack of receipts was, then measuring the total stack of receipts.

It is certainly true that if employee pay conditions are too great then a country can lose competitive behaviour. But as to that happening in the real world, well I'm not sure it's that common. Note, by the way, that when we talk about the extremely high rates of pay given to executives no-one ever seems worried that will effect competitiveness. It's only when the lower level employees want some conditions that everyone worries about how they'll compete with other countries.

Well i do have to ask why it is that everything is now made in China. I mean a part in my computer broke some years ago and they said it'd need to get shipped to China to be fixed and would end up costing more than a new computer. Fairly sure it was salesman BS and should've taken it to a friend that's good with computers but we wanted to save time i guess.

I mean i dunno i suppose shipping goods here could cost a lot too but if all the stuff is getting made in say China that couldn't be good news for many countries. The USA in my case is going to need to make something or do something nobody else can do as well or things will end badly (for people in the usa anyway).

China had a huge price advantage of cheap labour coupled with a government happy to create factories and warehouses anywhere, cheap energy with no regard to pollution, and a willingness by a lot of foreign companies to invest in the Chinese system.

Ironically the Chinese cheap labour advantage is rapidly eroding.

One of the major things with China is not wages, but the other costs.

These include:

Currency manipulation. For many years the Chinese have manipulated their currency to ensure that it retained a competitive advantage.

Environmental laws. Chinese factories are massively polluting. They use a lot of manufacturing tech that is banned in the west, and don't have the same requirements for safe disposal of pollutants or emissions restrictions.

Safety laws. They have much lower requirements for worker and product safety.

Take a look at the Tianjin explosions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Tianjin_explosions) or the state of the Yangtze http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/river_decline/10_rivers_risk/yangtze/yangtze_threats/. This is why Chinese goods are cheaper.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I could go into a whole rant about the minimum wage thing. I mean you have to look at this from the business owner's perspective too. I mean what happens if they have to raise wages and can now for instance only afford 4 low wage workers instead of 5 and the 5th is now laid off. What if instead to bring their profits back up they have to increase the price of the goods made. If goods costs more and this is across the board wouldn't all that money you make from the minimum wage increase matter less? Not only that but if somebody hypothetically makes 8 dollars per hour and now it's raised to 10 dollars per hour.

The inflation argument only works when the only cost to all goods is minimum wage. It isn't, of course, wages are let's say about half of all costs, and minimum wage is roughly about a half of all wages (that figure is really high, but as long as we're being really loose with our figures then we might as well tip it in the favour of your theory).

So let's say the minimum wage is going up 10%. And let's say a product cost $20 to make, then about $10 of that would be wages, and about $5 of that would be minimum wage. That means the minimum wage component is up by 10%, to $5.50. The total product is now going to be $20.50. So yeah, there's the inflation.

But has it made the minimum wage increase meaningless? Well the product is only up 0.25%, and the minimum wage worker has 10% more money. So he's still able to buy 7.3% more stuff - his 10% increase has translated in to a 7.3% increase in buying power. And remember that's an exaggerated example - minimum wage is nowhere near as large a part of the economy as my example gave.

What are you going to do for people that worked 10 dollars per hour before?

In order to maintain an incentive for higher training and harder work, the market will adjust to offer the same premium above minimum wage as it did before. That's how the market works.

Anyway this is just how i figure this would work and is by no means a full guide to how it works. Enlighten me if there's more to it than that.

There's a lot more to it. The biggest thing to remember is that wages are set by bargaining power, not productivity. As an example. consider if you have a machine that makes 1,000 widgets an hour, and each of those widgets is worth $1 over and above the cost of the parts that make it. The work isn't hard or demanding, but you do need one guy on the machine, without him there the machine can't operate. He is 'worth' $1,000 an hour to you and your business, that is literally the difference to your profits with him on the machine vs without him.

But of course you aren't going to pay $1,000 an hour, anyone can do the job so you let market forces decide. There's only one machine spot to fill and thousands of people who need a job, so you have all the bargaining power and can offer nothing more than minimum wage. If a year later the minimum wage goes up you aren't going to shut down the business, or move the machine to another country where you can pay someone less to sit at that machine. Because whether you pay $9, $12 or $15 that process is still making you a lot of profit.

There's still a lot more to it than that. There are jobs that really are on the margins of productivity that are impacted by this kind of thing. Small volume boutique stores and some kinds of labour intensive manufacturing can be really impacted by minimum wage increases. But generally the number of jobs and industries that will actually see job losses from minimum wage increases are a lot smaller than people realise.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Well i do have to ask why it is that everything is now made in China.

People focus on where things are made, but it's quite misleading. That last stage, actually making the product, is the least profitable, because it goes to whoever offers up the lowest cost to produce, which means profits and wages are cut to the bone. Whereas the value in design, and then way down the chain in marketing and in sales, that stuff pays, because it isn't a lowest cost industry.

Think of it this way - would you rather be working in Apple's design studio in the US, or in its affiliated iPhone manufacturing plant in China. Which country do you think Apple has produced more wealth for, the US or China?

Because a service or a design doesn't have a 'made in xyz' stamp on it, people forget that's where the real money is.

Yeah i suppose but the jobs going to China were the low wage jobs. For low wage workers that kind of does matter still. For higher wage workers not so much.

IDK abut the US but here in the UK I see a lot of cheap goods from countries like Thailand, Portugal, Turkey and Malaysia.

This includesclothes, housewares such as crockery, and tech items like phones. However as Sebster said above, none of this is designed in these countries, and the tech stuff is merely assembled there with the high value components manufactured in places like the US, Japan and Korea.

Since we're looking at the network of global dependency, it's worth pointing out ARM as an example of a major chip design company that doesn't do any production and simply licences designs to manufacturers.

So there you've got your global value and supply chain. At the top is the UK, designing the chips. Japan manufactures them and sends them to Thailand where they are assembled into phones with screens from Korea, cameras from Sony's plant in Malaysia, and batteries from China.

Finally the phone arrives in your local high street. You buy it and put it in the pocket of your jeans that were stitched together in Portugal or India (the zip came from Japan.)

There is no reason American workers should have to compete with workers in other countries, pushing wages down, it has just been engineered that way by "free market" lobbyists. There has been a continuous effort over the last 40-50 years to keep workers down and dismantle things like trade unions, which has also involved a heavy dose of propaganda. The reason industry has disappeared in the west is because the vast majority of wealth has already been concentrated in a very small number of "super rich", who aren't in the market for millions of cars. They buy financial services, so all the big money is in catering to that need. That's why Wall Street is rich and Detroit is Detroit.

It's just not good business manufacturing things that the other 99% of the population need... they don't have any money.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Yeah i suppose but the jobs going to China were the low wage jobs. For low wage workers that kind of does matter still. For higher wage workers not so much.

Yeah, and that's the next part of the coversation - while trade benefits every country on the whole, individually there are winners and losers.

Its why as intnl trade expanded it needed.to be done with some of the new wealth being directed to improved social support and the like. Unfortunately not only did that not happen, we've actually reduced some of the existing safety nets. No surprise the effect that's had on equality.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
(the zip came from Japan.)

I heard somewhere that something like 90% of the zips in the world come from one factory

The company is called YKK which stands for something in Japanese. Check the tag of the zip to see if it has those initials on it.

I've noticed in recent years the tag has grown smaller than it used to be, and it's getting more difficult to get a good grip on it with my clumsy fingers.

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 whembly wrote:
on August.

That's for that BBC post.

The changes to labor laws doesn't seem to warrant all that violence though (even though I'm not sure if it'd help with the unemployment issues)... which is why I asked if there were other, underlining issues.

Well consider the following scenario...


After a terror attack Obama issues a state of emergency, which among other things, prohibits protests, set curfews, limit peoples movement and gives the police the right to perform house searches/arrests without a warrant. This state of emergency gets drawn out to 6 months, which during Obama pushes forward a new law that forbids private ownership of guns, which cant be protested against now because hey! State of emergency right?

Try to imagine the reaction to that

Ya'll are more tolerant than we are... that's American Civil War 2.0 right that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LethalShade wrote:

Things got pretty hairy in Rennes yesterday, with police breaking a group of protesters by driving in the crowd at a slow pace while teargasing everyone. Some journalists were hit by nightsticks too.

Were the crowd getting ornery or peacefully protesting?

 sebster wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Depends. I mean are the rights so good that companies choose to go elsewhere? I know this is my dad's experience somewhat but he said when labor unions got things so good for the car companies in Michigan (like Detroit) they all started going overseas or lost to the competition elsewhere. Now look at us. We don't have such good car companies anymore. The workers have it too good here so companies don't want to set up here which means no jobs which means rather than workers with better wages we have people with no jobs. I think we all know where Detroit is now considering they filed for bankruptcy some years ago and how crappy and corrupt it is.

Detroit was never going to be saved. The economics that centralised car manufacturing in Detroit was always going to disappear whether it paid high union rates or close to nothing. The economics of the industry changed so that focusing around a single city didn't make sense, and didn't work anymore. Lots of manufacturing left Detroit... but not that much of it went overseas, mostly it went to other states in the US that had local production advantages. US peak car manufacturing was 13 million, it now makes 12 million - it just doesn't make them in Detroit anymore.

The other part of the issue is that the US car manuacturers lost to Germany and Japan and the rest because a long history of success led to some very lazy business practices among US manufacturers. Excessively generous deals with the unions were part of that, but you can also factor in design mistakes and some woeful business practices. In to the 1970s there was little computerisation of accounts among US manufacturers, one story I remember was, I kid you not, an estimate of total sales that was made by counting up the value of a few hundred receipts, seeing how tall that stack of receipts was, then measuring the total stack of receipts.

It is certainly true that if employee pay conditions are too great then a country can lose competitive behaviour. But as to that happening in the real world, well I'm not sure it's that common. Note, by the way, that when we talk about the extremely high rates of pay given to executives no-one ever seems worried that will effect competitiveness. It's only when the lower level employees want some conditions that everyone worries about how they'll compete with other countries.

well because if you get an officer of the company who gets a $50,000 a year raise, compared to a few thousand employees who get a $1 an hour raise and say they work an average of 1,500 hours a year (roughly 30 hours a week), you do the math.

 sebster wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I could go into a whole rant about the minimum wage thing. I mean you have to look at this from the business owner's perspective too. I mean what happens if they have to raise wages and can now for instance only afford 4 low wage workers instead of 5 and the 5th is now laid off. What if instead to bring their profits back up they have to increase the price of the goods made. If goods costs more and this is across the board wouldn't all that money you make from the minimum wage increase matter less? Not only that but if somebody hypothetically makes 8 dollars per hour and now it's raised to 10 dollars per hour.

The inflation argument only works when the only cost to all goods is minimum wage. It isn't, of course, wages are let's say about half of all costs, and minimum wage is roughly about a half of all wages (that figure is really high, but as long as we're being really loose with our figures then we might as well tip it in the favour of your theory).

So let's say the minimum wage is going up 10%. And let's say a product cost $20 to make, then about $10 of that would be wages, and about $5 of that would be minimum wage. That means the minimum wage component is up by 10%, to $5.50. The total product is now going to be $20.50. So yeah, there's the inflation.

But has it made the minimum wage increase meaningless? Well the product is only up 0.25%, and the minimum wage worker has 10% more money. So he's still able to buy 7.3% more stuff - his 10% increase has translated in to a 7.3% increase in buying power. And remember that's an exaggerated example - minimum wage is nowhere near as large a part of the economy as my example gave.

problem with people and minimum wage they don't look at the bigger picture, you say hey doubt my burger will go up too much because that burger flipper is getting a raise, problem is he is not the only one getting a raise, the people who transported the items too the store got a raise, the people who stored the items before delivery got a raise, the people who assembled the items to store got a raise, the people who worked the farm got a raise, the people who worked the ranch got a raise, the people who work the gas that went into the vehicles to transport the stuff got a raise, the power companies to run the store got a raise and the list goes on and on which leads to prices being raised even more.

 whembly wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LethalShade wrote:

Things got pretty hairy in Rennes yesterday, with police breaking a group of protesters by driving in the crowd at a slow pace while teargasing everyone. Some journalists were hit by nightsticks too.

Were the crowd getting ornery or peacefully protesting?

AFAIK, peacefully protesting. The police didn't want them to access a certain part of the city.


EDIT :

It was a smoke grenade that ignited the police car, not a molotov.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I've noticed in recent years the tag has grown smaller than it used to be, and it's getting more difficult to get a good grip on it with my clumsy fingers.

My pants are getting smaller around the waist. Don't know why companies are making all my pants smaller.

 LethalShade wrote:

 whembly wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LethalShade wrote:

Things got pretty hairy in Rennes yesterday, with police breaking a group of protesters by driving in the crowd at a slow pace while teargasing everyone. Some journalists were hit by nightsticks too.

Were the crowd getting ornery or peacefully protesting?

AFAIK, peacefully protesting. The police didn't want them to access a certain part of the city.

That is troubling...

EDIT :

It was a smoke grenade that ignited the police car, not a molotov.

And that makes it better? o.O

Asterios wrote:
well because if you get an officer of the company who gets a $50,000 a year raise, compared to a few thousand employees who get a $1 an hour raise and say they work an average of 1,500 hours a year (roughly 30 hours a week), you do the math.

You have zero appreciation of the scale of senior executive remuneration. No-one is talking about $50,000 a here, we're talking about CEOs who earn more than that in a day. The CEO of Discovery Communications got more than $150m last year, that's $400,000 a day.

To put that in your example above, a few thousand employees, which I'll assume is 3,000... could get a $15 an hour raise each and it'd cost the same as David Zaslav. But if a company gave 3,000 employees a $15 an hour raise each, I can guarantee you we'd see tomes written about what that would do to competitiveness, but when that money is given to the CEO, no-one even thinks about competitiveness.

problem with people and minimum wage they don't look at the bigger picture, you say hey doubt my burger will go up too much because that burger flipper is getting a raise, problem is he is not the only one getting a raise, the people who transported the items too the store got a raise, the people who stored the items before delivery got a raise, the people who assembled the items to store got a raise, the people who worked the farm got a raise, the people who worked the ranch got a raise, the people who work the gas that went into the vehicles to transport the stuff got a raise, the power companies to run the store got a raise and the list goes on and on which leads to prices being raised even more.

That's total gibberish, basically. If we lived in a world where employees had such bargaining power that simply wanting a raise meant you got one, then your concern would be valid. But outside of a chronically overheated economy that isn't the case. And the US market right now is the exact opposite of an overheated economy.

Asterios wrote:

problem with people and minimum wage they don't look at the bigger picture, you say hey doubt my burger will go up too much because that burger flipper is getting a raise, problem is he is not the only one getting a raise, the people who transported the items too the store got a raise, the people who stored the items before delivery got a raise, the people who assembled the items to store got a raise, the people who worked the farm got a raise, the people who worked the ranch got a raise, the people who work the gas that went into the vehicles to transport the stuff got a raise, the power companies to run the store got a raise and the list goes on and on which leads to prices being raised even more.

I do think that is part of it. Also since minimum wage increases all the other various jobs will have to be raised just a little as well.

I can understand wanting more money because you don't make enough. I really can. That said it's one of those things that probably doesn't work as well in practice. Then again my knowledge of the situation isn't too great.

If what sebster says is true and somewhat complete it does sound like it helps but not as much as people might think at first. Depends how the minimum wage bit is handled by everybody and that's the bigger issue.

 sebster wrote:

Asterios wrote:
well because if you get an officer of the company who gets a $50,000 a year raise, compared to a few thousand employees who get a $1 an hour raise and say they work an average of 1,500 hours a year (roughly 30 hours a week), you do the math.

You have zero appreciation of the scale of senior executive remuneration. No-one is talking about $50,000 a here, we're talking about CEOs who earn more than that in a day. The CEO of Discovery Communications got more than $150m last year, that's $400,000 a day.

To put that in your example above, a few thousand employees, which I'll assume is 3,000... could get a $15 an hour raise each and it'd cost the same as David Zaslav. But if a company gave 3,000 employees a $15 an hour raise each, I can guarantee you we'd see tomes written about what that would do to competitiveness, but when that money is given to the CEO, no-one even thinks about competitiveness.

problem with people and minimum wage they don't look at the bigger picture, you say hey doubt my burger will go up too much because that burger flipper is getting a raise, problem is he is not the only one getting a raise, the people who transported the items too the store got a raise, the people who stored the items before delivery got a raise, the people who assembled the items to store got a raise, the people who worked the farm got a raise, the people who worked the ranch got a raise, the people who work the gas that went into the vehicles to transport the stuff got a raise, the power companies to run the store got a raise and the list goes on and on which leads to prices being raised even more.

That's total gibberish, basically. If we lived in a world where employees had such bargaining power that simply wanting a raise meant you got one, then your concern would be valid. But outside of a chronically overheated economy that isn't the case. And the US market right now is the exact opposite of an overheated economy.

and those executives who are making those big bucks you claim, how many employees does their company hire? at say around 3,000 employees (unless marketing firms and such where all employees make lots of money) that is average commensuration and a very high end raise. lets look at those executives that you claim make a lot of money, how much do their employee make? I know in communications their techs make a crud load of money.

then there is you thinking costs will not go up with minimum wage going up is preposterous, I have already seen a Papa Murphy's family size Chicago pizza go up $2 this year alone. I have seen fast food prices going up too last year I could get a Big Mac for less then $4 now its almost $5.

when Minimum wage goes up not only do workers wages go up but all costs go up, raising minimum wage is going to hurt small business owners more then anything. which includes fast food since most are Franchises owned by small business owners.