I'm more generally referring to things like Hollywood leftist multimillionaires advocating for $15/hour for burger-flipping "living wage". They could take some of their money, buy a Burger King, and pay $15/hour. No one would stop them.

The NFL players could all quit, form a new player-owned football league, and pay themselves whatever they like.

People complaining a CEO's pay is too high could buy enough shares in the company and vote to change to CEO's pay. Or better yet, create a company that directly competes with the too-rich-CEO and pay the CEO of that company equally to the ever-important janitor.

People complaining about NCAA athletes being "exploited" could form a for-pay system where athletes who want to get into the NFL or NBA could play without being forced to go to class or comply with NCAA rules while waiting out the NFL & NBA age limit rules.

It's always about how "the man" is "keeping them down" and how government needs to force someone to do something that the market won't really bear.

It seems that every single time this sort of topic pops up, we have some SJW crying about greedy 1%'s not paying "a living wage". Even when a "living wage" is not quite at issue, we still have poor downtrodden NFL players being denied a extra $2.5M/year by some rich bastard team owner.

I am always left wondering why the SJW folks (or the NFL players) don't simply, in this case, form a non-profit corporation, buy a strawberry farm, pay $25/hr + healthcare + vacation for pickers, and sell the produce? Leading by example would "prove" that it is possible to make money (or at least not lose money) by selling strawberries picked by $25/hr labor.

There's not a thing preventing anyone from "solving" this "living wage" problem: just open up a competing business that pays a "living wage".

Well, nothing except competition.

It doesn't matter whether you've *actually* discriminated against *anyone*. Discrimination law has been twisted such that if your demographics are even slightly skewed, you'll be assumed to have discriminated.

"A door is ajar. A door is ajar. A door is ajar."

"No. It's not. It's wide open you stupid twit."

Ah, good times with the Chrysler New Yorker.

This was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the headline.

But won't you be among the first to complain when some company refuses to hire blacks, gays, and women?

You really can't have it both ways.

I knew you could.

Disparate Impact is a favorite tool of the left to "prove" discrimination has occurred even when it is highly unlikely. For example, when credit applications are scored by computer (where race is not entered). Almost always this is an Al Sharpton racially motivate thing.

Interesting to see it working in the direction of the white folks, but I doubt we'll see Reverends Al & Jesse making a fevered appeal against the racism of Tata's hiring practices.

Couldn't resist the chance to be an "apostrophe-s Nazi" in a Godwin's Law chain.

We've learned from progressives that anytime the results are skewed relative to the the population someone is getting screwed.

I fully expect this divergence to be 100% acceptable to the left because "traditional victims" are coming out ahead and "unprosecuted rapists" are rightfully being denied their privilege.

Building codes generally allow homeowners to install a second layer of asphalt shingles over an existing layer of same. But once you're considering a 3rd layer, building codes generally require the entire roof to be stripped and redone.

Software should be the same way.

Management pressure forces even good developers to produce. Sometimes, against your better judgement, you have to go for the quick fix to meet a deadline (or not exceed a deadline by too much). Or, developers make a proof-of-concept or prototype, and management says "ship that".

Once management has its grubby hands on existing codebase, it ignores the accrued technical debt, poo-poos developers warnings to rewrite some stuff that was thrown together in the heat of battle, and never funds general background cleanup tasking.

Management does not believe in bit-rot.

How much will radio stations charge the artists for advertising their music so that people buy their songs?

More dishonest than trying to use the current drought as proof of AGW?

I wasn't trying to use this to dispute AGW theories, just pointing out that AGW-theorists will almost certainly use the current drought as proof of AGW when it instead appears to be a reversion to the norm.

"The extreme atmospheric conditions associated with California's crippling drought are far more likely to occur under today's global warming conditions than in the climate that existed before humans emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases." [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/drought-climate-change-092914.html]

"Record California Drought Linked to Climate Change
Rising temperatures, not low precipitation, may be to blame for the West’s severe dry spell, Stanford researchers say." [http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/02/record-california-drought-linked-to-climate-change]

Increasing temperatures are projected to further reduce snowpack, which will lead to reduced streamflows, especially in the spring.

Springtime precipitation is likely to decrease significantly, making it more difficult to meet water demands during the summer, [2] when conditions are typically the driest.
Climate change will likely stress groundwater-based systems and result in decreased groundwater recharge. [3]
While severe droughts are already part of the Southwest climate, human-induced climate change will likely result in more frequent and more severe droughts with associated increases in wildfires. [2]
Projected temperature increases, river-flow reductions, dwindling reservoirs, and rapid population growth will increase the competition for water resources across sectors, states, tribes, and even between the United States and Mexico. This could potentially lead to conflicts. [http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/southwest.html#impactswater]

The last 150 years or so in Cali have actually been abnormally wet, similar to the wet period between two century-plus drought period 2000 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07...

BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.

The study involved trees at four places: Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the West Walker River and Osgood Swamp. Dr. Stine's tree-ring analysis found that live trees had covered dry beds of lakes, streams and swamps for overlapping periods of 50, 100, 141 and 220 years and that these "lowstand" periods were clustered in two major dry spells separated by a century-long wet period. "Epic drought," he wrote in Nature, is "the only plausible explanation for the site-to-site contemporaneity of the stumps."

Calling the current period a "drought" is contingent upon assuming the rainfall pattern of the last 150 years or so is normal. Research seems to indicate that the last 150 years were abnormally wet and that Cali climate is usually much drier. Doesn't matter though, as the current drought plays into the AGW narrative, because "climate change".

"California's current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state's recorded rainfall history. But scientists who study the West's long-term climate patterns say the state has been parched for much longer stretches before that 163-year historical period began.

And they worry that the "megadroughts" typical of California's earlier history could come again.

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.

"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.

Looking back, the long-term record also shows some staggeringly wet periods. The decades between the two medieval megadroughts, for example, delivered years of above-normal rainfall -- the kind that would cause devastating floods today.

The longest droughts of the 20th century, what Californians think of as severe, occurred from 1987 to 1992 and from 1928 to 1934. Both, Stine said, are minor compared to the ancient droughts of 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320.