Austerity failed. Give up. And there is no inflation anywhere that didn't adopt the notion.
The minimum wage was about 18/hour in 1966, and the republic did not fall. Some inflation took off later, but that was Vietnam and OPEC which blew our heads off.
It is possible to pay a decent wage and survive as a business - if you don't demand infinitely growing profits. Inflation and profit slowing is the bugaboo of the wealthy, not the giant group of the people known as the nation. Germany kept its decent paying jobs, and is one of the powerhouses of the planet. They didn't worship corporate profit increases over all else. Balance is the key.

in 1966, the minimum wage was about 18 an hour, adjusted for inflation. The world did not end. Actually, we were doing pretty damned well.

Rich people get treated better, news at 10.

Or, McDonalds could make a bit less profit. Profits are not guaranteed. They could clear three billion rather than four billion a year, and do just fine. On the other hand, the free market would explode as people could *buy* things again. If they can't understand the concept of limiting their profits, we can tax them until they get the message.

Slashdot is news about Stuff that Matters. If you want pure tech, go to the tech section. The minimum wage matters to all of us; poverty drags everyone down. The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation since it was instituted in 1966, would be around $18 an hour. We've been intentionally pretending we don't understand math for fifty years as people fell back into poverty.

Dead is dead.

Too many points of failure. Too complex a system.

Other malfunctions have happened in other plane systems, one resulting in the plane shaking the passengers around like dice. All three computers received the same input and made the same mistake. The question is: can we understand that we've overcomplexified systems to the point that they are too unstable to use? We made the same mistake with cars and roadways in the past century once; we kept doubling down on the system's complexity as the carnage mounted, and to this day, we think the answer is better cars rather than toss the original solution out and make something simpler. We're addicted to complexity. MAkes more money, for one thing.

Airbus created the first commercial craft that were completely computer controlled. QED: they go boom often, and we hear about them often. It's not the brand, it's the belief that computers are the best and only solution in every system case, voting machines to cars to pacemakers to trucks to planes. Those systems will fail spectacularly because the paradigm is to treat them like PCs, updated frequently to fix endless streams of errors, when they should have been working correctly in the first and only place. Computers are "infinite" machines - they can be operated in an infinite number of ways, and that is really bad news when you are trying to control a simple and finite process. We are over-complexifying systems because we can. Every nail gets the same hammer. Bad engineering and it will fail.The question is whether the computer-addicted generation will be able to understand what the problem is.

An anecdote can be defined as "evidence we don't want to hear about."

Hyper-complex software, sensor arrays, and mechanical systems will fail. They will always fail; humans cannot anticipate all errors, all possible combinations of factors that can cause death and destruction. Humans can't build autonomous complex systems (no, really, they can't. We've barely started making such things) that can't fail. In this case, can't say that a human pilot or a mechanical backup would have made a dfference, but as the world goes forward, gleefully firing truck drivers and converting cars into remote-controllable computer complexes, such things will be so commonplace as not to be worth reporting. Which will feed back our certainty that all is well. It isn't.

pays their full-time workers so little that they can't afford food or a place to live without welfare and foodstamps?

Could you please provide a source for this claim? In 2014, the Wal-Mart blog fisked a hit piece that was claiming things similar to what you just claimed, and pointed out that the average hourly wage at Wal-Mart was $12.91 per hour (and that is specifically not including highly-paid management).

http://blog.walmart.com/fact-check-the-new-york-times-the-corporate-daddy

How does it help me that my tax dollars have to subsidize Walmart employees

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/13/apologies-but-welfare-payments-to-employees-are-not-subsidies-to-walmart-and-mcdonalds/

Wal-Mart makes about 3% profit. In comparison, Apple Computer makes about 24% profit. Additionally, Wal-Mart has a more ethnically diverse set of employees than Apple Computer has. You seem to hate Wal-Mart; do you hate Apple Computer even more?

https://www.aei.org/publication/every-month-walmart-gets-one-profit-day-from-its-sales-while-apple-gets-7-5/

Also, low-income people like to shop at Wal-Mart because the low prices are a benefit. Some economists have written papers attempting to estimate the impact.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/11/walmart-destroys-jobs-yes-but-the-benefits-go-to-consumers-not-the-top/
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11809

So, to summarize: Wal-Mart pays a lot of taxes, employs a lot of people at an average hourly rate 78% over the US federal minimum wage, and benefits the poor by helping them spend less on the things they need.

I just don't understand all the Wal-Mart hate.

RAM prices stayed high long after production costs dropped. It took government action - overseas, I recall- to punish the collusion and price-fixing and force the prices to drop. There ain't no such thing as a free market.

Disney not two weeks ago fired their IT department and replaced them with H1B workers. They just didn't want to pay American salaries to American workers. The arguments is over.