Really? I dont believe that at all. one should not be paid 20 buck an hour to pick apples, or take an order at mcdonalds, the job is not worth that much, if it were our food would cost double and we would be in the same boat. just because you now make 50 grand instead of 25 sounds good, but if the cost of everything goes up to match that change, whats the point??

So your argument is society must always have an oppressed, poverty-stricken underclass, reliant upon charity or welfare to survive ?

Free market capitalist system does not reward companies for maiming people, [...]

It does (and did) if there's money to be made from it.

Setting up minimum wage destroys opportunities for people with no skill sets, that's all it does, it doesn't provide anybody with "decent living" and it shouldn't. Decent living is provided by better jobs, but you have to find those better jobs in the first place and if you can never get a job to improve your skills, a low wage paying job, you are much less likely to find the next job that actually pays much more than a minimum wage does anyway.

Please tell us about the general skills someone learns in an unskilled job paying less than minimum wage, that they don't already have, that are required in a job paying minimum wage.

Whether a job is a 'liability' or not is also a question to the laws, many of which are also designed to destroy competition to the larger players in the field, those who donate money to the politicians. However checking oil and tire pressure and wiping your windshield and pumping your gas is a courtesy that can no longer be provided to you by the gas station, not because of liability, but because of the all the labour laws and inflation and government is the responsible party for all of it.

No, this is a lie.

That service can absolutely be provided, it's just that no-one is prepared to pay what it costs (in no small part because their incomes have been suppressed for thirty-plus years to facilitate ever-greater corporate profits).

Business model is not broken only due to artificial govt laws that do not operate in the free market but are there f9r political purposes.

All laws are artificial and do not operate in the free market.

If minimum wage was set tomorrow to 100 usd per hour by your logic it would mean that every business is broken, because near nobody can afford those labour prices.

No, this is what we call an excluded middle fallacy.

We (and this is a problem afflicting most western countries) don't have high unemployment because people are being paid too much. We have high unemployment because there's not enough work for them to do. Sure, you can get rid of the safeguards around things like minimum wage and worker safety, which will drop the unemployment numbers, but all you've done is engaged in a slightly different form of rigging the numbers. The core problem remains.

Employment for the sake of employment is not the goal. You can do that tomorrow by reinstating slavery and having people move piles of rocks around (which is, basically, what people who think there shouldn't be a minimum wage are arguing for). Creating wealth and increasing living standards for everyone is the goal.

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.

Nonsense and propaganda. You cannot state anything until those increases actually kick in and are in effect for some time.

Actually I feel pretty confident stating that if more people have more money, economic activity will increase.

Minimum wage is actually minimum ability.

No, minimum wage is setting a floor on living standards.

It cannot extract non-existing money from small business, but it can prevent people with abilities that are below minimum wage from finding jobs.

If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle.

Economic activity is increased by more people having more money to spend ?

Inconceivable !

I don't think it's as simple as Amazon is good or Amazon is evil. Amazon is powerful, and that needs watching.

Now I have a number writer friends, one of whom is published both with traditional imprints like TOR and with Amazon's new in-house publishing imprints. She has good things to say about Amazon's imprints, but one thing you have to take into account is that nobody will stock your book *but* Amazon if you publish with them. That's giving up a lot, so they treat authors reasonably well. But that doesn't mean the corporation actually cares about authors. Amazon needs reliable mid-list authors to make their publishing ventures a success, and by cutting out the middleman can afford generous royalties. But if Amazon succeeds in putting a stake in the heart of traditional publishing, I wouldn't care to speculate on what will happen to authors.

Nor should what traditional publishers do for authors be underestimated. I have friends who are successful indy writers, but it's not like being a writer, it's more like running a small publishing house yourself. They hire story editors, copy editors and artists, and manage promotion and publicity. It's a lot of work; that plus actually writing pretty much precludes a day job. It's not for everyone.

It's a lot like being an engineer. Engineers are smart people who usually have a lot of insight into the companies they work for, but that doesn't mean that most engineers want to run businesses. Some do, but most would rather have other people take care of that stuff so they can concentrate on what they feel they're best at.

Many writers choose the indy market because it's the only way they'll ever get published. They just dump their manuscript on the market without editing, design or promotion and hope for the best. They rarely succeed. Others choose the indy route because they thrive on running and controlling their own small business, the way some engineers step naturally into the role of entrepreneur. They're well positioned for the future. But most writers need support to reach their full potential.

As mentioned earlier, this government was not voted in, the previous one was voted out.

Exactly.

You've only got to look at where the votes went, and the approvals ratings of the current Government (and especially Abbot) to see that.

Years ago, when static electricity was bad news for computers, I had the idea for a "data processing shoe" that would have a little conductive ribbon that would drag along the floor and ground out static electricity. Such a thing is of course no longer needed, but given the apparent popularity of data breeches these days maybe the concept could be resurrected as a fashion statement.

We got demoed this 6 months or so ago.

I still fail to see what this buys you over a bunch of regular blades or rackmounts running your virtualisation platform of choice.

I dunno. Has Obama come out in favor of it yet?

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.

Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?

Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.

That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.