Remember that minimum wage does not just affect minimum wage workers and their employers. It affects everyone who pays for services done by people working minimum wage

And it also affects everyone who sells good and services, since these minimum wage workers can now afford more. That's usually considered a good thing.

It all ripples through the economy. High minimum wages eventually make everything more expensive, not just a McDonald's hamburger.

Higher demand drives up prices, which drives up supply, which drives prices back down. The only thing that actually changes is what level of employment - utilization of production resources - results in the balance.

The bottom line is that if raising minimum wage from $7 to $700 will have a bad effect on the economy, then so will increasing $7 to $7.25.

Which makes just as much sense as saying that if rising price of a product from $7 to $7.25 will increase profits, then so will increasing it to $700.

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

States with the healthiest job situations were the first to increase minimum wage.

Economics: the "science" of fitting the data to whatever theory you happen to favour for ideological reasons.

Sadly, quite easy to conceive.

Without IAPs, what's the correct way to provide a limited playable version without offering the first episode without charge and offering additional episodes as IAPs?

Put the free limited and paid full versions in the store as separate apps.

But if you want some of the nasty shit, you usually know what you're about to get into. Not because school, teachers, priests or other fairy tale godmothers tell you about it. Because you effin' SEE what it does. Few people push their first time themselves. Most have some "help". From people who have been doing it for a while.

Or you mail order it from the Silk Road of the day. You keep on pushing the "dangerous drugs are used by desperate people" angle, but they're also used by people who simply want a thrill. And the fact is, at this point it's next to impossible to know how dangerous any particular substance really is. There's too much misinformation around. So people say "screw this", throw caution to the wind and do it.

And of course that's how it works with everything else, too. How many people still care about nutritional recommendations, which get revised every few years, rather than simply eating what they want?

Just take a moment to ponder how fucked up your life has to be that you consider a slow, agonizing death with a brief, occasional high a pleasant alternative.

And this is another thing: a typical drug-related death is not slow and agonizing, it's overdoze. Tobacco is the only exception I can think of, yet people who's lives are otherwise just fine smoke anyway.

If you are even slightly "high" you can not be pure and one with God.

Isn't it a cliche at this point that ancient prophets were high? Which, a more cynical person might think, is the real reason many drugs are prohibited: one possible effect is "seeing God". Whether such visions are "real" in some sense or not, they tend to prompt re-evaluation of one's life from a different - often larger - perspective. For someone who's life revolves around dominating others, what could be more frightening than for all the little plebs - or "consumers" - to suddenly see that the roles you've assigned them are, in fact, options to be chosen or discarded?

If Joe Sixpack sees God then Joe might start comparing that vision to Uncle Sam or the Invisible Hand and ask himself if these things, for all intents and purposes treated as divinely ordained in our society, are really good matches. He might even start to question whether memorizing answers to trivia questions is a good model for religion, and whether it makes sense to assume that the Creator of the Universe is obsessed with gay sex. And that might lead to some uncomfortable questions about who various religious leaders actually serve.

Well, it's also a problem if it harms your health, and I am forced to pay for your heathcare!

I am forced to pay for law and order, and the cost goes up when various jackasses stir up hatred of jews/blacks/immigrants/whatever. So should we ban free speech?

If it was entirely YOUR responsibility to pay for your health care (as it should be), then it wouldn't be a problem.

I am also forced to pay the opportunity costs of potential customers and employees being less capable due to losing their health. And, more generally, the opportunity costs associated with every stupid ideology that insists every man is an island in the sea of economy that exists independent of them.

And a lot more people would voluntarily give up smoking!

I have a hard time imagining anyone caring more about the costs of treating their lung cancer than about getting that cancer in the first place.

Wrong multiverse theory. And, indeed, wrong experiment. In fact, the wrongitudinal level of your post is so extreme that it should really be on K5.

It's testable, it's measurable, it's repeatable, it's capable of prediction. it's either the simplest model that meets these requirements AND produces correct predictions, OR it is not.

Therefore it is science.

Maths is a science, for the reasons given in the first line. Science is a mathematical system, because ultimately there is nothing there, just numbers. (See: Spinons and other quasiparticles.)

There are many multiverse theories and they can all be tested.

Many Worlds: The theory that there are no real "probability waves" in QM, merely overlapping realities that diverge at the time the "waveform" collapses.

This is an easy one. Entangled particles operate using the same physics as wormholes. If one of the entangled pair is accelerated to relativistic velocities, say in a particle accelerator, they will not exist in the same relative timeframe. It would seem to follow that if Many Worlds is correct, one of the particles will be entangled with multiple instances of the other particle, which would imply that every state would be seen at the same time. If the options are left spin and right spin, you'd see an aggregate state of no spin even if no spin isn't a physical possibility. And seeing something that doesn't exist either means you're in a Phineas and Ferb cartoon or Many Worlds is correct.

Foam Universe: This is the sort described in the article.

Yes, impact studies are possible, but they're only meaningful if you have enough data and you can't possibly know if you do. You're better off trying to make a universe, preferably a very small one with a quantum black hole at the throat of the bridge linking this universe to that one. What you will observe is energy apparently vanishing, not existing in any form - mass included, then reappearing as the bridge completely collapses.

Orange Slice Universe: This conjectures that multiple, semi-independent, universes formed out of the same big bang and will eventually converge in a big crunch.

It doesn't matter that this universe would expand forever, left to its own devices, because the total mass is the total mass of all the slices. Although they are semi-independent, they interact at the universe-to-universe level. In this scheme, because there's a single entity (albeit partitioned), leptons cannot have just any of the theoretical states. The state space must also be partitioned. Ergo, if you can't create a state for an electron (for example) that it should be able to take, this type of multiverse must exist.

Membrane-based Universe: This postulates that universes are at an interface between a membrane and something else, such as another membrane.

However, membranes intersecting with the universe are supposed to be how leptons are formed, in this theory. The intersection will be governed by the topology of the membranes involved (including the one the universe resides on), which means that lepton behaviour must vary from locality to locality, since the nature of the intersections cannot vary such as to perfectly mirror variations in the shape of the membrane the universe is on. Therefore, all you need to do is demonstrate a result that is perfectly repeatable anywhere on Earth but not, say, at the edge of the solar system.

Not everyone "gets" that advertising is needed. In fact, click-through revenue is so miniscule that it would be more cost-effective to not saturate the Internet with ads, or indeed have ads on the Internet at all. The Internet had no advertising at all until two Utah lawyers invented spam and made a fortune promoting their book on Internet advertising. That was around 5 years after the Internet was privatized.

Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising. As advertising on a site goes up, the time I spend there goes down. When in England, I watch BBC almost exclusively, ITV stuff is relegated to whenever it comes out on DVD. That has been the case for much of my life. When moving to the US, I abandoned television entirely simply because of the adverts.

Linux is one of the top Operating Systems and gained almost all of that reputation and awesomeness before IBM started their TV ads.

So if products don't need advertising, the Internet doesn't need advertising and users hate advertising, then who the hell is this "everyone" who "understands" the need?

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

The only reason that I can come up with for this focus on fuel cells is that Toyota and the other existing car manufacturers want to see a hydrogen distribution system put in place so that they can continue producing internal combustion engines using hydrogen instead of the fuel cells themselves. I think these car companies see their long term intellectual property investment as being in the internal combustion engines and drive train technology. My guess is that they fear the drive trains becoming commodity parts (how many ways are there to make an A/C electric motor) and then they are left simply styling auto bodies and being fashion statements...

I think that fear is unwarranted, as Tesla has shown just how differentiated an electric car can be and how much innovation there can be in the car cabin and features themselves... But history has shown that old companies cannot always change even when they recognize that a disruption is coming. And oh boy is one coming...

Tesla = iPhone
Gas cars = Blackberry at best

I am surprised at how strenuous the naysayers are and how much they seem to lack even basic technical curiousity about this new technology.

No one likes to admit they're wrong, and the more strongly you've committed to a position, the stupider you'll feel when the evidence becomes undeniable. That's why, at some point, it always stops being about issues and starts being about persons: people are not defending their position anymore, they're defending themselves. It's one of the more annoying failure modes of human intellect.

I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.

Who are you going to scam if you're the only one in a market? Yourself?

What would be really nice is a CAPTCHA for phones. So if someone calls me, they get a message that says "press seven if you are a human", and my phone only rings if they pass the test. It would also need to have a whitelist, since I get legitimate robo-calls from my kids' school.

Or just plain whitelist: if the calling number is on my phonebook, the call gets accepted and the phone rings, otherwise it's silently ignored.