Walmart is the 900-kb gorilla

Note: THERE IS NO WALMART IN SEATTLE. The closest ones are in Bellevue.

Care to place a wager?

Seattle currently has a 16.6% unemployment rate for youth age 16-24 (based on this data.

I'd be glad to wager that by 2020, the unemployment rate for youth age 16-24 in Seattle will be higher than 16.6%, with $50 going to a charity of your choice.

pay a local teen $20 every 2 weeks to mow my lawn,

Did you pay Social Security? Because if not, you are probably breaking the law. You may actually also be breaking the law if the teen did not have a work permit.

Because wages are generally only a fraction of the cost of goods sold, raising wages doesn't result in anywhere near as much of an increase in prices

The natural experiment is the fracking lands of North Dakota, where labor is so scarce that the market wage for McDonalds starts at $10.50/hour and they get a $300 signing bonus - but the Big Macs cost $1 more than usual.

That's the nature of capitalist society, capitalism naturally breeds inequality. Marx's analysis of capitalism still holds true.

On the other hand, Communism kills tens of millions of people through starvation (Ukrainian "famine", Great Leap Forward, etc.). So you gotta make the call if you want the poor to starve or to just be unequal.

To employers, slavery is a proper wage since nothing beats free.

To employers, the proper wage is the market clearing wage where employees accept the wages offered by the employer. For every employer who pays below the market wage, another pays the market wage, and the worker choses the employer who pays more.

Unless of course you decide to distort the market by having price controls, such as the minimum wage, which econ 101 says the employer has to either raise prices (possibly reducing overall sales) or employ more productive people. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

lack of a minimum living wage means that the taxpayer is forking out vast quantities of money to subsidise businesses by allowing them to employ people without paying them a living wage.

Without those subsidies, those people might have to study in high school and go to college in order to make a living...terrifying!

But instead, with the $15 minimum wage, we will have businesses only hiring the people who are productive at $15 per hour, and leave everyone else completely unemployed.

Australia has a minimum wage of about $15 right now. And the unemployment rate is less than 6%.

Those 20 and under can make less. 16-year-olds in Australia have a minimum wage of $6.03 AUD.

If you lay people off because the minimum wage is raised, who takes over the work those people did?

You can chose to only hire people who are clearly more productive, take fewer chances on hiring less experienced people, or you can reduce fringe benefits (for example, now employees have to purchase their uniform, breaks are more enforced to stay to the limit of the law, no more free meal, etc.)

Besides if you have to raise your prices, likely you will have less business anyway.

AO-13 was not in geosynchronous orbit, but a highly elliptical orbit with apogee near geosync distance (40,000 km), but perigee much lower (2500 km). You worked the satellite at apogee because it basically hung in the air there, and then briefly whisked around the planet to quickly to track around perigee. Transmitters tended to be 25 watts, which is more than most hand-held devices.

Folks tended to use yagi antennas with at least 15 dB gain to work AO-13 at apogee (typically 10 directing elements, here is an image).

On the other hand, I've talked to ISS astronauts with a 5W handheld transceiver and a rubber duck antenna. ISS is only 370 km away, plus it "sees" less of the planet so there is less interference from other RF sources.

Rs12821256, genotype (C;C) has "2x higher likelihood of blond hair" according to SNPedia (based on earlier work), but this new article claims the G allele is associated with blonde hair. Not sure what that means...

Optical SETI is the way to go. A 10-meter diameter visible telescope has a gain 80 dB greater than that of the 300-meter Arecibo dish.

Current NIF lasers can deliver petawatts for nanoseconds, and could easily outshine the sun during their pulse if provided with a reasonably large telescope.

That is a key assertion, especially if broadened to, say, the top 20%. What is your source?

Here is some info:

61% of U.S. households will break into the top 20% of incomes (roughly $111,000) for at least 2 consecutive years.

39% of U.S. households will break into the top 10% of incomes (roughly $153,000) for at least 2 consecutive years.

5% of U.S. households will break into the top 1% of incomes (roughly $360,000) for at least 2 consecutive years.

That said, 20% of U.S. households will fall into poverty (roughly $23,850 for a family of 4) for at least 2 consecutive years..

Source info here.

But, even they try very hard to distance themselves from Iran, the land of the batshit crazy.

I just met a guy who claimed "Iranian" heritage. His (muslim) family left "Iran" in the 1800's, and moved to Lahore.

On the other hand, I live in a neighborhood with Jews most of which moved from the Islamic Republic of Iran shortly after they revolution. They call themselves "Persian".

As per Wikipedia, the term "Eran" is found to refer to Iran in a 3rd-century Sassanid inscription, meaning "Land of the Aryans".

On the other hand, the country has been known in the West as "Persia" from the Greeks "Persis", meaning land of the Persians. There are Persians in Iran, but not all Iranians are Persians. Some Iranians are Lurs, Ossetians, Kurds, Pashtuns, Balochs, and Tajiks.

In 1935, Reza Shah requested that the international community refer to the country as Iran.

So it is complex...

There was no union in North Carolina...you have to do what administration wants or you get fired at the end of the year.

Oh noes, you have to do what your boss says?

If the administrators were idiots, the solution is not to make it impossible to fire teachers for disobeying their bosses, the solution is to get non-idiot administrators.

In the free market, idiot bosses run their companies into the ground and they shut down. In public schools, idiot administrators keep getting to spend public funds and rarely get fired.