I'm with you, if, and only if, these people get that information (and I mean information, not the usual scaremongering drugs-are-baaaaad bullshit) to make an informed decision AND I don't get to pay for it if they make a wrong one.

That provided, I'm with you. All the way.

I'm not telling them what to do. I only tell them what will happen when they do it. Whether they do it or not is their business.

I run a business (more than one), I woke up one day and said: I have some savings, why don't I build a system and try and sell it. I built my first system all by myself, found a client, didn't sell it but offered it to them for free, getting support money from that still and used that to advertise my services. Found another client and managed to secure a contract for building another system, hired some people, trained them and worked on that system. While I was working on that system I was making enough money to pay off some debts and get some more people, who I then put to work on my own products before I had a single client for those products at all.

I will never do anything 'benevolently', that makes 0 sense to me, I am in this to build my own stuff the way I want to and to make money off of it, if I am not making money off of it it is my problem, since I am spending money on building it, which is mostly salaries, rent, utilities and taxes. I don't need lectures on why people do what they do in business and I know precisely why I hire people.

I would prefer to hire NOBODY at all, that's my preference because I don't need the expense and the drama. However to be more productive I have to add more hands and heads to myself, I see employees as tools that I use to bring my vision to life. I have 0 customers for some of my systems and I must advertise to find those clients, but the money is already spent, the employees already got their salaries, the money came out of my own pocket - my savings.

'Trickle down' has nothing to do with 'giving rich people more money', that's socialist baloney, it has to do precisely with gathering capital and using the capital to invest into more production. Talking about 'trickle down' and 'giving rich money' is the exact economic illiteracy that I was talking about.

Poverty happens due to lack of production. I am not a robot in your replicator dream, I produce the way I do it because I want to get more money than when I was working as a contractor. I spend my time and my savings to produce, I see profits as way to increase production, not as a way to eat more expensive chocolate and drive a bigger car. Poverty happens due to poverty in thinking, which is what leads to overall poverty in society. Poverty in thinking is the way of thinking that includes 'stealing from the rich to give to the poor' - THAT is poverty of thinking.

Forget tax breaks, there shouldn't be any tax on work and on production at all. You tax something, you get less of it. Inflation is a tax on work. Business regulations are tax on work. Income, payroll, dividend, capital gains and other wealth taxes are taxes on work. None of them should exist, the government structured around taxing work will destroy the economy as has happened time and again, not just over decades, but over the entire existence of human life on this planet.

The rich stay rich by letting their money work for them. As to the USA economy right now it has nothing to do with production at all, it is all inflation based and it is mostly fake, it doesn't exist. USA is an unproductive economy, that cannot pay for the imports that it consumes with its own export of productive output, instead it exports inflation (money printing) and war. Disparity between the rich and the poor exists and will exist always and in the times of Rockefeller it was much more pronounced than anything we can see today.

Compared to Rockefeller the wealthy of today are paupers. By the time he died he was worth over 600,000,000,000 dollars in modern money, nobody is worth that much today at all and yet the economy was growing, the unemployment was minimal and the productive output was staggering, allowing the USA to become the economic powerhouse of the world over the 19th century after being an afterthought to Europe for centuries.

'Trickle down economics' is economics of savings and reinvestment and not of consumption at all, so yes, all of those people who use it are economic illiterates, they think in terms of spending money on the consumables instead of spending money on investment to grow money, which is what grows the economy *in normal free market economy*, which is what is happening in China today, not in the USA. You think there is no income disparity in China? Ha! Yet that economy is hot and growing and will keep growing, this century is Chinese and that is that and not American at all, this century is the century of free markets disguised as 'communism' and this is also the century of central planning failure disguised as 'American capitalism'.

Minimum wage does not protect the most vulnerable, it hurts the most vulnerable, minimum wage is minimum ability, it will displace the most vulnerable from the work force entirely.

If the government is in business of stealing and subsidising then businesses will be getting in on that game. In the USA government shouldn't be in that business, it shouldn't be stealing from anybody and subsidising anybody, it is government power that people want to use for their own reasons. If I had strong connection to a government that steals and subsidises I would absolutely pull the blanket my way, it's the most rational thing ever. The point is that there shouldn't be a blanket if it is made out of theft and it is.

'Trickle down' economics means that as a person gathers capital by being more productive by building a business the effect of his savings and re-investment creates more prosperity, which it obviously does, that's how new businesses built cities around themselves, that's how fundamental and infrastructural businesses allowed satellite businesses to be created (case in point AWS or Google API allows tons of companies to exist by giving them tools that were produced with the investment of those giants, same is true of every major industry which caused explosion of business around themselves, from food and energy to transportation and healthcare).

What you don't understand is that in order for 'the bone' to exist somebody has to produce it and by implying that the 'bone is given' you completely side step the fact that it had to be produced to exist. No, no bone should be 'given' to anybody, no, that's not a problem of any particular business, but it is a much broader economic and societal problem of theft and redistribution based on violent force of the State.

What takes time? When was the last time a politician failed to do something for the sake of expediency if they thought it would increase their ratings/power? It's not a conspiracy at all when it is this obviously true.

Preach it, brother! MARX, LENIN and CHE will live forever!

Yeah, it's just if the stupid business owners simply understood that if they paid their employees more right now they would be making so much more money from their business, if only they could do a simple business optimisation as well as Los Angeles politicians, who are after all politicians, so they must know a thing or two about running a successful business.

Those stupid fucking idiots, running their stupid fucking businesses, all business should be public property anyway, it all should be centrally ran by the government in the most efficient manner that would totally eliminate the wasteful competition and totally reduce all prices like all publicly provided services do. Public work at public prices and public quality, that should be the slogan. Those fucking morons trying to run their stupid fucking businesses should be thrown to jail for all this abuse that they are dishing out by daring to hire people and pay them the so called fucking 'market rate'.

The only unfortunate thing here is that the $15 minimum wage is not in effect right away, like tomorrow. Instead it is stretched in time over 5 years making it very very hard to connect the dots and see the obviously impending improvements in the economy right away. Why do these politicians not want to reap the reward of producing a much better economic outcome while they are still in the office? Hmm, they must really feel magnanimous, letting the ones who will come after them to enjoy the fruits of this particular labour.

Absolutely, and the very reason this law stretches the increase over 5 years is specifically so that the voters will blame something and somebody else for the worsening economic conditions, because for the mostly economically illiterate people (vast majority of the population) it is much easier to connect dots if they happen close in time from each other than if they stretch over a longer time period.

Poverty cannot be legislated away. Poverty can only be produced away. Did anybody here ask themselves a simple question, why is the government raising minimum wage to 15USD/hour BY 2020 AND NOT TOMORROW?

Because they KNOW it will hurt the economy, but it is a populous move (designed specifically for the economically illiterates, just like you), to make it look like the government does something, while the horrible economic effects of the actual increase will be disguised by being stretched in time over the next 5 years.

"Trickle down" economics means economics of savings and investment and "job creator theory" means that investments and businesses create jobs. That is how money is made, by creating it by production and production is business. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production, nothing else and without something being produced first it can never be consumed at all.

- the part where you are incapable of admitting of simply being wrong.

Corporations hire people, it doesn't matter in what 'role'. They purchase labour and thus they create jobs.

Corporations are customers of labour, but that's not what I am arguing about, I am very specifically pointing at your inability to follow your own logic.

When you said: corporations are not creating jobs and have never created jobs, you did not put any caveats there, saying that corporations actually always create jobs when they hire people because they are customers to labour.

I KNOW corporations create jobs, I run a corporation and I know what it means to buy labour thus creating jobs. You, on the other hand, talk out of both sides of your mouth.

I think organizing data and basic practical SQL should be now taught right after reading, writing and arithmetic.

something as simple as this:

table: student (id, name)
table: course(id, name)
table: student_course(student_id, course_id)

select sum(*), c.name from student s, course c, student_course sc where s.id=sc.student_id and c.id=sc.course_id group by c.name;

can provide perspective to math, to data, to understanding of the world. Learning to break down the world into concepts that can be named, expressed, related to each other, totalled, averaged, grouped. Showing a bit of set theory, joins, unions, etc.

But students lack much more than that, they lack understanding of real economics, real history, real politics and much more.

Seriously. With every teenager having a cellphone, complete with picture cameras and basically a pocket computer, teach them to keep their security tight. What happens with their data. What happens when they take pictures of themselves. And that the internet never forgets. How to keep their data secure. How to avoid being taken advantage of. And what problems they will run into when something is being abused. And how to react to it.

It is about the thing that will have, invariably, no matter what profession they decide for, the one skill they WILL need in terms of technology.

You think there's a shortage of rats in D.C.?

That's easy. Whenever the media need a new hype or pharma corporations need to get rid of stockpiled old antidote.