It is a clever trick to equivocate "insurance" and "access". It is possible to self-insure - a completely rational, actuarially-sound, choice for many young people.

QFT. There were a couple of time intervals in my 20s when I went without insurance, but that didn't stop me from hitting up the quick-care clinic and the pharmacy on the couple of occasions that a cold (or flu or whatever it was) wouldn't go away in a reasonable amount of time with OTC treatment.

Too bad 404care makes that illegal now. Perhaps some "Irish democracy" is warranted as a response.

Since when does Android run on iOS devices? It doesn't?

At risk of being pedantic, there was a project years ago that got Android kinda-sorta working on the iPhone 3G. It was sluggish and drained your battery at an alarming rate because it didn't have any hardware-acceleration or power-management support, and it didn't let you make calls IIRC, but it was Android on an iPhone. It even set itself up in a dual-boot environment, so you could switch between Android and iOS. AFAIK, it was never developed into something that was actually usable. It also never ran on anything newer than the iPhone 3G.

Raising minimum wage *past a certain point* won't help anyone. If you've ever done basic calculus you will have come across the concept of oprimization - in the abstract for instance, finding where the derivative of a function that's some sort of concave-down curve crosses zero.

The minimum wage will be like that. If you graphed the spending power of the minimum wage people (their income minus their expenses) it will probably be some kind of curve. Starting from zero, the graph will slope upwards, until you hit a peak, and then it will slope downwards as the increased labour cost exceeds the benefit of higher wages.

We are probably somewhere to the left of this optimal point. The increase LA is making probably will move people closer to the optimal point. Increasing the minimum wage to $100/hr will move you to a point far to the right of the point at which the first derivative of the graph crosses zero.

Most farms are highly mechanised and the cost of labour makes up only a tiny part of the cost. (My dad's ex's family are farmers, and farms employ a tiny fraction of the number of people than they did even just 40 years ago).

That assumes 100% of the cost of a product is labour costs.

In reality this is not true. In your example, the wage might go from $60/day to $120/day, but the product will go from $60 before to $80 after. Competition will mean many businesses take lower profits rather than pass on the entire price increase, and virtually no products are 100% labour cost. While wages cannot be raised infinitely, there will be an optimal point, and I suspect we are well below that optimal point as other cities have already demonstrated.

Only if 100% of that product's cost is labour.

In reality this is rarely true, and competition means that businesses often can't pass on all of the cost increase - what it'll mean is businesses will make a little less profit, prices will increase by less than the increase in the minimum wage, and more people will have some sort of disposable income they can now spend on discretionary items. So sales increase.

Certainly you can't raise wages infinitely, and at some point you'll hit a peak, but I suspect we are a long way below that peak.

How about outlawing the teaching of any religion with a major text longer than 512 words ?

That being said, if Bernie Sanders ran with Elizabeth Warren, under any party, I would vote for them.

What kind of "libertarian" are you if you'd even entertain the notion of voting for either of those socialist jackwagons? You might as well turn in your guns, your money, and your freedom now, before they take them from you.

And they make the vast majority of the income and should pay the majority source of the income tax.

They already do:

Last week the Congressional Budget Office joined the IRS in releasing tax numbers for 2005, and part of the news is that the richest 1% paid about 39% of all income taxes that year. The richest 5% paid a tad less than 60%, and the richest 10% paid 70%. These tax shares are all up substantially since 1990, and even somewhat since 2000. Meanwhile, Americans with an income below the median -- half of all households -- paid a mere 3% of all income taxes in 2005. The richest 1.3 million tax-filers -- those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $365,000 in 2005 -- paid more income tax than all of the 66 million American tax filers below the median in income. Ten times more.

How much more would you like them to pay?

> This is just like the rush to judgment against the engineer, who everyone was ready to lynch after the accident;

Because in the vast supermajority of cases, it always comes back to operator error.

*looks at userids*

Yeah. He's new here. /pre-emptive UID-off.

I feel very stongly about

oh wait, shiny thing !

(Just a meta-comment, that I really had nothing to add so didn't respond, but I did read and process what you wrote, and didn't ask for elaboration and then just ignore it.

And surprising to hear you sound so strongly libertarian in your other reply (under your Net Neutrality JE)!)

I trained to be a IT professional.

All ways good in my working career until I hit 40 after that it was much harder to get a job.

If your training is only good for 20 years of work, the pay has to go way up.

Employers want cheap slave labor, not workers with wisdom, families, and an outside life.