No one should ever be keeping your credit card number without your explicit permission.

Which is actually a good thing for the state in question. People's incomes are divided up proportionally typically between shelter, living costs, and savings. That is, a low income family will generally spend 50% of their income of shelter, and 50% on living. A middle income will typically spend 33% of their income on shelter, 33% on living, and 33% will be saved etc. This is independent of the actual absolute wage they get, as you rightly say.

The key though is that that 33% saved by the middle income family will be a larger absolute amount, which will give them more opportunity to move to lower average income areas in later life, and have a higher quality of life.

It is in a state's interest to have high inflation, as long as it's not extreme. Inflation is what makes that state's citizens better off than the neighbouring one.

No, it's simple - by raising the minimum wage, they also raised the spending power of the people in the state, increasing the profitability of the local companies, and driving growth. Most of the companies that will have had to raise their wages significantly are the very large out of state companies like McDonalds, who will remain there whatever. Thus, no jobs really are lost due to the fast food chains moving out, but jobs are created by the increased spending power of the people who work at McDonalds.

Long story short, the increased minimum wage took money from McDonalds' off shore tax avoidance fund, and put it into the state.

The problem with smoking is not that it harms your health, it's that it harms other people's health, and makes other people's environment less pleasant to be in. That's why smoking is (typically) banned in public places, or near public buildings, but not banned in the comfort of your own home (that said, even there, it can have severe impacts on children/other members of your family).

Notably though, you won't see anyone trying to claim that you don't need to be good at maths to be good at physics though ;). Mostly because physics is a more mature field, and they all recognise by now that it is applied maths, and requires you to get the maths right.

The problem is, you've actually used maths every day in your career, you just haven't realised it. When you are programming, you are by definition doing maths - programming is a branch of discrete applied maths.

Actually knowing the theory of discrete applied maths obviously makes you better at doing discrete applied maths.

Bullshit, the forms you need to fill in when you submit your H1-B application require you to provide listings of similar jobs, and how much you pay them. I'm from the UK, but I live in the US, under an H1-B, hence knowing what you have to fill in on the forms ;).

And yet, somehow, a figure picked out of GP's ass to cause a stir... is?

more than $140,000 a year, but less than $180,000 (plus various other things like stock etc)

And when you had to present evidence of how much a US citizen earned doing the same job, and why the salary you were paying these guys was at least as high, how did you prove that?

As a foreign worker in the US, I have no idea where you got that $15 an hour from. I can assure you, I'm paid substantially more than that.

Hmm, My immediate thought actually is that there's a fucking huge overlap. Print your own cornicing for your house... Print your own bath plugs... Print your own custom pipes for the awkward places that are unique to your house... Print your own parts to customise fixtures and fittings. The list is basically endless in the DIY landscape. The only worry home depot might have is that there might be too much overlap, and their sales of other things might drop!

What about this link says the design is better?

But notably, the 3% that actually pay worth a damn ;)

On the contrary, it means almost exactly the same thing. It means the centre of the OS, which manages the hardware. The fact that it was relatively naïve doesn't change the fact that it was a kernel.