...and someone else will take his place.

No, they value the fact that you just can't stay in business when your out of pocket cost is $28/hour for a $10/hour job that earns the business maybe $15/hour in billable labor (and remember, there's also overhead to pay before you can even think about profit).

The business owners I've talked to would rather NOT hire illegals, because there's also an unreliability factor (90% can't be counted on to show up every day) and a quality control factor (most are less qualified than you'd really want), but when it's hire the illegal or go out of business thanks to the mandated costs of legal labor... well, I don't like it either, but I understand why it happens.

"But if they bettered themselves, they would not be picking produce for sub-subsistence wages, now would they? So those poor farmers would still have to ship in exploitable people..."

Uh, no. Used to be every generation of our own as-yet-unskilled kids did this work. We'll never run out of a next generation of kids.

And I suspect those "exploited" people would tell you it's a better living than they made in the old country -- otherwise, why come here in the first place?

That's an interesting insight (I hadn't thought of that, thanks!), and I think you're right about welfare making it just as easy, and about as profitable, to not work at all... but the work still has to be done, so...

I've sometimes thought that if we had "national service", it should involve working these types of seasonal jobs, as a means of getting the work back into American hands.

I think you'll find the correlation is not with a higher minimum wage, but with the total cost per employee as imposed by the state. Frex, in California, wages are only about 30% of the mandated cost of each employee. The other 70% is payroll taxes, workman's comp, insurance, and the like.

That 70% is what an illegal labor force saves you, a cost far more significant than any minimum wage increase.

In fact, in some areas illegal laborers make more than minimum wage, because having ducked out of that 70%, the employer can afford to pay more than they would otherwise, and do so to attract a better grade of illegal worker. The illegal worker thereby earns significantly more take-home pay than he could earn as a "legal" worker. (This is common in the construction trade, for instance.) Not only that, but the illegal worker takes home his entire paycheck, minus no deductions or taxes.

Per the last stats I saw, hardly anyone earning minimum wage is "supporting a family". 80-90% of minimum wage jobs are held by supplemental earners (second job or teenager in the same household as a primary wage-earner who gets more than minimum wage). So the notion that we're starving families via the current minimum wage is bogus. Nor have min.wage increases in the past made any difference, for the same reason.

And before you accuse me of being one of those fat cats who just don't give a shit -- as a small business owner, my income rarely exceeds the minimum wage. Hey, let's legislate =me= a better income while you're at it!

"The presumption in the post is that the causality is that increasing the minimum wage causes employment increases. What if the causality goes the other way?"

I had the exact same question. I'd guess those states where the causality is as per TFA may be driven by regional costs, like basic living in the SF Bay and Puget Sound areas -- where if you're going to have entry-level or service workers at all, they have to make an increased minimum wage or they simply can't afford to live there, not even 3 families to a hut. And those regions are such a majority of the state's population as to completely skew the results. Maybe things get better in S.F. and meanwhile the whole Central Valley starves... observationally, this seems to be the case; small businesses are folding all through the minor population areas of California.

But otherwise, I'd expect prosperity and profit opportunity comes first, followed by competitive and rising wages (for a sterling example, see the North Dakota oil patch).

They may have more money, but do they have more spending power? Probably not, since in my observation, prices as driven by business costs, being cumulative of all costs, tend to increase faster than wages. And either a business raises prices to cover expenses, or they go out of business (which of course puts some people out of work).

More interesting would be minimum wage vs cost of living. Every time I've priced anything from Australia, I've been shocked at how much more expensive everything is (typically 2-3x the same item in the U.S.)

Labor isn't worth an arbitrary value. It is worth some fraction less than the value it brings the employer (no one is going to hire workers at a loss; the whole reason you hire workers is to produce sufficient value to generate profit). It's amazing how the same people who don't grok this are all over the Big Media industry for pricing their goods above their demonstrable value, leading to the "Pirate Bay Economy".

Or maybe not. Linked from TFA:

http://www.cato.org/publicatio...

Chapman's apple-planting was never about the fruit (nor did TFA go into it). What it was really about was CIDER -- hard cider in areas that didn't yet raise enough barley for beer, or lacked the quality of soil for grain crops, frex in rocky areas like the Appalachians. Beer (which then meant thick stuff with a lot of nutritional value) and cider are how you preserve grain and fruit when you don't have secure dry storage or refrigeration (not that fruit keeps very well at its best). That the end product contains alcohol, well, that was a side benefit.

If there were master keys the Apple process to retrieve court ordered data would not take 4 months and $1,000.

There is a huge caveat here:

You can only do this if you have the keys from a computer you have sync'd with previously. That only happens if you enter your passcode then see the "Trust this Computer" prompt on a computer that has iTunes installed and you click "Trust" at the prompt. That creates a set of sync keys that the iOS device will then accept to access the various services.

Some of the stuff he complains about is only enabled for devices used for development or if the device is enrolled in enterprise provisioning. As far as I'm aware, Apple requires that the company purchase the device on the company account to support over the air enrollment in this system so it wouldn't affect personal devices. Even for USB connected devices, you must enter the password/passcode to allow the device to be visible to MDM tools in the first place. Even enabling development mode requires entering the password/passcode.

The one main point he brings up (which I agree with) is Apple needs to provide a way to see the list of computers on your device and remove them.

There are some other more theoretical issues here that Apple should address, but no your iPhone is not running a packet sniffer and will not hand over files to anyone who connects. If your device isn't provisioned for enterprise and has never connected to a PC to sync (the vast majority of iOS devices these days) then as far as I can tell, none of the issues he found are of any use whatsoever.

"Fat AGnus", not "Fat ANgus", like you typed. Googling that will get you, I suspect, pictures of large cattle instead of BBW porn and custom silicon.

It's a small part, but it's a part. I think Snowden has done his fair share of trying to inform laymen and stir up giving-a-fuck. If he wants to switch to working on tech, he could accomplish nothing and still come out far ahead of the rest of us. ;-)

The existence of a decent open-source router can't do much against a U.S. National Security Letter.

While we certain should care enough to force our government to stop being our adversary, there will always nevertheless be adversaries. You have to work on the tech, too. Even if you totally fixed the US government, Americans would still have to worry about other governments (and non-government parties, such as common criminals, nosey snoops, etc), where you have no vote at all. You will never, ever have a total social/civic solution which relies on, say, 4th Amendment enforcement to keep your privacy. I'm not saying your chances are slim; I'm saying they're literally 0%.

Furthermore, getting our tech more acceptable to layment acually would correct some of the problems inherent with NSLs, improving the situation even in a we-still-don't-give-a-fuck society. If you do things right, then the person they send the NSL to, is the surveillance target. The reason NSLs (coercion with silence) works is that people unnecessarily put too much trust into the wrong places.

For example, Bob sends plaintext love letters to Alice, so anyone who delivers or stores the love letters, can be coerced into giving up the contents. OTOH if they did email right, then if someone wanted to read the email Bob sent to Alice, they'd have to visit Bob or Alice. That squashes the most egregious part of NSLs, where the victim doesn't even get to know they're under attack.

That's true whether we're talking about email, or even if Bob and Alice get secure routers and VPN to each other. One of them gets the NSL ordering them to install malware on their router.