Really? Florida and Texas have quite low minimum wages across the US and very large illegal populations. Is there any evidence for this?

Anyone who has studied the labor market knows there are tons of studies showing that minimum wage increases in the amounts being considered are basically irrelevant to job growth or economic growth.

But a non-rigorous thought experiment is this : go look up how many jobs are minimum wage and then go look up the total wages earned at that level. The first is small, the second is miniscule relative to total income in the US. Slightly altering the second will not markedly modify overall income distributions (ie how much less will a rich person earn in real terms vs total earnings). Now go look at work hours reported at higher income groups after taxes went up a small amount. You'll find a change ~0. If that had no effect, there is no reason a much smaller change will someone have a larger effect.

Now you can at least say you have thought a bit about the issue as compared to offloading the thinking to your favorite talking head.

There are also rigorous studies done by many academics that agree the effect if existant, is tiny. If I was still in college with lexis Nexis I'd just post those.

Can you define a living wage? we would all do good to know what hurdle we are trying to surmount.

For example, given tax policy, a single adult on minimum wage at 40 hours a week earns about 1200 a month. Assuming medical for 100 a month(8% is a trigger under the ACA I think but I don't live in the US right now), is 1100 survivable with a small pot saved for emergencies?

The answer if it is just a single person is yes. My last year in college house sharing I paid 300 in rent, running costs of 300 in food, 100 in utilities, and 40 for a phone. That is well within those bounds. Its not a great life, but I had enough to go for a beer or a movie from time to time.

But this was suburban NC, not NYC. Should the federal minimum wage guarantee my ability to live in any city in the US? Then it needs to be 20 bucks an hour (Manhattan).

We need to decide if this is actually a federal minimum that caters to the 20th percentile or a number that must function for every American.

But this study is not adding anything new. It is long been studied and proven raises in the minimum wage are basically irrelevant to job growth or economic growth. I'm just asking if the number should support a single adult, a family of 4, and in what way.

absolutely untrue. his only signature achievement to go to the supreme court was upheld, and he had 2 years of an foolproof majority in congress. His policies not working is a complete measure of how poorly he constructed (or more realistically, allowed congress to construct with no input or leadership) them, not an inability to get them passed. The last president to pass this much legislation, especially major, economy impacting legislation, was FDR. His policies have had far reaching consequences in many areas, but he continues to complain that the lack of results is the "other side's fault". It's pitiful.

and just to be precise, I voted for him the first time around. His first 4 years were such a travesty I sat out the second one.

I'd bet you dollars to dimes if it wasn't so much cheaper to the employee and employer to have employer provided health insurance, it wouldn't happen. For me, the cost of employer provided health insurance is about 60-70% cheaper than getting it privately (at least when I was working for a large employer). Why? My marginal tax rate was right around 50% and they got insurance at a better rate than I could secure. So while it may have been a cost of about 8k to my employer, it was worth a solid 25k in pretax income to me.

Guess what, an f'ed up tax regime creates weird incentives. I'm not even getting into their incentives of giving you health insurance vs income (less severe, but still another added savings).

don't try to argue with a humanities major. all they have is the belief they can pull rank in some theoretical world. Leave them that, it's all they will ever have while scientists are actually out there contributing to the body of human knowledge.

where are the mod points when you need them....

I never cared much about the Turing test, but this explanation makes me want to go read his original papers on it.

but trying to play the slow kid isn't exactly working. He finished a PhD at 23! that, if nothing else, tells you just how fast he is. He may not be able to do long division in his head quicker than some, but in his areas of competence, he is an intellectual giant who ALSO happens to work harder than you.

Golf swing analysis. Good players would love this to check ball impact angles if the resolution was high enough.

I can't believe the first comment realizing sports applications are awesome was bowling!! What about baseball and golf? Those are much higher speed motions where people already pay obscene amounts for high frame rate video to fix swing mechanics.

Spoken like someone who either has never had a kid (might go into labor spanned 9 weeks for us, you'd know this if you were educated about it), is a ridiculous tight ass, or maybe has a wife who is a ridiculous bitch and is too whipped to realize how much his life sucks.

for pretty good reason. unlike a cell phone there isn't a brightly backlit screen but I can still get texts/updates/emails that may signal I should quietly excuse myself from the theater to take care of some personal business. It's even less invasive than a pager.

There are huge ways this can (and probably will at some point) be used to make technology less invasive to those around you and your life. I'd love to not interrupt a conversation to check if my wife just went into labor or needs me home ASAP while out having a beer with a friend. Or my friends who are doctors can get a low profile pop up that they are needed at the hospital rather than having to have their phone out.

we got involved in the ISS ages ago. First plans were in the 80s and Russia got involved in 1993 (first piece went up in 1998). And frankly, we are only not seriously talking about decommissioning the ISS because it ran so far over schedule. It should have been at end life before the shuttles.

just wondering, what in the world could you possibly be doing that was originally designed at 1/100,000th of optimal and relevant?

I mean, I've done this before. I had to generate all the legit ticker symbols for derivatives on futures, and just to understand the rules I wrote code for that. Now, I could have built a config file from that code that would have sped up the "generation" portion by 10,000x I'm sure. But the thing is, all it cost me was about 3 seconds on initialization of a process that required about 10 minutes to run. So for me, I didn't care as optimization in the guts of the calculations I was doing were far more important (i.e. at one point I was able to take the run time down from 20 minutes to 15 minutes earn on in dev, which was only a 50% speed increase on the relevant section, but far more important than a 10000x speed up on the ticker generation).

any half decent coder would have broken it up into 20 different cells, probably something like DA-->DT with meaningful column names and a comment in each one and then combine it together way over on the left for whatever you want to see........

But you can do the exact same thing in python and I see it all the time, where people get lazy (oh wait, there is some minuscule savings of milliseconds, so it's worth it....) and put into one line what would be a lot more nicely done across several.

Luckily excel makes it nice and easy to segment the nested code as it highlights which parens tie out to other parens. So I can fix the crappy nesting that my juniors would write for me and then tell them if they want to keep their job they won't make me waste time making their tools readable and maintainable.