I wonder how improvements in logistics and remotely operated weapons systems change the need for this. The danger of having everyone on a base be incapacitated by illness while surrounded by a hostile enemy was huge 50 years ago and would easily outweigh possible dangers from side effects of a less-tested vaccine. Now, it's far easier to have drone patrols protecting a quarantined base and deliver men and equipment from reserves far away to fill the gaps in an overall strategy.

It's hard to translate miles into actual value. 30K United miles + fees buys you a transatlantic flight. When I was looking a couple of weeks ago, it was the same going from LHR to EWR or SFO, with $188 for the UK leg and about $6 in the other direction (UK airport taxes are pretty huge). The round trip to SFO is about $1200 without the miles, so 60K miles works out to about $1K on that. That makes the value of 250K miles about $4000. This is a pretty low bug bounty.

On the other hand, the value depends a lot on whether they count as premiere qualifying miles and flight miles or not. If they count as PQM then the 250K is enough to give you the highest level of premiere status, which means you're at the head of the queue for upgrades and get a number of other benefits. If they count as flight miles (exceedingly unlikely!) then it's a quarter of the way to the million mile thing, which gives you star alliance gold for life (and, having flown far too much recently, I can attest to the fact that gold status makes it far less annoying. Apparently it actually become enjoyable at higher levels, but I'm hoping not to fly enough to find out).

It's all awesome to me, but yes - it's all disco.

I'm not sure about the 'Left', but the Democratic party in the USA tends to have more support among people with the technical ability to rig elections if they were held online. The Republican party tends to have the support of the people who own the companies that can rig them if they're not. With this in mind, it doesn't seem surprising that neither party is in favour of paper ballots.

You have moved on to an aesthetic argument. That's suitable for discussions about how you spend your own money, but much less so when we're discussing the public fisc. Sociey may owe everyone a life without serious material want, but it doesn't owe them an ocean view.

Zillow has many listings down below $58K, none of them for trailers - check out, say, ZIP code 39212. I suggested four people could easily live on a median salary, not minimum wage. And as far as livability goes, it's highly undesirable, but that is more or less orthogonal to the issue of whether or not you can live there.

The average rental cost you can find is - I'm guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong - derived from online sources like Craigslist? That's not the average place on the market, which has a lot of Section 8. As for used trailers, look at something like this to get an idea of what's out there. And remember that Jackson is one of the most expensive places in the state... if you really get out in the boonies and know how to fix your own stuff (a $1500 car can last a lot more than a year if you know how to fix it yourself), it can be insanely cheap.

Because one of the strengths of email is that it is a decentralised, multi-vendor platform. The fact that you use gmail doesn't prevent me from using hotmail, yahoo, or whatever, or rolling my own. And that works fine, until one or two players has a dominant position. See what Google has done with their XMPP support, for example. When they were the underdog, they were happy to federate with everyone in a vendor-neutral network. Now they're increasingly trying to lock users into using their network (I think federating is up at the moment, but you can't add new contacts on non-Google-hosted domains).

The other aspect is privacy. If a certain percentage of my social graph uses gmail, then it doesn't matter that I don't - Google can still get a fairly accurate view of the shape of that graph, which is valuable to them. The other poster claimed that it's a reaction to whatever is popular, and he's right in a sense: email is a more robust network when there are no particularly popular providers and when people are fairly evenly spread between a smaller number.

Most of the time, if someone is using a free webmail email address for business, I'd consider it a warning sign, with AOL not seeming particularly worse than Hotmail or GMail. Builders are probably my main exception to this, because they're one of the few contracting jobs where technological competence is not essential. That said, the last two builders I hired were through a web site that allows you to post jobs, have tradesmen bid for them, and hire them online, so a baseline knowledge is increasingly required for getting work.

So you're saying that it was the Facebook of its day?

They need to contain valid WHOIS information, but there's no requirement that every email address on a domain be owned by one person. More importantly, even if they're not anonymous, you can easily create a single email address for each company that you do business with and delete it afterwards (or, better, redirect it to the spam honeypot address on your mail server).

I'm not worried about the consumer surplus - I don't care if it's zero, in this particular case, because it's not Econ 101 but actual people with lives that need to have meaning and purpose.

The effective result is that society decides that people shouldn't starve just because they're not economically productive enough to feed themselves and their progeny, and society should own up to its duties and pay them the difference. Otherwise, what's the difference between you and your supposed conservative archenemy? You accuse them of lacking community spirit, but you want business owners to pay people lots of money just because you say they should, instead of contributing a non-negotiable part of your own paycheck (aka taxes) to pay for the social outcomes you want. Yeah, Walmart and McD's and a bunch of other business get cheap workers. But the alternative to that is that they adopt a different business model that involves a lot less people - Walmart vs Costco. Sure, it's a lot better to be a Costco employee than a Walmart one, but there are a hell of a lot less of them.

Hahaha, how funny. It just so happens that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and having family there still, I'm quite conversant with the local economics. I'm assuming that you got a median house price, or a median mortgage, of $58k from somewhere. That's not an entirely unreasonable number, but the distribution is anything but normal - it's at least biphasic, probably triphasic (large underclass, modest middle class, small upper middle class, tiny sprinkling of really wealthy people). In much of the city, a large number of properties that have been repossessed for taxes can't be sold because the simple requirement to pay up to three years' back taxes in order to take possession of the property completely eliminates the potential profit.

You can buy a habitable home in a not-so-great neighborhood for under $50k, or a used trailer for something like $10k. You can easily rent a 2BR apartment in a bad neighborhood for $200/mo. The people I knew didn't drive new cars, and if one died in a way they didn't know how to fix, they'd buy something for $1500, max. They also didn't pay anything like Jackson prices for housing.

Incidentally, since when is a minimum wage job supposed to support a family of four on one income? I said you could do that on a median income, or yourself pretty easily at poverty line.

I never asked for data, I asked for plausible arguments why, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing, we should stop at (say) $15/hr, or, more generally, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing for society, why should only business owners should bear the cost?

You are welcome to live any life you can afford, but if you want to idealize the 1950s as the height of worker power and complain that you can't live as well now as you could then, that's incorrect. You can. You just have to live like the real 1950s, not the ones in your head.