You're making the common mistake of assuming that if the minimum wage were $20/hr, all the low-wage jobs would become $20/hr.

That's not what will happen. The low wage jobs which are truly underpaid (i.e. they generate more than $20/hr of productivity) would indeed have their pay increased to $20/hr.

But all the other low wage jobs would simply disappear. There's absolutely no point for an employer to pay someone $20/hr is they're only getting $10/hr or $15/hr of benefit from it.

CEOs being overpaid is a legitimate problem. But their effect on overall incomes is not as big as you think it is. According to the IRS tax stats, the total income of everyone making over $500,000 in 2011 was $1.351 trillion. If you confiscated all their income and distributed it to the ~150 million workers, it comes out to about $9000/yr per worker. Or about a $5/hr increase assuming you work 8 hours a day, 50 weeks a year.

Once it reaches a critical mass it will. It won't be pretty.

You're misunderstanding the fundamental problem here, which OP put rather well. The problem isn't pay; the problem is productivity. These people do not generate enough productivity to warrant a $20/hr wage. If they caused a revolution and recreated society to their liking, the only way the math balances out is if you lower the standard of living (i.e. productivity per person) to where their standard is the new average.

Fixing the problem isn't as simple as just increasing their wages. That just increases their standard of living by dragging down everyone else's. The proper fix is to increase their productivity. Whether it be by education, re-training, or a more efficient employment program which better matches these people with available jobs. Their productivity has to be increased if you want to see a real improvement in the country overall, not just a reassignment of money from high income people to lower income people with no net difference.

A common theme I see over and over with people I know stuck at minimum wage is that they want to improve themselves, but between all the bills they have to pay, they cannot afford neither the time nor the money to finish their high school degree, or training they'd need to get a new, better job that interests them. While free K-12 schooling is a great idea, I think most kids are... naive (some would say stupid) when it comes to how the real world works. They don't appreciate what a great the opportunity the free schooling represents until it's too late and the opportunity has passed by Somehow we need to change that. Maybe something even as crazy as K-10 schooling, everyone is forced to work for a living for 2 years, then finish 11-12. I'm reluctant to continue the college loan programs because while they do give poorer people opportunity, they're even better at driving up the cost of tuition.

Well, that's assuming the median income is post-tax income. If it's pre-tax, then the cost of government programs and health insurance are included. And even if it is post-tax and you add in the US$4338 PPP Germans get as universal health care, they still lag the U.S. in median income. (The real story is a bit more complex, as about half of U.S. health expenditure per capita is government spending, so equivalent to the unmeasured health insurance in European countries. But due to the higher health care costs in the U.S. the net effect is about the same as just adding per capita health expenditure to European median income.)

Eyeballing the median income stats, the U.S. still ends up in the top 8 if you adjust for health insurance, ahead of most of the European nations.

Incinerating money doesn't make it go away. The value that money represented just gets distributed into raising the value of the remaining money. That's probably the outcome you want anyway - society is benefiting from the fine paid. Just be aware that it doesn't work quite the way you think it does (e.g. since the value of each dollar increases by the same minute fraction, the people with more dollars get a bigger gain.)

I know that red light cameras have sometimes been abused, but what are we supposed to do about the pandemic of red-light-running?

Adjust the timing so after your light goes from yellow to red, the cross-traffic light remains red for a couple more seconds before turning green.

It would also help if the length of a yellow were standardized across the country. When I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, the first month I was screeching to a stop at yellow lights. Then I'd sit there like an idiot for about 3-5 seconds while the light stayed yellow. I suspect that a good portion of the "pandemic" of red-light running is due to certain municipalities programming in excessively short yellows to try to generate more red light ticket revenue.

Most laptop AC adapters put out 19 V DC, though some of the ultralights use 12 V DC adapters. Current is voltage / resistance. The resistance of your body from your finger to your feet, and the low voltage limits the current that'll flow through your body. You're as likely to feel this as you are if you held both contacts on a 12 V battery (which is to say, not at all). The 9V battery on your tongue has a much lower resistance to deal with (both an electrolyte bath and a much shorter distance to travel), so generates enough current to create a tingle in your tongue.

POTS phone lines run power at 5 V DC, but the ring signal is generated by increasing the voltage. The spec is to bump the voltage up to 20 or 30 V DC (it's been a while since I worked with these). But many systems would exceed spec and crank it up to 60 V or more. Those would give you a nasty shock if you were working on the line when someone made a call. Not enough to injure you, but enough to leave your hand and arm tingling for a few seconds.

But yeah, you're not gonna electrocute yourself by touching the two DC leads coming from an AC adapter.

Dell, HP, Alienware and other company will do anything in their power to not comply with this standard. This means less chance to get money out of customers pockets.

Actually, for laptops, I suspect it has less to do about profits, and more to do with simplifying the engineering design specs by having a single, known power source which puts out a specific voltage profile as you increase the amps drawn. We're not talking about a phone which draws a couple Watts at most and can be simultaneously charged and powered via a USB cable, so you can effectively use the battery as a power sink to even out the voltage variances. We're talking about devices whose power draw can range from about 5-10 Watts all the way up to 100 Watts. And not all AC adapters are equal at generating a clean DC current.

The US should do what Europe has done and basically fully embrace diesel fueled vehicles for their efficiency.

The U.S. has embraced diesel. Nearly all of its trucks (which account for about half the country's petroleum consumption for transportation) run on diesel.

See, when you refine a barrel of petroleum, you get a certain amount of diesel, and a certain amount of gasoline. You can tweak the refining process to get more gasoline, or more diesel, but it becomes more expensive. The most cost-effective refining yields about equal amounts of diesel and gasoline. If you tried to convert all vehicles to use diesel, the refining requirements and market demand would make diesel extremely expensive, while gasoline became dirt cheap.

So the most cost-effective way to use these fuels is to have a healthy mix of both gasoline and diesel vehicles. In the U.S., most of the transport trucks use diesel while most of the passenger cars use gasoline. This is a natural fit for both types of fuels. Diesel engines tend to produce most of their power at a lower RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at close to their max capacity - which is what trucks do. Gasoline engines tend to produce most of their power at higher RPM, so are suitable for operating at long periods at a fraction of their max capacity, but have that extra power on tap for passing and emergency maneuvers - which is what people look for when buying a car. To make a diesel engine more car-like (i.e. gasoline engine-like), you have to couple it with a turbocharger or a supercharger to spread out the power band and give it more high-end oomph.

The prevalence of diesel cars in Europe is mostly an artifact of the high fuel taxes there. Typically, diesel is taxed less because it's used mostly by trucks, and they don't want to drive up the cost of goods by way of a high fuel tax. Under this artificial price structure, diesel cars suddenly make economic sense.

Economically, the case is even worse. The whole process of producing ethanol is both labor and capital expensive. It is obviously more expensive as a motor fuel. Then when you consider what has happened to food prices as corn (a base part of much of what we eat as well as feed for animals we use for food) prices have gone up.

It made sense economically the way it was first implemented. See, the U.S. overproduces food. Ever since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and its widespread food shortages, the U.S. has implemented subsidies and programs to insure there is always an oversupply of food. That's why we pay farmers not to plant anything on their land - we want that excess farming capacity ready and available should, say, a drought wipe out a part of the Spring crop.

All that excess food means food prices crash to where farmers can't make a living anymore. So the U.S. government buys all the subsidized food (mostly corn) at a set price, then resells it to the market. But since there's an oversupply, there's always extra food left over. We give some of it away as foreign aid, a lot of it becomes cattle feed to satiate our appetite for beef, some enterprising chemists figured out a way to turn some of it into high fructose corn syrup.

And during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, someone had the bright idea of turning it into ethanol as fuel for our cars. The economics of the cost to grow corn didn't matter - that was a sunk cost. The corn had already been produced and paid for. Any use you could find for it was better than letting it rot and become rat food in silos. Under those circumstances, corn ethanol makes sense.

Then the corn lobby got their paws on it. They took a program which made economic sense because it converted excess food into fuel, and morphed it into a program which makes no economic sense because it grows food for the sole purpose of turning it into fuel. If you're going to grow a food crop to convert into ethanol, sugar cane and sugar beets make the most sense. Corn is down at like #15 on the list. The only reason corn was chosen for ethanol production was because we had a lot of excess corn sitting around in 1973.

While I agree with you, Disney was actually one of the few (only?) studios which did it right and would replace your broken DVDs for a nominal materials and processing fee. They had a similar program for VHS tapes as well. It was probably due to all the parents complaining when junior microwaved the tape/disc.

It's just Simpson's paradox. The really rich Republicans tend to live near urban centers. Urban centers tend to vote Democrat. By arbitrarily dividing the population among state lines, you are incorrectly assigning the taxes paid by the rich Republicans living in Democrat-voting states to the D column.

If you eliminate the arbitrary divisions (states) and base it purely on individuals, Republicans tend to have higher income so pay higher taxes than Democrats.

I'm not from the US, so I never understood why poor people vote conservative? All the red states seem to be poorer yet these are the people that would benefit most from a "socialist" left govt.

Poor people don't vote conservative. You're falling for something called Simpson's paradox. When you divide a population along arbitrary lines, the outcome per group can run counter to the outcome overall. The most famous example was the 2000 election where Gore won the popular election, but Bush won the electoral votes and thus the Presidency. Even though Gore won more votes, by dividing his votes among state lines, Bush ended up carrying more states (weighted by population) to win the Presidency. Another example is when in the 1980s, Southwest airlines won the award for best on-time flight ranking for the nation, even though at every airport they serviced they finished no higher than 2nd.

The same thing is going on here. Democrats on average tend to have lower income than Republicans. It's just that the really wealthy Republicans tend to live in or near urban areas, which vote heavily Democratic, so they end up living in states which vote Democrat. Thus if you try to analyze this on the basis of "poor states" and "rich states", you incorrectly assign those rich Republicans' income to the Democrat column because the state happens to vote Democrat. (This is also the flawed reasoning behind the common misbelief that because blue states are net contributors of federal funds and red states net receivers, that Liberals fund the government and Conservatives take from it. It's just the arbitrary state lines which create Simpson's paradox making it seem that way. In reality the opposite is true - Conservatives tend to have higher income so pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes.)

The red states tend to have a greater proportion of their population in rural areas, and rural people tend to vote Republican, urban people Democrat.

I'm going to have to say that's a result that's unique to Switzerland. There's a direct correlation between homicide rates and assault rates (a failed homicide being classified as an assault). For your hypothesis to be correct, the overall assault rate in Switzerland has to have remained the same or climbed, while the homicide rate decreased. Indeed Switzerland has one of the highest assault rates among OECD countries (4.0%), but one of the lowest homicide rates (0.7 per 100,000).

But since most of this criticism is directed at the U.S., how do the two rates compare in the U.S.? The U.S. has one of the highest homicide rates among OECD countries (4.8 per 100,000 - more than double the OECD average of 2.2), but one of the lowest assault rates (1.5%, only Canada and Japan are lower, less than half the OECD average of 4.0%). (The interface is terrible - you have to hover your mouse over the little bars in the graph to see the number for each country, and the bars are inverted so a tall bar is a low number.) So while Americans kill each other a lot more, Europeans attack each other a lot more. This would appear to bear out the adage that "an armed society is a polite society." If the U.S. were to ban gun ownership, the homicide rate could decline to Canadian levels as you posit, or the assault rate could rise by 2.7x to the OECD average, or some combination of both. It's impossible to say which would be the outcome given the data.

I've been following this debate a long time, and followed with much interest what happened in Australia when they disarmed in 1997 (homicides are down, but assaults and sexual assaults are up, and robberies fluctuated a lot and are currently unchanged). I don't like nor own a gun, but I also dislike making decision purely on gut feeling rather than sound statistical data. The only conclusion I've arrived at is that the cultural norms for a country matter a whole lot more than whether or not you ban guns. Guns are mostly illegal in both Canada and Mexico, but widely available due to proximity to the U.S. Yet Canada is one of the safest OECD countries while Mexico is one of the most dangerous.

As an aside, it's interesting that the data on that site ranks the U.S. as the 3rd safest country against assault. The data was from a Gallup poll asking residents of those countries if they'd been assaulted in the past year. Other measurements of assault rate I'd seen ranked the U.S. about average among OECD countries. But those were based on police reports of assaults per 100,000. So either Americans are lying about whether they've been assaulted, or people in other OECD countries are not bothering to report assaults to the police, or police in other OECD countries are lying about how many assaults are reported to them. And no the high homicide rate in the U.S. does not affect the assault rate significantly. If all 4.8 out of 100,000 homicides failed and were classified as assaults, it would increase the assault rate by just 0.005%.

The PC market is not shrinking. What's happening is people and companies are going longer between upgrades, meaning the fewer PCs are sold in a given year. That combined with market share reports in percent (instead of raw numbers) gives the illusion that the PC market is shrinking. If you look at the raw number of PCs in use at any given time, you can see the PC market is still growing. There's a slight slowdown over the last year due to tablets, but the overall trend is still positive.

I'll post this again since it's relevant. A hospital worker in Israel exposed himself to a cobalt-60 radiation source for 1-2 minutes while trying to fix a sterilizer. The IAEA report of the incident is pretty detailed, including photos and x-rays documenting his injuries and eventual demise a month later.

During the Cold War, the Soviets had vastly more tanks than NATO. So one of the common hypothetical scenarios was an unstoppable Soviet invasion led by their tanks. The NATO response plan included detonating airburst nukes over the advancing army. While these would directly kill only a few near the hypocenter, soldiers in a much larger area would receive a lethal dose of radiation. These so-called walking dead would survive to fight a few more days or weeks before succumbing to their injuries. I suspect this scenario and particularly the term "walking dead" played some part in the genesis of the modern zombie movie. The movie widely credited with creating the zombie horde theme (Night of the Living Dead) was filmed in the late 1960s during the height of the Cold War.