Without a minimum wage the floor drops out of your next-best-choices and large chunks of the population end up on starvation wages. This isn't a theoretical issue you need to estimate with graphs, it can be seen in practice in jurisdictions with extremely low or nonexistent minimum wages, or even in first-world gig work.

That makes sense, you don't believe that's the case because you just voluntarily and uncritically filled your head with a warm load of grifty bullshit "documented" by a couple of right-wing lobbyists. If you'd ever read a real history book focusing on workers' standards of living in that period, the way that the propaganda book you hopefully didn't pay for flew in the face of it would've set off some alarm bells. Here's something to get you started: https://www.crei.cat/wp-conten...

Look at the median home price vs. median salary in the '70s vs. now and the homeless guy might look like the only person who hasn't been totally hosed. It's the same for education costs, two things conveniently left out of inflation measures. Accounting for transfer payments doesn't change the picture either:

https://equitablegrowth.org/sl...

So you know, and at the same time think that most anyone who wants a job has one right now? How does that work?

People were often forced into the earliest mills because the (once popular) alternative, farming the commons and telling business owners to fuck off with their hellhole factories, was conveniently taken away. The alternative that people are choosing work over is usually not a lower-paying job but the threat of homelessness and starvation often worsened by the very business interests they're forced to work for.

Productivity alone won't do anything for workers, both the industrial revolution and the last half-century in the first world are proof of that. If you're worried about employers leaving for cheaper labor costs, good luck competing with every Chinese political prisoner.

They offer you more than minimum wage because of the existence of a minimum wage. Otherwise they'd offer you not $1 per year, but just enough to afford to return to work when added to whatever welfare they can squeeze out of government and society. Minimum wages do apply to salaried jobs as well. Check out what you can earn in countries that don't have them, and then thank a union. Or throw off the shackles of the minimum wage and get into a type of work that really doesn't have one, gig work, and let us know how that supply and demand thing works out for you.

The Luddites died in grinding poverty with all indications being that they were correct, it was their grandchildren who got the new jobs that came along as a result of the automation that ruined their grandparents. Wages and standards of living have been stagnant for a half-century at this point. There are people frantically applying to hundreds of jobs they're well-qualified for and not getting so much as an interview. Over 100 people are applying to each job opening these days, and likewise it takes over 100 job applications for an average applicant to get a job (both rather conservative estimates). If improving productivity led to rising wages, why are we not earning 40% more for the same number of hours people worked in the '70s? Why has going from mainframes and dumb terminals to present-day computing added approximately jack shit to ~90% of workers' pay?

Good for you! Especially if you work in tech. Sucks for the people who aren't part of your anecdote though.

Look up the history of the ones you don't think may have value and you'll learn about the workers who fought and/or died to get the laws in place that keep you from experiencing the same thing, which you now take for granted. Or if that's not enough, maybe you should experience a 996 work schedule in China, work alongside a nonexistent/laughably low minimum wage in a Caribbean country, or do some dangerous work in a Nigerian e-waste mine to get a taste of what happens without all those regulations.

Not using Plex is the gift that keeps on giving. Why so many people went for it when there were better open-source alternatives available, I'll never know.

Trade deficit as an emergency, I think that's the economic equivalent of declaring the color of a T-shirt to be an emergency.

There are quite a few Vinfast cars going around, I wondered if people were importing them individually but then I spotted a Vinfast dealership off the highway (401 I think?) next to a Lotus dealership.

Chile seemed to be making something similar work with early-'70s computer technology, until Henry Kissinger decided that democratic socialism was a threat worse than Soviet communism and had the regime overthrown and replaced with a murderous right-wing dictatorship:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit...

I thought you should be able to find the link to the data in the news article, but since you can't, here it is:

https://www.pewresearch.org/so...

While the planet could support more people with properly managed resources, this idea that innovation comes from pulling the genetic one-armed-bandit enough times to hit a few jackpots and pop out a few Einsteins is ludicrous. Einsteins aren't born, they're made and enabled. If you want new ideas and innovation, support and empower the people who are already there to do it. We already have lots of people who could generate new ideas including lots of potential Einsteins, they just don't have the time or conditions to make a breakthrough like he did. They're scrapping away at a shitty job that eats all their time to make an already rich person richer instead of having the time to study bleeding-edge physics etc. in their generous downtime at a chill job in a patent office. Or they've gained the skills to make breakthroughs but are wasting them on making Facebook more addictive or developing Grok.

Per capita GDP isn't even a good measure because it isn't a measure of average wealth at all, it's a measure of total national income with no regard for how big the average person's slice of the pie is at all. I think what you're looking for is median household income or median personal income.

It's not society, society doesn't care too much about population growth, it's the economic system. Capitalist economic systems require infinite compounding growth in a finite world (so that capitalists can at any time turn their money into more money without doing any work), and so far the main driver of that growth has been population growth.

In a related problem, most pension/retirement schemes work like a long-running intergenerational ponzi scheme that will only avoid collapse as long as the next generation is bigger or at least wealthier than the last, and now we have two generations that are smaller and poorer.

A reasonably slow population decline wouldn't have such problems, but that's not what happens when a society suddenly makes 2 generations too poor to afford kids and also smart enough to realize it.

Here's some data to back it up:

https://fortune.com/2024/07/25...

Are you trying to argue that while they say they can't afford kids, they're actually not having kids because they're wealthy but don't know it?

I heard one libertarian argue that instead of having roads anywhere that a private entity doesn't feel like building one, people should just be driving offroad 4x4s through unmaintained mud trails, like in some of the more remote parts of Russia. Which is ideologically consistent at least.

Important points to live by, not just for software. The drive to find simple solutions to complex problems rather than accepting and managing complexity causes a lot of harm and waste.

That's fine for hobby programming, but sadly companies now do all their PHP coding with frameworks, either Symfony or, more commonly, Laravel. I'm guessing because they think it makes their developers more like replaceable cogs. No need to demonstrate real coding proficiency, just experience with the chosen framework.