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spoon0042 posted:ahahahahahaha Yeah, it's well-known that labor is 100% of operating costs. In fact, this is the USA, so it's 110%!!! I mean, that's kind of a bigger deal than 150% being a 33% increase from 100%. Baby steps.
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May 5, 2015 02:01
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Ervin K posted:Well I'm not surprised my point went over your head. What I was trying to say is that no government policy is going to change the value of low skill jobs. But keep crying about "DEM CONSERVATIVES Even the lowest-skill job is necessary for society to survive. What you are saying is that some people are doing necessary work, but should nevertheless live in never-ending squalor because you somebody has to live a worse life then you or your relative success in life has no meaning.
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May 5, 2015 03:14
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Effectronica posted:The idea that "rationality" means not having any emotional investment is a pernicious kind of insanity, one that is basically coterminous with technocracy. Star Trek has repeatedly demonstrated the limitations of such thinking. Ultimately the Vulcans are a stunted race, constitutionally limited in their ability to understand the political reality around them, always secondary to the more emotionally vibrant humans. Truly a lesson for the ages.
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May 5, 2015 03:38
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Typical Pubbie posted:Price != value. The government can set the price of labor by fiat, but I can't think of any feasible way for it to set the value. Price controls are generally a bad thing. The D&D consensus after MW threads play themselves out is that the MW is the worst of the best policy options for boosting incomes at the bottom of the pay-scale. Ideally society would eliminate the minimum wage, tax wealth, and transfer the revenue from those taxes to all Americans in the form of an expanded EITC and more robust social welfare programs. Why EITC though? Why not just mincome? Why make it conditional upon a company being willing to sign off that you did work on a form, make-work or no? Think about the value equation when you're basically saying that a company can hire employees basically for free. That can only lead to incredible inefficiency in labor utilization.
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May 5, 2015 03:44
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Typo posted:I'm not sure if the EITC does this already but you could include some kind of a GMI into a negative income tax it by simply have a tax bracket where you get refunds for making $0 Why bother with all the complication, though? Just do progressive taxation for whatever other income they have (including investment  ). If someone is making enough money, the taxes they pay will exceed the mincome anyway. 
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May 5, 2015 03:54
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Typo posted:Because then you are simultaneously giving them an incentive to work as well as providing them with a guaranteed standard of living. So you're saying we should be rewarding companies that are unable to find meaningful work for people? I don't want to encourage people to do jobs they don't need to do. Most current work is make-work. We should not create incentives for keeping that up.
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May 5, 2015 04:03
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Badger of Basra posted:Bring back the telephone exchanges and the typing pool! Computers used to be an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, we should rid ourselves of these damnable silicon contraptions and go back to doing it the old fashioned way!
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May 5, 2015 04:10
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Zeitgueist posted:Minimum wage has little effect on employment but thread accurately named, voted (1)5(an hour). Voted 1 for the 401k I don't have.
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May 5, 2015 05:56
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:You don't need a 401k, once you get your PhD you can just get a tenure track faculty position with a respectable pension. Yeah. Sure. 
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May 5, 2015 06:06
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QuarkJets posted:Why is it that conservatives always want you to believe that knowledge and education are finite resources that needs to be rationed to the already-wealthy? Meanwhile, wealth is not a zero-sum game, how dare you imply as such!?
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May 21, 2015 18:40
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Jarmak posted:Los Alamos is a stupid loving example because it was a military base that was purposely built in the middle of nowhere at high expense so they had a safe and secret place to develop the atomic bomb. It's as if concerted government intervention can create a sustainably positive economic environment! 
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May 23, 2015 02:19
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logosanatic posted:Where does this gently caress a watermelon statement come from why is it being used? I have found an answer to both your questions: 
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May 26, 2015 17:50
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Markets do whatever the gently caress we want them to. It is plausible that all we can do with a market is constrain it, rather than control it. Constraints can become contradictory to the point that the market cannot function. Additionally, some point enforcement costs are too high to avoid a black market which bypasses your rules, and then the whole situation gets more complicated. See illegal immigrants being paid sub-minimum wages under the table as a fundamental tenet of our current agricultural backbone. The solution is, as you have mostly stated, to slowly raise the minimum wage and see what happens, without ignoring the black market in labor.
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Jun 2, 2015 21:48
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down with slavery posted:no it's not. i mean, cool stupid semantic point, but it's still wrong by any measure Pro tip: read the whole post and maybe you'll understand the context in which this distinction does matter. Or don't. I can't control your actions, only constrain them through probations and bans, which would be inappropriate in this context.
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Jun 2, 2015 22:10
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JeffersonClay posted:Data is not only numbers. You are a moron. Graphs can be used to illustrate data. Graphs in themselves, without numbers tied to them, are only data if they are what you are gathering in your experiment/survey/research. For example, say you are surveying visual expression practices among amateur economists. Instead, I think that what you may be trying to express, if I reinterpret it charitably, is that you were using the graph to describe a model of reality, rather than data about reality. Do you find that acceptable?
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Jun 4, 2015 02:39
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Zeitgueist posted:We know what he was doing, we're making fun of him for making a graph to give his opinion the weight and heft of an academic statement, but without the rigor. Or maybe this is an extremely useless, multi-page derail hinging upon someone stumbling in expressing themselves and then getting all defensive about it, which I, for one, would be happy to help deescalate so that there is at least a chance for some meaningful conversation.
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Jun 4, 2015 02:46
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Raskolnikov38 posted:This thread was literally started by an anti-Semite who couldn't stop himself from blaming the bad economy on the Jews, there was at no point in time anything redeemable in this thread. In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. (Jer. 31:29 King James Version)
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Jun 4, 2015 02:52
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JeffersonClay posted:Graphs can be used to express the relationship between two or more things. That is often, but not always, in the form of numerical data. I'm sorry, but you've got it backwards. Graphs are ways to visualize data. The data either has to be there, or be generated by a model. quote:The graph is this paragraph in visual form. That's not data, though. Again, you're expressing a model. Data is something you would actually be measuring. You can't measure "The minimum wage has positive and negative effects. At low minimum wage levels, the positive effects are dominant and increasing. As the minimum wage grows, it reaches a point where (positive effects) - (negative effects) is at a maximum. Beyond that point the negative effects begin growing faster than positive effects, and at a sufficiently high level of minimum wage, the negative effects begin to dominate. " That's a model. You could then run data, say, the relevant economic measures in a certain economy, and then you'd get the point where (pos)-(neg) is maximum. Or you wouldn't get just one: it might just oscillate oscillate. And then it would show that your model is wrong, or of limited applicability. In no way is that paragraph data, other than if we were investigating you as a subject, that is, it would be qualitative data about your opinion about this subject. But this is not data about the economy.
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Jun 4, 2015 19:03
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JeffersonClay posted:
Yes, it is. It's a way of visualizing the data generated by a toy model expressing a more complicated mechanism. It just so happens in these models it's a clear analytic functional dependency, so you don't have to bother with generating the data and then drawing it out, you can just cut out the middle-man, but it's still not in itself data. You're expressing a model. quote:What other word would you use to describe the information that informs a model? I would clearly delineate data from model, which you refuse to do, and it's making you look more and more ridiculous and frankly calls to question any social science credentials that you might have that you are refusing to make that distinction, instead opting to defend your original graph as itself data. It's not. It's just a way in which you're trying to visualize your model. quote:No, that paragraph is a description of data. The graph is a depiction of data. Data is not limited to coordinate pairs. No, it isn't. It's a description of yours, or say an accepted, model of the relations between parts of the data. You then need to present actual data that fits in within this model to argue for that model. But it's no more data than a Laffer Curve is.
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Jun 4, 2015 19:28
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down with slavery posted:I'd like to know by what definition that's "data"? As I said, it would be data if we were collecting the opinions of people in this thread about their models about raising the minimum wage for another purpose.
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Jun 4, 2015 19:29
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JeffersonClay posted:Ok so it's a graph which is representing a model... Excellent! Progress has been made! Now apologize to the rest of the thread for wasting their time insisting on this point. quote:You didn't answer the question. What word would you use to describe the information which informs a model? Why is data an inappropriate word to describe that information? It's background knowledge which informs the model, and is separate from data. Data is what you gather in the field, and then you see if the relations between the data fit with your model (to some level of uncertainty). If you're doing Bayesian analysis, then when you're looking at Bayes` Theorem: P(M|D, I) = P(M|I) x P(D|M, I) / P(D|I) D is the data you are collecting, M is the model, and I is the background information that feeds into the model and to your data collection methodology. Another way to put this is that there are at two levels to arguing about statistics: about the data collected, and about what that data means. You keep conflating the two. At least on a disciplinary level, you should be able to agree with people about the data collection procedures to a level where you at least don't disagree about whether unemployment is at 10%, median wage is at $40,000/yr, interest rate is at 2%, etc. Then you can argue about which model best describes a series of data with respect to time. If you disagree there, then you push error models in collection back and forth, or arguing about relevant variables, or whatnot. You seem to be using language that would suggest that you are arguing at that level. But really, what you are saying is that "this is what I think the relation between raising the minimum wage to total benefits accrued to people of a certain social class", and then putting it again in graph form, and thinking that that helps. I doesn't. We can read that paragraph, and we can read that graph, to say that you think that there is benefit to raising the minimum wage until some point, then it will become a hinderance, until it leads to zero benefits for the lower social classes. The issue is that people disagree with your model. And you claiming that that model is actually data is simply obfuscating that point. Objections to that model that have been raised is that it doesn't take into account the rate of increase of minimum wage, it doesn't take into account the relation between that rate and inflation, all things that are vital since pretty much everyone here who is arguing for a raise in the minimum wage, is arguing for doing it gradually and adaptively. The data that will be needed is not another graph visualizing your model, it's data from people actually raising the minimum wage at a certain rate (as they are in LA and in Seattle) and seeing what happens. The model we need is one that will actually take into account rates and times.
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Jun 4, 2015 20:03
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:I want to drop this into my syllabus for "how do you use and work with statistics" AA. Sure. Just don't forget to use the APA standard for citing Something Awful Forums posts. 
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Jun 4, 2015 20:08
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JeffersonClay posted:I never claimed the model was actually data, i claimed the model was informed by data, that it represented data. You seem to think that there's a really important distinction between data and information which informs a model. Fine. I'm happy to concede that the graph contains no data about what the effects of any specific minimum wage level would be. I never claimed it did. That's why the axes are unlabeled. Yes, I do, and any scientist, social or exact, doing any kind of statistics also thinks that this is the case. So you may want to update the way you're presenting your arguments if you want to be taken seriously. quote:No, because that graph was never intended to actually calculate any actual effects of minimum wage changes, only to describe visually a relationship between overall welfare and the minimum wage that literally everyone except Elcondemn agrees must be true. I absolutely reject that it "must" be true. As do many here. Not just because it has no room for rate of increase or rate of inflation, but because, as I've mentioned before, there's the whole issue of black market in labor which further complicates things. You have to argue for this model using data. Current data, meanwhile, as has been explained to you, has shown that overall there is no effect on unemployment or inflation, which seems to suggest that it only increases welfare as has been implemented so far. The behavior may well change in various ways if the rate of increase is too high or if it's too sudden, but there is no data to support your model of how that change will go, and again, your model doesn't even have rates.
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Jun 4, 2015 21:14
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JeffersonClay posted:I'm not attempting to do statistics here, either. Whenever you are trying to argue from or from models about data you are doing statistics. You may only choose to do it well or poorly. quote:Haha oh man. So your answer to the question "what will happen if the minimum wage is 15b/s" is "it could be good for the economy"? I guess two people are making that argument now. My answer to the question "what will happen if the minimum wage is 15b/s?" is "either we are talking in Zimbabwe dollars or this is so far afield from the range in which we are discussing to be irrelevant".
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Jun 4, 2015 21:38
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JeffersonClay posted:Rather than wasting time with this sloppy dodge, let's assume that you are reasonable and believe that a 15b/s minimum wage would not be good for the poor. So you agree that there must be some point where the minimum wage can be too high, and therefore some point where value is maximized and some point where the negatives overwhelm the positives. So you don't disagree with the graph I made at all. Glad I could illuminate things for you. This is literally "if we taxed people at 100% they would have no motivation to do further work, while lowering it to 99% will encourage them to work a bit more, therefore increasing revenue. Do you agree with this? Well, then you must accept the Laffer Curve." 
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Jun 4, 2015 21:52
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down with slavery posted:the only real "argument" happening is that one idiot defending his chart for 20 pages The real argument is actually 5 pages. It's only 20 pages if you forget to adjust for inflation.
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Jun 5, 2015 03:12
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The literal hill you wish to die on - it's a Laffer curve!
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Jun 5, 2015 20:27
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paragon1 posted:We will accelerate money to a significant fraction of lightspeed. Krugman's got you covered.
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Jun 6, 2015 16:28
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JeffersonClay posted:Not all infinite series sum to infinity. The only way you could create a positive feedback loop that caused runaway inflation would be if minimum wage labor costs were 100% of total costs, but they're not, not even close. Hold on, if you're raising minimum wage, and say we assume that leads to increases in wages across the board due to secondary effects, doesn't that increase the percentage of labor in total costs? You start out with minimum wage labor 50% of total costs, you increase it by 100% - but you didn't change the rest. So now the new minimum wage labor is 66.7% of costs. Total costs rose by 50%, so you raise 66.7% by 50%, now you're raising the total by 33.3%, not 25%. Labor is now 75% of costs. Raise it by 33.3%, _now_ you get 25% increase, and now labor is 80%. The increase goes as the series summing 1/n, which doesn't converge. But I think that's the wrong model to look at. Let me play around for a minute to see what is going on. Say you want a worker to always be able to afford a living with their wages. So, we want MinWage = LivingWage. Let's say that making a living means you buy products, and that all those products have a labor and a non-labor component. So: LivingWage=a * Labor+ (1-a) * Other Where Labor is the average labor cost, Other is the average non-labor cost, both for the product basket we're looking at. Now, let's further suppose that Labor is linear in MinWage, say by a factor X. So we finally get: MinWage = a * X * MinWage + (1-a) * Other MinWage = Other * (1-a)/(1-aX) So for any value of Other (external?), a (labor-intensiveness of production, basically 1-a is kind of the productivity?) and relation between average wage and minimum wage X (which is independent of the rest maybe?), you should be able to choose a minimum wage that is a living wage. But like with dynamic hedging, I guess the problem is that you can only adjust these things at finite intervals, which may cause instabilities. The fact that your more time-series-like model doesn't converge leads me to suspect that this is the case. Caveat lector: I am not an economist by any means. ETA: Oh, heh, I already see a problem: if aX >= 1, this doesn't work.  So a < 1/X, meaning you need labor intensiveness to be low enough, or productivity to be high enough, for this to work. Alternately, average labor costs are very close to the minimal wage, meaning you have a mostly egalitarian society. 
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 21:59
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VitalSigns posted:Also, there are states where they index the minimum wage to inflation already and it didn't kick off a diverging series of raises driving all prices to infinity...what is it with this thread and imagining insane and fanciful consequences of ordinary policies that already exist? How dare you sully my simple and pretty math with brute empiricism?!
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Jun 9, 2015 00:40
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JeffersonClay posted:Yeah, but Elcondemn is ideologically comitted TO the minimum wage. Wait, is your position that there shouldn't be a minimum wage, period?
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Jun 9, 2015 18:35
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This thread is getting really bad in terms of the signal/reports I've got two suggestions:
Good luck!
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Jun 17, 2015 06:36
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down with slavery posted:great suggestions OR you know, or you could just probate people who unironically make statements like "the working poor do not exist in America" for ~100 pages If we started probating everyone who persisted in repeating ignorant statements divorced from reality, there would hardly be anyone posting in D&D. Maybe that's how you would like it, but apparently most of the users in this forum disagree with you. I don't generally like probating people for mod sass, but I would suggest that if you want to continue this conversation, you do it privately, rather than in-thread.
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Jun 19, 2015 03:49
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Orange Sunshine posted:I have a question about the idea of a $15 minimum wage. What happens to people who aren't worth $15 per hour? Why do you keep employing them for any amount of money? These are clearly people who should be in some kind of rehab, not slaving away for the pittance you deign to provide them.
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Jun 22, 2015 05:21
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President Kucinich posted:I don't know about ya'll but I'm pumped finding out working poor people don't exist. Headed to the cemetery right now to dig up some friends and remind them they're not dead from choosing between treating a tooth ache versus making rent that month. Then I'll drive down to the local school supply charity building and let them kids know their parents aren't really poor and no they don't need those supplies, while admiring the empty halfway houses along the way. President Kucinich posted:I'm starting a national tour where I visit all the pauper graves with a bullhorn in hand to demand those lazy fucks get a job and stop complaining. Liquid Communism posted:No, his argument is that he's a fuckwit from a Nordic social democracy who has so deeply internalized the social safety net available in his homeland that he simply cannot conceptualize that a person with a full time job could be poor. President Kucinich posted:No, his argument is he's an obese toddler that hasn't learned object permanence yet. Do you really think you're improving this thread or this forum by coming in when another user is probated and dropping sick burns on them?
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Jun 24, 2015 00:42
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down with slavery posted:It's more just celebrating the reprieve before they come back and we go back for another 100 pages of the same stupid discussion held up by the same 3 idiots. A more productive celebration, in my opinion, would be to demonstrate a solid argument in their absence, to provide a good example.
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Jun 24, 2015 02:17
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down with slavery posted:Feel free to read the thread and view any number of solid arguments that have been put forth What is GP's current status?
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Jun 24, 2015 02:35
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down with slavery posted:Then the thread becomes a news/hangout thread alongisde Q&A because "should the US raise the minimum wage" isn't really a highly contested topic here, nor should it be. The more interesting discussions are to be had about the feasibility of a GMI, "solutions" to automation eating away at demand for labor, etc.  Your destiny awaits!
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Jun 24, 2015 03:18
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FieryBalrog posted:Have you seen the Federal government's ridiculous perversions in the Farm Bill? It's easy to point out failures, but as others have pointed out, the Federal government has also had successes. How about you be a little bit more constructive? What are your ideas for alleviating poverty which do not go through the Federal Government?
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Jun 27, 2015 22:14
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