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[Random_Dragon]

It's not that hard, you just gotta start by knowing where it isn't.

[McTraveller]

Huh I just saw someone arguing the federal minimum wage should be increased to $25.

I really wish people would try to address the supply side of things rather than demand; simply giving people more cash is not likely to make things more affordable.

The only way to make things more affordable is to increase supply relative to demand.  Right now we just have tight supplies of everything, so increasing wage is just going to increase prices. I haven't seen any significant efforts to increase supply in low-end consumer goods, food, housing, health care, or anything else, really.  Unless the government can start busing oligopolies and lower barriers to entry, we'll never fix "the affordability problem."

I don't understand how people think...

[Frumple]

The only way to make things more affordable is to increase supply relative to demand.

This is... wildly untrue. Wildly, incredibly untrue. Plenty of stuff's price is nearly entirely uncoupled from supply or demand pressures due to other crap going on, and there's a pile of ways to handle that that don't involve doing anything to the supply other than unfucking access to it.

Upping wages is one of the ways to unfuck access in the short term, hopefully paired with doing so in ways that effect the long term; regulation adjustment, decapitating CEOs (I joke... mostly), whatever.

Any case, federal minimum wage in the US is still seven goddamn dollars and twenty five cents. It's pretty clearly entirely too low to function as anything actually useful. Can argue more about how high once it's no longer too bloody low, heh.

[McTraveller]

I think we're using different words to say the same thing:  "fixing access" is the same thing as increasing supply.  Supply doesn't mean "you have stuff sitting in a warehouse" it literally means "made available for sale."

Yes you can do this with regulation (e.g., no hoarding, no price fixing, etc.) in addition to making it easier to produce new things.  Which is what I think was being indicated there?

Sure $7.25 is low... but I don't know the last time I was anywhere that jobs were paid that low.  Around where I live nobody will take a job for less than about $14/hour (maybe I saw bagging clerks at the grocery store for $12?), and that's even higher than our state minimum wage.

Because of that, minimum wage isn't the biggest problem anyway; the real problem is the part-time benefits cliff. Instead of saying "full time is more than 30-whatever hours a week" and then having benefits laws set against part-time vs full-time, or based on size of company, they should just be "all benefits are required at any employment level, they must be no less than 10% full-time equivalent, and can pro-rate to 100%, 100% reached at not less than 30 hours per week" and "no less than 10% of the 'large company' amount, prorated to employee count, to reach 100% at not more than 50 employees" or something.

Breaking health care insurance from employment would be a massive game-changer for employment law in the US, but I just don't see that happening in my lifetime at least.

[hector13]

The just-in-time model also doesn’t help supply side issues. Trying to keep just enough stock to meet demand is fair enough if the shelf-life of a product can be measured in days or weeks, but it’s less sensible when it can be measured in decades. If anything happens to make supply stop, at any point in the chain from raw materials to the store shelf, it’s gone.

An example. I used to work in a store that sold canning supplies, basically glass jars, various powders and preservatives, things of that nature. Very few people actually bought these things though, because for years there was a shortage on lids for the jars, and that’s pretty much all anybody wanted.

That’s not going to change when the priority of executives across the land is to maximize share prices though.

[anewaname]

So, you really think that the engineers who designed and validated the new part design, and programmed the machines to stamp the piece, are so mindblowingly stupid? They probably just cut 30 minutes off production times per vehicle and removed the need for 150 fasteners.

The only "engineer" involved in this decision is a drug addict who used the profits from a slave-labor emerald mine to make some lucky investments in the 90s and crown himself as the Genius Savior Of Mankind.

So now it was his decision... What do you care if he made a decision to reduce the number of parts or something? You know other people did the work on it both before and after his decision. You want to say that people were stupid for designing crumply uni-body cars and cars are going to snap apart because of this? Why not say that we should go back to the car industry we had before, with cars that were heavier, used more fuel, and were 100% made in the USA. Do you really think that if it wasn't him at the head of that company, that an individual with "better" traits would be running it? You can find something to complain about, about all of the auto leaders going back to Ford who did make his cars 100% in the USA but was probably an honorary member of the KKK. They all were people who made decisions that hurt the workers or the consumers to maximize profit; and disguised those decisions with fabricated tales of "smarter", "better", and manifest destiny. And in furtherance of the profit seeking and fabrication of tales, they paid out money into systems of education, both secular and non-secular, where excess family members could become part of their superlative-promoting propaganda campaign to speak of their greatness, to justify actions, and write false histories.

[Lord Shonus]

You want to say that people were stupid for designing crumply uni-body cars and cars are going to snap apart because of this?

"Crumply unibody cars" are perfectly strong in the frame. They "crumple" because they're designed to collapse sacrificially in a crash to protect the occupants. It isn't "deciding that I know better than the existing auto industry because I'm the smartest man in the history of everything" and making absolutely stupid design decisions while firing anybody who questions them.

[Micro102]

There really isn't a point in pretending that Elon is some sort of genius who thinks outside the box and knows better than others. The dude's an idiot. His name is only on a few patents which are all aesthetic, and his engineers say he just gets in the way. He suggests really stupid stuff like "all our cars must be built to 100 micron accuracy" which as I have come to understand, would cost $100,000 per car due to the special machinery required and need to redo them upon error, and that he didn't even use common engineering units. He is burning twitter to the ground. There are negative reasons to think Elon knows what he is doing, and you would be better off asking an actual engineer what they think.

[McTraveller]

I think this should move to the engineering thread....

[hector13]

I don’t think it’s about engineering anymore. Elon fanboys versus Elon detractors.

Not that it’s anymore Ameripol, but when has that stopped anyone.

[Frumple]

I mean, unfortunately the US is his primary market, so when whatever the latest screwup with tesla impacts, it's going to be on our pedestrians, probably us more than anyone. Unfortunately, it's still pretty ameripol

I wish it wasn't. I'd be happy to see musk fuck off and bother some other country for a while.

[Micro102]

You know what? Yeah this has veered away from politics so let's get it back on track. So Elon is being questioned by the government for his sabotaging of a Ukrainian naval strike by cutting off the starlink connection that Ukraine uses. I've also heard him use some very specific wording when referencing an event that indicates he is waaay too close to Russian propoganda (I can't look it up right now but it was something like "name-of-person's mistake".)

[hector13]

Pretty sure his assertion was that Starlink was never on in the places that Ukraine are moving into and he’s only refusing to turn it on when they’re asking him to allow them to use it (conveniently not allowing them to use it to attack Russian assets) and also something about wanting to avoid escalating things to the point Russia might use nukes? Utter bollocks regardless since he wants Ukraine to basically accede to all of Russia’s demands for territory.

[Il Palazzo]

I've also heard him use some very specific wording when referencing an event that indicates he is waaay too close to Russian propoganda (I can't look it up right now but it was something like "name-of-person's mistake".)

“Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).” - in his 'peace plan' tweet

[Schmaven]

I imagine for any international businessman with global products, it would be desirable to not wage war against your customer base.