But no one would actually work for free, so now the company has to actually decide how much it values the work at.
Look at what happened with retail and fast-food after lockdowns lifted in the US: wages surged for the bottom 10% of earners. These places couldn't get people to work for minimum wage, so they had to ignore minimum wage and actually value the work accordingly. As a result, income saw some pretty strong growth for those employees.
What a minimum wage does is set the opening baseline for negotiation. The company can say, "We know this is a shitty job that anyone can do, and the government says that kind of work is worth $7.25." That creates a hurdle to discourage an employee from negotiating for more.
Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.
The argument is that raising wages would cost business owners too much. They would need to close up shop rather than pay higher wages, and then the workers aren't making anything.
And there is some truth to that, unfortunately. Almost half of all private sector employees work for a small business. If small business labor costs doubled overnight, most could not absorb the additional expense and survive. You'd see a lot of places go belly up, and either nothing would replace them or large corporations that were able to absorb the labor costs would take over and raise prices to maintain their margin. A higher minimum wage just strengthens the position of the companies with enough capital to survive the change.
I agree that wages need to increase, but it's a lot more complicated than just the government saying, "Hey! Pay them more!"
There's also a huge risk of this being misapplied. I remember way back in PS2 days, I was struggling with a jumping puzzle in the original God of War so much so that the game jumped in with a prompt offering to turn down difficulty. But turning down the difficulty in God of War reduces combat difficulty, nothing to do with the huge friggin' hole I kept falling into from mis-timing jumps.
Honestly, every game I've played that offers scaling difficulty based on performance has been because I sucked at the platforming parts that they couldn't make easier with a setting. Maybe it's a hint that I should stop playing platformers.
For the last 40 years or so, Republican voters have mostly been single-issue voters. They care very passionately about one thing, and will let almost anything else slide as a result. Being in favor of cable fees doesn't matter as long as they're anti-abortion. Being in favor of cutting social welfare programs that those very voters rely upon is fine as long as they're anti-trans.
For the most part, each voter only cares about one or two specific things, and the whole picture doesn't really matter to them.
I think that's more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they're having events at all, they're not putting as much money into them as they used to.
Personally I feel that if someone is chronically ill with a debilitating illness, the most humane thing we can do is allow them the choice of assisted suicide.
I think the most humane thing to do would be to treat them with the best care we as a society can provide without forcing them into massive debt.
Where I live, all care has a six month wait list. I started a new job with new insurance back in April, still haven't been able to get in anywhere to see a new PCP. My dentist canceled an appointment on me last week and rescheduled it for February.
People say socialized medicine leads to long wait times to see doctors. Well, I'm not seeing them now anyway, so at least it's less or of my pocket.
I agree in the case of single-family homes. Even in cases of 3 or 4 unit buildings. But how do you propose full-on complexes get run if not by a company? Very few individuals have the capital to buy a 50-unit building, and honestly, the US needs more dense urban housing to help reduce our impact on climate.
That's a bad take. The case actually affirmed business judgement rule: the idea that the guy running the company knows how to run it better than the shareholders. It's part of why post-war America is considered the golden age of American manufacturing: Publicly traded companies invested in their employees and wages exploded across the board. A 100 year old court decision isn't the primary driver on a problem that's really only developed in the last forty or fifty years.
My BIL is a Catholic Libertarian. Almost forty and still lives with Mom and Dad, so he never had the brush with reality that your friend went through. He thinks he's politically savvy and always wants "civil debate" with me, but he's utterly insufferable.
I'm not looking forward to Thanksgiving next week.
Future Me has more experience and wisdom than Present Me. There's no reason I should do anything when such a better-suited candidate will inevitably emerge.
No, you only need to abide by the laws of your locality. Just like within your own country in different states or counties. I can't buy alcohol on Sunday morning in my town, but I can if I drive to the next town over.
Ironically, this is pretty much how McMahan got Lower Decks. He used to write the TNG Season 8 Twitter, where he'd post fake synopses for his imagined episodes. It was almost always a fairly serious A-plot and a hilariously bananas B-plot.
That's not what 'needs' means.