Obama to raise federal minimum wage via executive order

Do Federal contractors have food restaurants that take orders? Bye bye cafeteria lady

 

Good. Why waste someone's time with such low-value work that won't even pay a living wage?

 

Terrible way to make it given that the image is irrelevant and not even accurate since wages aren't being raised to $15. And there are plenty of places where wages ARE $10 an hour (or more - in Midland, for example) - for fast food and those jobs aren't being replaced by machines.

This is the problem with the simpleton strategy of posting stupid GIFs to make a point instead of being able to articulate an actual message.

 

How many employees on federal contracts make minimum wage now? Probably not many.

 

Estimated to be a few hundred thousand.

 

The bigger issue is making much ado about nothing. This is what people are talking about after the state of the Union address? He raised the minimum wage a buck or two for 200,000 people?

Here is what you're really getting. You will get a reduction of work force, a reduction of hours for those people and an increase workload for those who do get the raise.
The number always balance out, regardless of how you want to manipulate the equation.
Is this a bad thing? No Is Obama doing anything significant? No

 

They become poorer by not losing any money? That's quite an argument. Or I guess you're hinting at inflation

The inflation caused by minimum wage increases should be very easy to track empircallly - yet economists who have studied the issue haven't been able to find anything statistically meaningful at all despite dozens or even hundreds of examples to follow.

Why are you right and the evidence wrong? The US economy is simply too large (and most minimum wage increases are too small) for anything to have an impact on the economy as a whole. Your claim about others being hurt is smply not true in any tangible way.

 

Whether the work is worth someone's time should not be up to you or anyone other than the worker.

whether it is or isn't a good way to make the argument is irrelevant. The argument holds on its own merits.

 

It's a big thing for those 200,000 people, though.

Absolutely. Significant things require Congress. It's quite clear that Congress is dysfunctional, even ignoring the President's role. The Senate and House are at complete odds. So he's doing the little things he can do by executive order to make a difference in people's lives.

Except it doesn't. As I pointed out, this reality is playing out in plenty of states that have higher minimum wages, and even in areas where the market has forced it like Midland. And there's zero evidence of fast food workers being replaced by machines.

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/12/03/tablets_at_restaurants_applebee_s_chili_s_race_to_eliminate_human_interaction.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-delivery-by-drone/

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/08/29/can-fast-food-jobs-really-be-replaced-by-machines/

 

curious as to what field you're in, I can give you a probability on how likely machines will replace you if capital holders decide so.

Become a capital holder. nuff said, if you want equality in this system

or reform the system

 

That gets rid of people to manage cash transactions and orders. That's it. That still doesn't eliminate cooks, dishwashers, people to deliver food, people to clean the restaurant, etc..

At best that removes a small fraction of employment and that's assuming that people are comfortable with not having a person take their order (which isn't a given)

 

Computer programmer. Go ahead and tell me my future.

 

Gee the first blog says:

 

Are you suggesting that cooking and dish washing can't be done by a machine? my kitchen suggests otherwise. The second link shows you delivery being done by a machine.

How dense do you people have to be to make the argument that workers can't be replaced by machines and that it will never happen? good lord.

It must be that Applebee's and Chili's are investing in these devices to not replace waiters...... haha

 

Yes, because restaurants have replaced all their dishwasher jobs with the machines.

 

How's your handle on data structures, and algorithms?

Are you more comfortable with SQL or NoSQL alternatives?

How good are you with interacting with hardware?

Do you work typically for or own a startup, old-school established company (think IBM), or new-school established company (think Red Hat or Google)? If you want to specify startup by financing stage and relative maturity, go ahead.

Because, you know, an Indian is easily available for some of the grunt work, and given deep learning and Ray running Google's department of engineering, machines that learn on their own will be in vogue---from Watson onwards. (as an aside, wonderful article about this---yay Canada! http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning/)

let's not disparage one class of worker or another. Unless you own your own significant capital, you are at the mercy of capital, and you are in this together with all service workers---a commodity and cost capital relentlessly seeks to erase.

We're all in this together.

 

They have replaced tons. Talk to your parents.

 

My parents have both passed on years ago. But as someone that has seen many areas where automation has been accused of taking people's jobs away, it just hasn't happened. Restaurants still employ dishwashers to load, unload, and even wash dishes, pots and pans. Even those that use dishwashers (and btw, dishwasher machines are usually used for health reasons because they can wash at higher temperatures).

Restaurants will still employ waiters to bring the food, answer questions, serve drinks, deal with issues, etc.

Of course, this discussion is irrelevant since none of these restaurants have introduced automation because of the President's action to raise the minimum wage in cases of federal contracts.

 

Raising wages necessarily raises costs of production unless you lay people off. There are some industries that produce elastic goods that can't raise the price of the good so they often either lay people off or look to cut costs via automation, in the case of inelastic goods, you just pass that cost on to the customer.

Wages shouldn't be looked at in terms of actual dollar amount, it should be viewed in terms of buying power, people making minimum wage will always have the least amount of buying power so they'll always be poor. Raising the dollar value of that minimum does not effect buying power. You could make the minimum wage a million dollars an hour, and it wouldn't change that they'd have the least buying power in the country;they'd be poor.