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- Hacker News
- $25 is difficult to manage even in California, with millions of customers. I can't see how its economically feasible in Alaska.by gamblor956
- Needs to be dynamic. Maybe it's too hard for politicians to understand, but it needs to be tied to something. We can't keep raising it every few years to an absolute amount. This is a good start and I wish them the best but it's short term thinking like every other one of these bills. I also think it's weird to use the living wage as a basis since they'll only make it up to that number in 6 years?by Neywiny
- Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone.
Is anyone here familiar, to comment?
by bell-cot - The problem with doing that in Alaska is that there is not really a funding source for… anything. No income tax, typically little to no sales tax, low property taxes… the state’s other income source is a tax on the oil companies that drill and export from Alaska, which gets turned into the quasi-mini-UBI Public Fund Dividend.by klardotsh
- Or the people who don't like living in a remote area with high prices could choose to move somewhere else? The US is huge.
- Alaska has generally two categories of places. Nome, mentioned in the URL, is a fly-in community that can receive barge shipments on the ocean during a short summer season. There is literally no road that goes there.
Not that cost of living is cheap in the rest of Alaska but the fly-in dependent communities are a whole other thing than the places that have a road ultimately connected to the Yukon, BC and the rest of continental north america by road.
The transport costs to get just about anything to the fly in communities is similar to Nunavut. Plenty of examples in Canadian media of $29 bottles of orange juice and similar.
by walrus01 - What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?by tt24
- tl;dr:
Every minimum-wage supporter would actually be fine with the extremely reasonable position of paying everyone in proportion to the replaceability of their actual work and then letting businesses that don't know how to provide value just go out of business. Raising the wage floor is just an imperfect-but-actionable proxy for that because nobody is willing to honestly explore curbing the excesses of the executive and investor classes.
> "What do minimum wage supporters expect to happen with people whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value?"
Can I assume that you're referring to the executives? Just kidding. Of course you aren't.
You can either mandate that people get paid commensurately with the difficulty of replacing their actual labor (as opposed to merely of their position[0]) or you can raise the floor and hope that it approximately achieves something close enough, but you must pick one.
[0]:
The position of CEO of a company has great value, someone needs to make those decisions. But the actual labor of a CEO can often be trivially done by even the least intelligent and least motivated employee. They are eminently replaceable. And yet the CEO gets paid in proportion to the position rather than their labor.
Right now executive pay is artificially high relative to their actual labor as "the cost of doing business" and laborer pay is artificially low relative to their actual labor as "the way to stay in business". Why does that seem ok?
- > whose labor does not produce >= $minimum_wage worth of value
Same thing we’ve been doing for other fields like software engineers - just pay them more.
- Labour theory of value should first be applied to management staff who produce nothing of value before employees that at least contribute something.by Blazara
- If a business can't pay it's employees enough to live on it shouldn't survive.by sapphicsnail
- I haven’t seen an actual answer to your comment and it seems simple to me - if they cannot provide that value then society provides it to them so they do not have to live in slavery or abject poverty. UBI, minimum wage, earned income credit or what have you. Greed is the only reason humanity accepts poverty - we were well on our way to solving it in fact.by conception
- "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -A Christmas Carol (1843)
The whole point of civilization is to help people.
If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist?
- What about people receiving astronomically high wages that vastly outstrip their labour value?by dwroberts