God says, "I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?"

-Nat Tokington

As Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown, puts it, "this presupposes that if you hire someone for, say, 40 hours a week, you owe him enough money for him to lead a decent life". If the value of a worker's labour is less to her employer than the cost of a reasonable standard of living, why should the employer be on the hook for the difference? Subsidising the worker, to bring her up to a certain baseline mimimum, counts as a subsidy to the employer only if we think that was the duty of business all along—to pay workers not only a wage commensurate with the market value of their labour, but also sufficient to finance a life of a certain dignity and security. Mr Brennan goes on (using the example of Bob, a McBurger employee):

Isn’t it more plausible to think that if there’s some enforceable positive duty to provide Bob with enough stuff to lead a life, that all of us, together share this burdensome duty, rather than just Bob’s employer? Why should Bob’s employer, specifically, be the one that has to bear the burden and lose all this money to keep him alive (at whatever level you consider decent)? This just seems like a kind of moral outsourcing to me. Why not instead Bob’s neighbors, parents, friends, or sexual partners? Bob does McBurger a service, and McBurger pays him for that service.

Whenever you hear "Salem Witch Trials" you should immediately think "Sarah Palin, Tea Party and Death Panels."

Salem was about urban vs. rural. It was the city intellectuals vs. the country farmers. It was the "true Americans" vs. the "liberal elites." And the liberal elites got burned at the stake.

"that guy's doing some shady shit and I don't like it."

And if you have more friends than he does, guilt is utterly irrelevant.

I mix... a large, famous reality TV show involving people locked up together for months at a time. And as I have to sit in the chair making it sound good for ten hours at a stretch, I have to listen. I've gotten good at listening for quality, not content; I can zone them out a lot of the time. But sometimes I don't.

I had a formative experience a few years back where there were two stupid girls who were friends with a smart girl. And the smart girl did something that the stupid girls didn't appreciate - I think she talked to Bob first when they wanted her to talk to Mary and then Bob. So one of them came to her and said "why didn't you talk to Mary first?" and the girl said something like "because Mary would have told Bob and she would have told Bob this instead of that and since we need Bob to hear that I figured I should make an end run and take care of it. Sorry I didn't talk to you first."

So stupid girl one nods and smiles and goes to stupid girl two. She relays this story. Then she says "I hate the way smart girl leaves hair on her brush." Stupid girl two says "and she's always so uppity." Stupid girl one says "yeah! Who does she think she is!" and so on for the next ninety minutes working themselves up into a lather over what a horrible person smart girl is. Within three hours there was a shouting confrontation over what a slob smart girl is and how she has no respect for other people because she left her underwear on the floor in the bedroom. Stupid girls splintered from smart girl, dogged her, made her life horrible, got the whole house to burn the witch and she was gone in three days.

People rarely fight over what the fight is about. They fight over not liking your face. This is why smart people hate stupid people - because smart people can be right and still be burned at the stake. And this is why stupid people hate smart people - because they think it's about being right instead of being on our side.

How many millions of people voted against their own healthcare? How many millions voted against their own financial best interests? How many people effectively foreshortened their lives by edging their worlds just that much closer to Dickensian hell? And they did it with a smile to show those goddamn coastal liberals a thing or two.

This is why Democrats lose. They have to find the poor smart people while the Republicans just need to point at the witch.

I don't even know if I'd call this a first draft. Writing is a thing for me to do and I need something to do lately. This is more constructive than being a smartass on Twitter which is maybe what I'd have done instead. But I'm learning some of what I thought were my coping mechanisms for stress are stressful themselves. Writing and art are work if you want to produce something decent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Whatever, I'm off track. Sorry this isn't cited or anything. I'm confident I'm right about this stuff but I wrote it off the top of my head except for some details of the Oxford Group so I could be wrong about some things. This is not a first draft, it's a raw draft. Thanks for keeping me motivated with the first response.

_______________

According to the mythology of the program, what would come to be known as Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 when an alcoholic named Bill Wilson serendipitously came in contact with another alcoholic named Bob Smith through the use of a phone book in an Akron, Ohio hotel and the guidance of a church. Bill had had a religious vision about six months prior that he accredited his new found sobriety to but part of the vision was sharing this revelation with other alcoholics in order to maintain his own sobriety by helping others.

Bill Wilson’s story is the first chapter in Alcoholics Anonymous, colloquially known as The Big Book, the text which was written by committee in 1939 and gave the group its name. In it he details his life and struggles for sobriety. Fighting in World War I, flying high as a stock broker in the twenties, how that all worked out for everyone involved, being a miserable drunk that could not function whatsoever to the point that his wife worked to support him in a time when women did not work. Some of the details of Bill being an insufferable piece of shit are obfuscated by history such as the fact that a woman taking a job is not scandalous ninety years later. Some details are no doubt obfuscated by Bill intentionally to save face as he was an egotistical maniac in addition to a useless alcoholic. Some details are not clear due to subsequent history which is not mentioned in the AA program as Bill and Dr. Bob are canonized in the pantheon of a group where questions are ignored, brushed off, rationalized away or met with hostility.

Bill and Dr. Bob (the nickname for Bob Smith) were involved in an early twentieth century fringe Christian movement called the Oxford Group and AA is directly patterned after the philosophy of this movement. The Oxford Group was a movement founded by a Christian missionary named Frank Buchman in 1908. Simply put, it believed that all sin and all of the world’s problems could be attributed to the character defects of fear and selfishness, ideas that would reappear in AA doctrine thirty years later. Buchman did not lead a church. The Oxford Group was organized informally and meetings among members were more likely to be held in a living room than a worship center. The goal of the group was essentially to infiltrate churches throughout the world and draw parishioners into the group through the charisma of its members and the results of its philosophy that would presumably be magnetic due to the absolute truth and effectiveness of its practices. The solution to selfishness and fear is to give one’s life over to God. Whatever that means.

At one point Bill Wilson got a surprise visit from an old drinking buddy named Ebby Thatcher who had used the Oxford Group methods to cease drinking for a (short) period. Bill claims in his story in the Big Book that he brushed off Thatcher because Bill was an agnostic and had no interest in “the God thing.” Which is either an outright lie or a redefinition of the word agnostic. The latter is not unlikely because there’s an entire chapter in the Big Book that can be seen as an attempt to frame everyone who is in active addiction as an agnostic, but I’ll come back to that chapter later. Of course Bill isn’t 100% dismissive. He was probably just an asshole at the time because he was full of cheap gin. He claims that he noticed a change in Ebby Thatcher that stuck with him.

Bill was in and out of sanitariums in the early thirties for alcohol withdrawal and possibly delirium tremens, the worst expression of withdrawal which can lead to hallucinations and death if not medically treated. Today severe alcohol withdrawal is treated with anti convulsants, fluids and vitamins but also a not dissimilar experience of being locked in a hospital. There were no benzodiazepans in the thirties so aside from literal medical use of alcohol, the treatment was spotty involving sedatives or experimental treatments. Experimental is the experience Bill had after his meeting with Ebby Thatcher. Bill was given the belladonna treatment, a quack method involving a poisonous plant that can itself induce hallucinations And what happens? Bill has a ‘spiritual experience’ and comes to accept the Oxford Group’s methods as being an effective treatment for alcoholism. There is no mention of his prior experience with the group in the book. What exactly the ‘Belladonna Method’ is has been rendered unclear by history and AA makes no attempt to clarify eighty years later. Ebby Thatcher is never mentioned again but is arguably canonized for delivering the spark of a message to Bill. He was sober for about six months and after the success of AA Bill supported him for the rest of his life out of gratitude (I guess). Don’t let that fact paint a rosy picture of the man. He sobered up but remained a complete piece of shit.

So into this confluence of events that seems at this point remarkably easy to attribute mystical involvement if one doesn’t read any source but Bill’s own word, Bill stumbles into an Akron hotel on a business trip. He’s about six months sober but has not been able to put into practice what he believes is the answer outside of the halls and rooms of the sanitarium. He has a bar on one side and a phone booth on the other. He knows he needs to help other alcoholics in order to help himself because the hallucination, ahem vision, in the hospital told him so. So he calls around various churches in order to find someone to help rather than go to the bar which is something he desperately wants to do. And he is connected with Dr. Bob Smith, who is coincidentally part of the Oxford Group as well, and the two spend a night talking each other through the throes of craving. This was this first meeting of alcoholics anonymous.

Okay, I'll play.

A minimum wage is a means of monetary redistribution built into payroll.

Assumes facts not in evidence. Suppose Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice all work for Google. They all make eleventy seven gajillion dollars a year. The minimum wage is eleven dollars a year. Neither Bob, nor Carol, nor Ted nor Alice are experiencing wealth distribution.

Let's suppose instead that Larry, Moe and Curly all pick lettuce for Farmer Bob (no relation). They all make eleven cents a year. Suppose the minimum wage is eleven dollars a year. Oh, ho! You cry. Now we're redistributing money. No, not really. Because Bob is gonna sell the farm or hire robots before he pays that much extra. And you know what? Bob can get a bunch of undocumented workers to replace Larry, Moe and Curly.

A minimum wage has nothing to do with "monetary redistribution" and everything to do with lifestyle protectionism. The argument against minimum wage is that if people want a job that badly, they ought to be allowed to work for it. The argument for minimum wage is "How else do you intend to keep out the wetbacks?"

Seriously.

The first time a federal minimum wage was passed and not immediately abolished by the Supreme Court, it was 25 cents an hour - $4.10 in 2012 dollars. That's not enough to keep anybody in their shanty and socks... but it's enough to drive the goddamn Mexicans back across the border where they can't Terk our Jerbs. Two years later they criminalized El Marijuana. It was the other shoe of The New Deal - plenty of make-work, but only for white folks.

So that out of the way, let's not pretend that a minimum wage is a living wage, which is what the socialists and communists and neoutopians and myself are really interested in talking about. Minimum wage in California is $8 an hour. A living wage in Los Angeles is $11.37 and that's without kids. Minimum wage plus a baby = food stamps, no two ways about it.

So let's not look at it from a perspective of money and buckets. The question at hand is who you wish to remunerate well enough to establish themselves within your community. For places that pay minimum wage, the answer is "nobody." This is not an unfortunate consequence of capitalism, this is a conscious choice by predatory corporations. It doesn't have to work that way.

I know two people who work at Costco. One of them is out on the floor, the other one does advertising.

Both of them have been there more than fifteen years. Compare and contrast with Amazon's digital Okies.

A guy named Bob takes on CinemaSins, a YouTube channel popular for criticizing/harassing popular films for their "sins" (mistakes, inaccuracies or clichés).

The video is a 30-minute-long visual essay aimed at portraying CinemaSins as inadequate to its stated purpose, as well as damaging to the overall entertainment climate through dumbing said entertainment down.

I'm not entirely convinced on all of the points, but I like to explore opposing points of view. I must admit: I went to watch the essay because I was already disfatuated from CinemaSins' approach.

I also went out to watch the Everything Wrong with "Everything Wrong with X" series of Bob's videos, those acting as precursors to the essay. Bob seems to be quite determined at disproving CinemaSins (and both it's creators, Jeremy and Chris) as disingenuious and hypocritical, while sometimes committing to the same things that he points out to be bad in CS. Here are the two videos I've seen, with a few more available on the channel:

Here, Bob presents good points on both the unsuitability of CS' said-to-be not-criticism and the film itself.

kleinbl00

Alice isn't attempting to determine Bob's behavior. Alice is attempting to determine the influence of the heavens on the events that surround Bob. There is no scientific method that connects the world around Bob to Alice's observations.

If Carol studies Bob's reactions to Alice's predictions, Carol is a sociologist.

Remember when “Honest Bob” Murray of Murray Industries whined about a “War on Coal”? Most people in “Honest Bob’s” situation would’ve had the sense to keep their pie holes shut, considering he was responsible for the negligent homicide of the coal miners who died in one of his death traps just a few years earlier in the Crandall Canyon mine collapse. “Honest Bob’s” workers probably thought he’d declared a war on them.

And from the looks of things in the news lately, coal’s declared a war on us — with lots of help from the coercive apparatus of the state. A 60-year-old storage tank at a Freedom Industries site in Charleston, West Virginia leaked MCHM, an industrial chemical used to clean coal, and contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 residents. No doubt “Honest Bob” was dancing with joy at the thought of being superseded by a coal industry figure even sleazier than himself.

Murray Energy, the coal industry, and the fossil fuels industry as a whole have benefited massively from systematic state intervention on their behalf. The state’s actions on the industry’s behalf include not only original enclosure and appropriation of vast tracts of land and the resources on it — often to the prejudice of those already living there — but the use of armed troops in pitched battles to break strikes and the massive preemption and nullification of tort liability laws that would long ago have rendered the coal and fossil fuels industries bankrupt from damages for the harm they’ve done to surrounding communities and their own workers.

East of the Mississippi, enormous tracts of “vacant” land (except for American Indians already living there) were preempted by colonial governments, and doled out to favored persons in grants often comprising millions of acres. Land in the Alleghenies and Blue Ridge that was homesteaded by early settlers — who hence had no formal title because government was still irregular — was later expropriated by railroad and mining companies. A good fictional example is the indie movie “Matewan,” set in the 1920s Coal Wars of West Virginia. Striking miners in a tent city outside town, besieged by Pinkertons and sheriff’s deputies, were rescued by armed people who came down out of the woods to their aid. These so-called “hillbillies” were the descendants of earlier settlers, whose land had been stolen by the mining company and who consequently fled into the hills to eke out a subsistence on marginal land.

West of the Mississippi it was even worse. The great majority of land in the Guadalupe-Hidalgo session went directly from being state property of the Republic of Mexico to being U.S. federal land. Some of this land was later settled by farmers under the terms of the Homestead Act. Much more of it (an area roughly equivalent to France) was given away — with much less difficulty of claiming it — to railroads, not only to provide the actual rights-of-way, but also strips of land several miles on either side of the actual route to provide the railroad companies with valuable real estate as a source of funding. Still a great deal more of the land — a majority of land in some Plains and Rocky Mountain states — was retained in the “public” domain; this land, from which individual settlers had been conveniently excluded, was preferentially leased to mining, logging, oil and ranching interests for almost nothing.

Likewise the regulatory state — ostensibly created to protect the public from pollution and health hazards and labor from unsafe working conditions — preempted older,, traditional common law standards of tort liability. to the surrounding population for all the serious pollution, health effects, economic effects of watershed destruction, etc., etc., etc., from mountaintop removal. Quite simply, companies that engage in the kind of risky offshore drilling BP does, or in fracking or mountaintop removal, would not be able to afford staying in business in a just world. If local juries were free to award damages equal to the actual harm inflicted by these activities, the cost of liability insurance would outweigh likely profits in most cases. What’s more, without the corporate veil to hide behind the boys in the C-suites and boards of directors would have to fear having their entire personal fortunes seized to pay damages.

Workplace safety laws provide minimal protections at best, and even their requirements on paper often go unenforced because of chummy relationships between management and federal inspectors (the latter two groups reportedly having had sex on their desks on the Deepwater Horizons drilling rig). According to an independent analysis after the Crandall Canyon disaster, the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s review of the roof control plans submitted for the operation — where the central pillars supporting the roof collapsed — were perfunctory.

After Deepwater Horizons, the Crandall Canyon collapse and the Charleston MCHM spill, it should be obvious that federal labor, workplace safety and environmental laws are nearly worthless most of the time, and not much better even when enforced. So long as the state exists, the legal regime will never be made effective at preventing things like the Deepwater Horizons disaster or Crandall Canyon through any kind of governmental “reform,” because to do that would destroy not only the business models of the regulated industries, but the entire economic model that depends on wasting the artificially cheap energy and resource inputs those industries provide.

The only viable alternative is direct action. Ways to stop environmental pollution by energy companies include physically blocking pipeline construction and sabotaging equipment, doxing corporate officials and harassing them at their homes, churches and country clubs, and whistleblowing by employees (not martyrdom — just saving stuff to a thumb drive and anonymously sending copies to every reporter and advocacy group you can think of will work fine). Workers can fight for a safe working environment using an entire arsenal of time-honored direction techniques, many of them discussed by the Wobblies in the pamphlet “How to Fire Your Boss”: Whistleblowing, doxing, and other public information/humiliation campaigns (including joint campaigns with friendly community organizers and social justice advocacy groups and boycotts like the successful campaign by the Coalition of Imolakee Workers), picketing and leafleting rights-of-way, random unannounced one-day wildcat strikes or sick-ins, slowdowns, and working to rule, protests and suppliers, contractors and outlets, enlisting the sympathy of teamsters who haul dangerous cargo — the list is endless.

The basic point is the state works for employers and resource extractors, not for us. So instead of begging the state to protect us from industry wrongdoers, we must do it ourselves.

I did not suggest the $25k/yr. interviewees not be hired, I merely pointed out that, depending on how they answered the questions, they may end up being problems.

Thanks for clarifying. I concluded that you would not hire them when you said

No matter which way you look at it, you're going to have problems if you don't pay your employees a living wage.

Sorry for jumping to conclusions. So, what would you do?

mk and thenewgreen refer to this conversation in the past tense, and if you feel it has run its course, please feel free to say so. I will consider askinghubski, though I am wary of the amount of effort it might take to understand a lot of different people's positions.

I haven't even gotten clarity on the terms "living wage" and "starvation wage" which you use as black and white categories. Here are the definitions you linked to:

That allows a family to meet its basic needs, and provides it with some ability to deal with emergencies, without resorting to welfare or other public assistance.

money paid to workers that is not enough to pay for the things (such as food and shelter) that are needed to live

So there is some ambiguity about who will be able to meet basic needs with a given wage. The worker, or the worker and family? Consider this scenario:

Alice and Bob work in the same office, with the same role, at the same level, with similar performance and seniority. As one would expect, their salaries are very similar. Bob is married to a doctor and lives in a paid-off single family home. They have a dog but no kids, and enjoy spending time in their vacation condo. They have no debt. Alice is a single mother of three. She lives in a rented townhouse. She has student loans outstanding as well as significant credit card debt because of chronic bad luck with the used cars she buys.

Alice is thinking about declaring bankruptcy. Bob is thinking about buying a Maserati.

As I said, their salaries are similar. Is it a living wage or a starvation wage?

Since public assistance in the United States is typically means-tested on a household basis, there should be nothing immoral about an employer hiring Bob at any salary while he is living comfortably. But if his circumstances change, say following a divorce, he may start qualifying for public assistance. Nothing has changed in his relationship with his employer; is the employer now acting unethically?

From the Bitcoin wiki:

Suppose Alice wants to send a bitcoin to Bob.

1) Bob sends his address to Alice.

2) Alice adds Bob’s address and the amount of bitcoins to transfer to a message: a 'transaction' message.

3) Alice signs the transaction with her private key, and announces her public key for signature verification.

4) Alice broadcasts the transaction on the Bitcoin network for all to see.

Some considerations for TinCan:

Step 1 could be done with TinCan, just like using e-mail or postcard or skywriter. Security is not important, since Bob sends his public address (e.g. something that looks like "1Krn7vC1kqmag8wbTbr1yZCJceHYVmpYse").

Steps 2-3 would normally be done using dedicated bitcoin software. Someone who has bitcoins to spend is likely to have an app or software to generate transaction messages. So there isn't a strong reason for TinCan to take on this task and try to convince users that it is reliable and trustworthy.

Step 4 requires access to the worldwide bitcoin network, and the transaction will not be verified until it is broadcast. So the selling point of TinCan -- that it works without Internet access -- would render this step impossible.

In other words, without modification TinCan could be used to share one's public address in order to receive funds later. This might be useful in the protest or concert or natural disaster scenarios for small purchases based on trust, or else to solicit later donations while passing out water bottles or gas masks.