I think that's a bit of a moot point. The exchange rate is about $0.75:$1, but what really matters is relative purchasing power in the worker's own country. The OP was pointing out that for McDonald's to survive in Australia, they had to start offering expensive, gourmet burgers. Australia's minimum wage is roughly $17.25/hr in Australian dollars, so the math works out to be roughly the same.
The parent comment stated if you pay more, you get better workers. Of course that is true, until you have to pay everyone more. Paying someone more money does not magically make them a better worker. Paying more attracts higher quality talent, which allows your business to offer a higher quality product, which allows you to charge a premium and make more money.
Right, so you can now buy a burger off of the dollar menu, which costs approximately 1/7.25 hrs of your labor. When you earn $15/hr, you now have to work 19.5/15 hrs to earn a burger. Yes, it's a higher quality burger, but you can get a higher quality burger for the same amount of labor at minimum wage in the US, and still have the $1 option for those who want it.
Refining and delivering gas requires labor too. While many in that industry may earn more, I'm sure there are minimum wage workers employed by that industry that will affect their costs. It doesn't help right now that oil and gas are at rock bottom prices either.
Keep in mind that a wage increase affects not only one business's profit margins and pricing, but also the prices of all of their goods from suppliers too. Consider that fast food needs to pay 30% to labor, mostly at minimum wage. Another 30% or so usually goes to food costs. Those food supplies are the product of farm labor and food processing plant labor, both of which pay close to minimum wage as well. If minimum wage doubles, that means the fast food business now has a labor cost of 60% of his original pricing, plus the increases in food costs he is going to see as well. Those food cost increases could be 30-40%, meaning he will likely need to raise prices significantly to keep the lights on. For a company like McDonald's, who do you think is their target market when they try to keep prices as low as possible? The rich? They're trying to make food affordable for everyone, including minimum wage earners. When McDonald's costs nearly double, what do you think is going to happen to their prices?
So raising wages across the board would mean those worse workers who cause higher turnover and other costs are now going to earn the same amount as the better workers who don't cause businesses those problems, right?
I agree with you regarding taxes, although I don't anyone can honestly say that having more doctors and other highly educated professionals is bad for society. Requiring 12+ years of education to do some of the menial tasks doctors do, that could be done cheaper by someone with less schooling, would also be beneficial to everyone. The same goes for requiring a 4 year college degree that costs +$50,000 for many non-professional jobs.
This is a refreshing perspective on inequality. FWIW, I think one additional thing that would help with tilting the scales away from the 1% is the fact that most laws and contracts are written to put financial creditors first in line for any sort of liquidation of assets in a company. The VC industry oftentimes includes at a minimum 1x liquidation preferences in a liquidity event of any company. Banks also often get paid first in bankruptcy filings before suppliers are compensated for goods and services provided on credit. This may only make a small difference in the global economy, I'm not sure. However, it seems like someone investing their time into a company, whether as an entrepreneur or as a supplier providing goods and services, deserves to be compensated first, given they can't get their time back, before financial providers are compensated for their contributions. Furthermore, their are many more suppliers and entrepreneurs than exist financial creditors in the economy today. Ensuring these individuals are compensated first when things go poorly tilts the scales a little more towards the 99% vs the 1%. Anyways, that's just my 2 cents.
I'm surprised no one here has commented that they just use the iOS Reminders app that's native to the iPhone. I've found it to be more effective than any other system out there, and it's also significantly simpler.
>The article doesn't go into details as to why Apple should be doing anything with VR that isn't a) a proven technology nor is it b) anything more than a fad.
You could say the same about cars, but Apple is supposedly working on building one. The same could be said about watches before the Apple Watch was released too. I agree with your point, but I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Yeah, but the pricing for the API with HelloSign and DocuSign is a bit steep, given their pricing for using their service. $30/month for unlimited document sends vs $2/API call (1 document send) via the API.
Somalia is often brought up by Libertarians as an example of a distributed legal system. The argument is that Somalia has done better than their African peers over recent years...no idea if that is still the case or not.
I'm not talking about teaching ML or AI to MBA's, I'm talking about making the technology easy enough to use that it is accessible to practically anyone. ML can have lots of benefits to many small businesses where parts of their operations are highly repeatable, but variable enough that they can't necessarily be automated away. Figuring out how to use ML in cases like this can improve quality control, efficiency, and a host of other factors, but owners of many small businesses don't have the technical skills or time to invest in learning AI. What they do have is a few thousand dollars to invest in something that could make their business better, but there needs to be a Wordpress or Excel of AI to bring the technology to them.
Well a car operates in only two dimensions and has one given goal of transport from point A to B, so a car would maybe be a 5 or a 6. Keep in mind this scale is how close we are to actual human simulation. Humans brains deal with setting their own goals, dealing with conflicting information in pursuit of those goals, making trade offs, a constant influx of new information that affects variables in the decision making process, etc, all of which have yet to be adequately solved by AI. As the article points out, there are lots of mechanical/hardware complexities that further complicate the software with human robotics, and don't forget the average worker has 30-40 years of life experience (i.e. Learning) that a robot would need to somehow replicate. I'm not saying these problems won't eventually be solved, but AI tech has some tools that are really useful right now, but most people don't know how to use them. Instead of trying to skip up the ladder from step 4 to step 8, let's figure out ways to introduce step 4 to more people, and then we'll have more brains trying to solve the problems at steps 5, 6, and 7 to help us get to 8. Everyone will also make more money along the way :-)
I haven't bought completely into all the AI hype, so take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being human, we are at a 3 or 4. Boston Dynamics is trying to do things at level 8 with tools still stuck at the lower levels of AI. If there is a massive economic opportunity for AI tech that's available now, it's figuring out how to get it out of SV and making it useful for small businesses across the country. There are literally thousands of tasks that can be done faster and better using AI, but the problem is to use AI, you need someone skilled in basic programming to spend a week teaching themselves the basics before they can even begin to think about solving real business problems. Simplifying AI tools to the point where someone with basic excel/web browser skills can learn and apply this tech to their business operations in a few hours' time will be key to unlocking this opportunity.
If this is true, this is an incredibly risky move. I know self-driving cars are more or less inevitable at this point, but there are hundreds of unknowns that still need to be figured out. How will passengers treat the vehicles? What happens when there is a problem, and there isn't a human present? How secure will the cars be? Is the 'call a car from an app' business model the one that will win? Committing this amount of capital this early in the game seems like a big gamble, unless there are a large number of contingencies worked into this deal.
This is interesting because much of what has been written about Uber and lowering prices + surge pricing is the idea that Uber is trying to perfectly match supply and demand. If rides are consistently unavailable, that would be an indicator to me that their pricing is too low, and they aren't doing as good of a job as expected with this.
I wasn't necessarily referring to just the "Opulent Minorities", i.e. the rich unless you are referencing something else I'm not understanding. There are plenty of examples where mob rule overruns the rights poor/disenfranchised minorities too.
I think this is where crowd-funding can be a better platform for main street investors interested in this space than the stock market. Investing in a game idea that you like helps the game get made, but if it's a runaway hit, as long as there's a mechanism to distribute the cash windfall to those crowdfunding investors, it seems like a much better option than trying to grow to IPO only to burn out a few years later.
I'm a big fan of Hayek, however I don't think he ever discussed what I feel is the strongest argument against state-sponsored central planning - contingency planning. When the government decides it needs to be responsible for some basic human need because it is too important to be left up to the free market, such as food security or healthcare, it crowds out alternatives that actually behave as valuable insurance/backups to a primary provider of a given good or service. If/when the government fails at providing something as vital as food or water, there isn't much you can do when the government controls the means of production. If a natural monopoly exists, people are at least free to find alternatives on their own, and thus profit from them, should those managing that natural monopoly fail at their jobs.
My example was extremely simplified, and my point was not that China's central planning is correct, working well, or a good idea. It was that it is easier to get away/justify central planning on basic necessities (especially when 500 million people don't even have access to these things) than more complicated luxuries that are more subject to individual tastes.
The risk of not having ammunition is factored in to the price in this example. For the same reason, I may pay 2x for marketing collateral I need for a trade show from a local supplier instead of purchasing online because the risk of not having it for the show is reduced. The price of goods in a free market is never necessarily the same in all contexts where transactions take place.
One theory here is that it is easy to predict basic needs for a population, and thus let the government control the production of those - food, shelter, medicine, etc. For an extremely simplified example, you have 1 billion people in China, so you need to build 1 billion housing units. That is going to keep a lot of people very busy for 20+ years.
Once the general population's needs move beyond basic necessities, it becomes much harder for a central authority to predict what will be needed by it's citizens. Services, entertainment, and consumer goods are all highly dependent on many more variables than shelter and food are.