Scattered things...

[pmb]

• I remain skeptical of quite a few things that Hillary Clinton stands for - increased censorship is pretty much always wrong, and she's too willing to roll over and find the "middle ground" between the centrist position and the loony right - but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.
• 12 catches of 5 clubs. And I could count them myself instead of having someone else tell me how many I got. That was most pleasing.
• Conference submission date is May 16th. Work work work. Then I am done with the research project that is turning out to be kind of orthogonal to the research I want to do. Then it's all area exam all the time. Work work work. Then the term is over.
• And this summer I am teaching "Intro to Programming" in Python in a 4-week intensive (7/24-8/16). Using John Zelle's book based on the advice of several people. I am psyched. The rest of the summer is going to be spent biking and hanging out and reading and recovering from a relatively rough year of grad school.

Comments

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I think linked a percentage-wise increase in minimum wage to the same percentage-wise increase in Congressional pay is mediocre at best. A 20% increase gives minimum wage workers an extra $2k/year, but gives a Congressperson an extra $33k/year. In other words, the Congressperson's raise would be 2.5 times the minimum wage worker's entire salary (after the raise).

Sadly, it may still be better than what we have now.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

True. But it at least ends up tying the minimum wage to inflation, which is a very important first step (although it's already been done here in Oregon).

[freyley.livejournal.com]

Yes, a more ideal scheme would be along these lines:

minimum yearly salary (per company) = .02*CEO's total earnings+bonus+value of benefits, etc OR .20*Congresscritter's salary, whichever is greater.

And then calculate hourly wages based on the standard 40 hour week.

Sadly, neither Hillary nor anyone else can propose that sort of thing.

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

sounds like the "Maximum Wage" law that Jello Biafra was proposing several years ago. Maximum Wage being defined as 4 x minimum wage, more or less.

[(Anonymous)]

honestly though, i think there are people who are more than 4x as worthless as i am.

doh

[cosyne.livejournal.com]

fuck you, autologout

Re: doh

[coldtortuga.livejournal.com]

I think I must now create an lj account named autologout, solely for the purpose of having abuse heaped upon it.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

There's a diffference. If you establish a minimum wage, say, $10/hr, and then a maximum wage, say, 8x minimum wage, you've established a hard upper limit, which puts serious economic limitations on invention, creativity, brilliant ideas, etc. If you establish a minimum wage that floats based on the maximum wage, CEOs can still make billions if they can figure out a way for their company to survive while still paying the lowest-paid employee _very_ well. I'm fine with that, and so are many economists. Japan even has a similar system.

(caveat: you need similar limitations on contracting, and outsourcing, before it actually works as a system)

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

If you establish a minimum wage that floats based on the maximum wage

which is exactly what Jello was proposing, that if you establish one as a multiple of the other, you'd see the minimum wage go up in a real hurry.

Just as another interesting note, the average multiple in Japan between CEO and lowest-salaried worker-bee is roughly 25-30. In the US it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 600x, and has been accelerating upward in the last 20 years.