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

[zudini.livejournal.com]

I don't really know anything about economics or politics, but it seems to my naive mind that raising the minimum wage just pushes more jobs offshore, so that the real benefactors of such a bill are China and the shipping industry.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. In theory, that's how it works. But in practice, modest increases to the minimum wage don't seem to be correlated with increased unemployment. My gut says that there exist levels of squalor that, as people living in the richest nation ever, we are not okay with seeing our fellow human living in. Starving in the streets, children losing limbs to polio, that kind of thing.

The minimum wage is then our society's expression of "People should not have to live below this level of poverty, no matter who they are".

I'm pretty sure that the idea that I describe in the first paragraph can be concretely shown to be the right thing on almost every level by using various intra-country biodiversity measurements (we all share at least X% of our genes in common), the price that people seem to assign to their own lives (1.6 to 2.5 million last I checked), and JS Haldane's remark that he wouldn't die to save his prother, but he would die to save 2 brothers, or 8 cousins.