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"The Pitchforks are coming for us Plutocrats"

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Jul 4, 2014.

  1. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Yes.

    No. About half that maybe.

    --Also, like Seattle, in the Bay Area the hue and cry about municipally mandated increases in minimum wage has been drowned out by the reality that it is not stopping or even slowing the economy.
     
  2. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    If you hire a contractor (or any professional) based simply on the price, that's your first big mistake
     
  3. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    I can't explain it any better than I have. Which is not at all what you are inferring above.

    When you hire a contractor, you have ONE certainty and a lot of maybes.

    The one certainty is the price. The maybes involve quality of work, will it be done on time, etc. Typically the contractor will have references and/or a portfolio that will HELP clear up the maybes. But just as in the stock market, "past performance may not be an indication of future results." Rare is the professional that will have a unanimous 5-star rating with a large sample size of references.
     
  4. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Not even necessarily the price. Contractors may find all sorts of reasons or excuses to claim that they are doing more work and want more money.
     
  5. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Comparing hiring a contractor to the stock market is a false analogy. You, not the market, is in charge

    The lowest price on a renovation is usually a "too good to be true" deal. Lowest price can often mean incompetent workers, shoddy work, sub-standard materials and the famous "unforseen cost overruns" that end up costing you more than you even imagined

    If you're dealing with a competent company, you do due diligence, get an agreed to design and a written proposal. You can eliminate almost all of the "maybes"

    And I've worked with contractors with five star references. Not hard to find.
     
  6. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Batman made a good point that is often ignored.

    Everyone focuses on "employment" vis a vis minimum wage hikes ("Will businesses employ as many people?"), when INFLATION is the true boogeyman.

    OK, businesses, you suddenly have more "customers" because of the fatter paychecks. More demand = you know what . . . higher prices. For everyone. Think I'm going to celebrate that?

    OK, so the McDonald's fry cook is now making $15 an hour. What are semi-skilled employees making, say, $17-$20/hour supposed to think? "I'm more educated, have more skills . . . and now I'm making almost the same as the 17-year-old burger flipper." Think there wouldn't be some rumbling?
     
  7. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Those wages are already up because the minimum wage is up and everything follows suit. Minimum wage isn't some flat number that everybody gets. It's the baseline, not unlike first-year union wages.
     
  8. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Of course it would for companies that employ minimum wage workers (and thus have to raise everyone else, too).

    But companies that employ skilled or semi-skilled workers would be much slower to implement wage gains, I believe. Only if/when market forces dictated it some weeks/months down the line.

    And if all this is true . . . then you really do have some serious inflation on your hands. And the people hurt most by this? Unemployed people and seniors on fixed incomes.
     
  9. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Yeah that inflation bogeyman has been around for about the last decade now. Still hasn't happened. As long as the inflation chicken littles and the deflation chicken littles are in equal balance, it should be OK.

    Unemployment and under-employment are the far bigger deal, both for the short term (next five years) and the longer term as a structural matter.

    Really the inflation fear is just one more hypothetical scare tactic to add to the many that the writer debunked.
     
  10. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Yeah, because wages have been pretty stagnant.

    And the places where wages aren't stagnant . . . you pay $375,000 for a shithole residence. But we pay our fry cooks $15/hour. Woohoo!

    I think the writer made some pretty good points. But I think he's off the rails with his "kick ass" San Francisco and Seattle comparisons. And the idea that shooting unskilled workers' paychecks full of steroids won't have some serious negative consequences.
     
  11. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    To me, the real problem with the bleating about minimum wage is that minimum-wage jobs are not in general designed for people to live on. Yet there are many people who are trying to do just that. That it should be raised, I have no doubt. To $15 an hour? That's fantasy. You want $15 an hour, learn how do do something more valuable than cooking French fries.
     
  12. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Don't you think they would if they could?
     
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