No. That will cause it to remain a political football just like it is right now, with the political parties fighting over what the "goal for wages" should be. Nobody wants that. That solves nothing.

And now you've just reduced worker effectiveness. You don't want the minimum wage to be too high, because having the minimum wage be just a living wage and not arbitrarily more gives people motivation to work harder to earn more money.

You also don't want the minimum wage to grow significantly faster than inflation, because most of the folks at the bottom end of the wage spectrum will spend every penny they have, and if they spend more, that overconsumption is likely to cause shortages of goods that will drive prices up in strange and irrationally market-distorting ways.

Also, increasing pay faster than the cost of living increases will cause a greater than necessary impact on the price of goods and services by making them more expensive to produce, which will reduce the desirability of goods with lower margins or higher labor cost as a percentage of their total price, which will result in increased pressure to automate and reduce the number of workers to avoid hyperinflation. So now you have fewer people making slightly more money each. Increasing unemployment is not a good thing.

And of course, if you're wrong in the other direction — if the minimum wage increases more slowly than inflation — you have the problems we have now.

No. You tie it to inflation, period. Anything else WILL cause problems. By tying it to a specific inflation metric, once you pass the law, the minimum wage becomes a self-adjusting system that is largely insulated from politics, and nobody ever has to touch it again.

Businesses can do that anyway. It's not like they can't predict ahead of time roughly what the CPI is going to be from year to year and plan for it. The prediction won't be exact, but neither is anything else in this world.

See above. There are very good reasons why the minimum wage should not run out ahead of inflation, not the least of which is that government cannot be trusted to set sound fiscal policy from year to year, because our federal government is mostly run by people who think that it's a good idea to spend money on the people's credit card when they're only earning enough money to pay the interest and not pay down the principal, who repeatedly give gifts far more expensive than they can afford (tax reductions, for example) just so that they will be seen as the good parent (and get reelected) despite the negative impact on fiscal solvency, and who have basically zero fiscal self control. If you think either party is going to set good minimum wage policy, I have a bridge to sell you.

Amazon and Roku would both be forced to open up their platforms. Same with Nintendo, in all likelihood. But Xbox, Playstation, and Samsung likely dodge the bullet (though the last of the three already makes third-party app stores possible).

This number seems arbitrary. A more reasonable number is 1. If you build a device platform that sells apps created by third parties and someone else wants to create a third-party app store for it, you should be required to make that possible. Period. No exceptions.

Yes, but that's not the whole story. The people making minimum wage + $3 per hour are ALSO making that because their bosses want to get better people than they would get by paying minimum wage, so if minimum wage were lower, they would be paying less. The people making twice minimum wage are paid that because their bosses want to get better people than they would get at minimum wage + $3 per hour.

Lots of folks on the right either don't understand or deliberately ignore that part. They dismiss the need to increase minimum wage by saying things like "but nobody earns minimum wage". And even if that were true (which it isn't), the fact of the matter is that the minimum wage sets the floor from which most other wages are derived. So when you increase the minimum wage, the wages of other workers also increases across the board.

The largest increases are obviously at the bottom, but it has a ripple effect throughout the pay scale, because the department store sales clerks ask, "Why are we being paid barely more than grocery store baggers?" and so their wages go up, and the corporate secretaries ask, "Why are we being paid barely more than sales clerks?" and their salary goes up, and so on up the ladder.

The best way to reduce income inequality is to continuously ensure that the floor for the minimum wage is a living wage by pinning it to the cost of living.

Now I'm sure that some folks will argue until they are blue in the face about whether to use the CPI or some other metric. Personally, I really don't care which metric they use. What's most critical is ensuring that it is pinned to *some* inflationary indicator. If it is an imperfect match for the real-world cost of living, that's still better than not having it pinned at all, and having the bottom end of the wage spectrum remain flat for sixteen years while the cost of living increases by more than 36%, which is where we are right now.

Inflation isn't a problem as long as wages are keeping up. The problem is that wages weren't keeping up. And the reason they didn't keep up for some people is because the Republicans rejected minimum wage increases repeatedly during the Biden administration.

Businesses will screw you to the maximum extent they can. They won't pay any more than they have to. And nobody wanted to pay more, but then wondered why they couldn't get workers. They couldn't get workers because they didn't pay enough. We *needed* a minimum wage increase to keep the economy working. In fact, we *need* for the minimum wage to be pinned permanently to inflation by law, with annual increases as needed. But we won't get it because the same people who are breaking our economy now were also trying hard to break it before so that they could con people who don't understand economics into voting for them.

Unlikely. They wouldn't want to let that sort of person in after two years. They would simply flag that employee record as "no rehire".

No, this isn't about that. This is about workers who they think are underperforming. The theory is that those people might learn from the experience and be better employees after a few years.

In practice, however, this is rare.

Most of the people who are underperforming are not underperforming because of laziness, but rather because they were in a job that wasn't a good match for their skills, or because their management didn't provide the necessary support for them at that stage in their careers, or because they weren't a good team fit in one way or another, or because they were sabotaged by others because of stack ranking games, or any number of other reasons that have little to do with the employee and everything to do with the environment.

Thus, most of those folks would have been able to immediately do better in a different environment, so banning them from employment by Microsoft for two years just means that they lose the opportunity for those employees to do better at Microsoft.

Worse, the few who are underperforming because they are fundamentally lazy usually don't learn from it, and blame others for their failings anyway. So two years later, if they come back, they come back just as bad as they were before.

The right way to handle underperformance is *always* a transfer to another team. Do that a couple of times before you give up on someone. After all, you already spent a lot of money finding that person, and training that person on internal systems, so you'd have to be an idiot to not want to give them the best possible chance of success at that point. If, after doing that a couple of times, they still never succeed, then at that point, you cut your losses, because they are in that second group. And you don't ban those folks for two years; you ban them long-term. Maybe in a decade, they'll grow up and be good employees, but probably not in only two years.

They didn't have 2,000 underperforming employees. They had probably 100 underperforming employees, 600 underperforming managers who didn't manage 600 employees adequately, and 1,300 employees who were chosen to be declared as underperforming to satisfy stack-ranking quotas.

F**k Microsoft. You couldn't get me to work there for a million dollars a year.

To be fair, that's because Amazon's total margin on Kindle books is only 30%. If Amazon gave Apple 30%, they would have to provide the bandwidth for content delivery literally for free, without making a single penny. So short of decreasing author compensation, the only way Amazon could have realistically complied with Apple's unreasonable sales commission would have been to increase prices whenever they sold books on iOS.

Consumers actually do gain something in this case. They gain a device that works they way they expect it to work, rather than having to do clumsy workarounds to accommodate Apple's excessive corporate greed.

And it is excessive. It's one thing to take a 30% commission on content sold in their store. It's quite another to take a 30% commission on content sold from an app merely because the app was sold in their store. Can you imagine if Walmart demanded a 30% commission on the sale of every printer cartridge that you buy, whether you buy them at Walmart or from Office Depot, merely because you bought the printer at Walmart, or worse, required the printer vendors to lock the printers to use only Walmart-sold cartridges? Apple's commission is every bit as absurd and abusive as that.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why Apple did it. They wanted to avoid companies giving away their app and then charging an in-app purchase fee to unlock app features or disable ads. But instead of explicitly banning that practice as a matter of policy, they chose to allow that policy and take a commission on it, which for consumers is the worst of both worlds. It led to most games on iOS being ad-laden abominations, while still abusing consumer trust by trying to take an extortionate commission on things that Apple had no reasonable right to demand a commission on, like the sale of eBooks through the Kindle Store.

The dividing line should have been between external creative content and code or in-game currency. Charge a commission on turning on code to avoid the "no commission on free apps" loophole. Charge a commission on in-game currency to avoid that becoming a "pay to not view ads" loophole. For everything else, Apple should never have charged a commission beyond the usual and customary credit card surcharge. And if they had done that, they wouldn't be dealing with the complete loss of that revenue now. But because they were too greedy, because they took more than they were due, they're paying the price.

And while I applaud the courts for FINALLY forcing Apple to act like a responsible adult, this court decision was at least fifteen years too late. Consumers have been actively harmed by these iOS App Store policies for almost seventeen years. But I guess if you're a powerful enough company, you can get away with horrible consumer abuse for a really long time before your chickens come home to roost.

Yeah, and that's the bigger point. Without vaccination, if exposed to diphtheria, she would have a one in ten chance of dying. With vaccination, even if we assume that it was the actual cause of her condition, she had at most probably a one in a few hundred million chance of that happening.

Tetanus? More like one in five.

And pertussis has a low rate of death, but causes... well, a lifetime of seizures, for one.

That's the fun part of vaccination. In theory, any vaccine can cause the symptoms that the original infection can cause, just with vastly lower probability.

But the thing is, unless your odds of being exposed are vanishingly low for some reason, your odds of getting those permanent injuries are likely to be orders of magnitude lower from the vaccine than from the actual disease. So yes, you're taking a risk to save yourself from a much bigger risk. It's like wearing a seatbelt. There's a tiny chance that a seatbelt can kill you by causing the injuries that it is trying to prevent, or by keeping you stuck in a burning car. But you're still *individually* way less likely to die if you wear it.

And that's in addition to the collective benefits to society.

Because there are multiple causes of epilepsy. Genetics are only one of the possible causes.

A high fever can also cause brain damage that can result in epilepsy. So can a blow to the head (possibly even a blow to the head that occurred during a febrile seizure, though that would have to be one heck of a seizure). And nutritional deficiencies can also sometimes cause it. And nutritional deficiencies can have all sorts of root causes, from differences in diet to differences in gut biome because of overuse of antibiotics, not all of which are necessarily tied to families in any meaningful way.

And autoimmune disorders don't necessarily have a history. They can be caused by an illness, or in very rare cases, vaccination, usually because of a defect in that specific batch of a vaccine (e.g. the narcolepsy-inducing flu vaccine a few years back). Or they can just suddenly appear idiopathically, possibly triggered by some unknown environmental cause. Either way, you don't have one until you do, and not all autoimmune diseases run in families (though most do involve some genetic predisposition).

And epilepsy can have a genetic cause even when neither parent's family has a history of epilepsy. After all, every person combines genes from both parents, and you never know what combination you're going to get. A sufficiently rare non-sex-linked recessive gene that is carried by both parents could result in that recessive trait appearing, but might never occur in either lineage if they didn't happen to have kids with someone else who has that rare recessive gene.

The sheer number of variables in involved is why it is basically impossible to definitively say that a vaccine caused a specific condition in a particular person. The best you can do is say that statistically, there is or is not a correlation between the condition and vaccination across a sufficiently large population.

We were taught that in history class, not in our government class. Part of what's wrong with our country is that people think that these things are ancient history with no bearing on the present day.

Our government class didn't teach most of that, either. Government classes tend to be taught by the prevailing party in a given area. So you hear what they want you to hear.

You may be certain, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're right.

What your daughter is experiencing is a febrile seizure, which is a seizure that is triggered by a fever. The rate of these seizures increases by a factor of about 1.5 in the three days after the DPT shot. That doesn't mean that they are caused by the DPT shot, though. They're *triggered* by the DPT shot. A kid is either prone to having seizures during fevers or isn't.

Almost nobody who gets a febrile seizure ends up with epilepsy, though. Out of the 277 people in the study linked above who had febrile seizures, zero of them were the beginning of a history of epilepsy; either they already had a history of seizures before or they never developed it.

So although it's *possible* that your daughter is an incredibly rare exception, but it is orders of magnitude more likely that the epilepsy and the febrile seizure are unconnected, and that the lack of a prior seizure is a fluke.

That said, a temperature of 105 is considered a medical emergency, and fevers over 105 can cause neurological damage, so I can't definitively rule out the possibility that it was caused by the vaccine (or maybe by the vaccine happening to coincide timing-wise with some other illness, e.g. picking up some virus while at the hospital/clinic to get the vaccine).

There's also the remote possibility that the vaccine somehow triggered an autoimmune condition, and that this is the root cause of the seizures. The hair loss is also a red flag for an autoimmune condition. Has she been evaluated for autoimmune disorders?

I don't know the details of the arrangement between Microsoft and EA Games, and it probably isn't a full 30%, but I can pretty much guarantee you that Microsoft's Xbox store isn't providing those digital codes and download bandwidth for free.

While false advertising can create unfair competition, that's an entirely different part of the law than antitrust (Sherman Act).

Also, you are incorrect. The Xbox is sold as a device for playing games. Consumers buy games from third parties to play on the Xbox. The iPhone is sold as a device for running apps. Consumers buy apps from third parties to run on the iPhone. Apple never said that you could buy software other than through them. Therefore, there is no difference that is meaningful here.

Again, marketing has nothing to do with antitrust except as an additional illegal act that can contribute to an attempt to monopolize.

You don't own a 3D printer? Turn in your geek card. :-D

But seriously, yeah, broken plastic does tend to be the most common cause of things getting thrown away these days, and it usually isn't worth the time to 3D print a replacement part unless it is something pretty simple. Then again, if there are enough of them, you might get lucky and find that somebody already modeled it. :-)

Only if your Xbox has an optical drive and supports optical drives. Microsoft is phasing those out, at which point they will be taking a commission on every sale, and they're doing it so that they can take a commission on every sale.

There are only two real differences between Microsoft and Apple in this matter. First, Apple's iOS started out as a closed platform, rather than starting out as an open platform, and staying closed is a lot easier than becoming closed. Second, Apple got successfully sued, whereas Microsoft hasn't been successfully sued yet.

Give it time. I'm reasonably certain that the whole point of Epic taking on Apple was because they were only a tiny fraction of Epic's sales, and they could afford to give up those sales for a chance at winning a case that could then be used as leverage against Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

Then there is the basic fact that Microsoft markets the Xbox as a very limited device, but Apple has done the opposite and marketed as a 'do all" device" ("There's an app for that', "Whats a PC?"). Again, this shows these are two very different matters.

That is certainly true, and that could absolutely weigh in favor of Microsoft being able to restrict their platform in ways that Apple couldn't. Of course, ultimately, the impact on commerce is still mostly the same whether you're talking about a device that only plays games or a device that you use for other things, so while from a consumer perspective, the harm is greater from Apple doing it, the harm to the free market is similar, just at a smaller scale.

No one is batting an eye about Apple TV because it is a niche platform that almost nobody actually uses, which means it doesn't cost anybody enough money to sue over. Apple has a single-digit percentage of the connected smart TV market, behind Amazon, Roku, and Google.

Besides, the company that would have the most to gain is Amazon, and they have their own competing hardware that is so vastly much more popular than Apple TV that they'd be better off making the Apple TV experience worse and showing "Better on Fire" ads, rather than bothering to sue over the token losses from not being able to do direct sales on that platform.