At least as of 2011, Uranium ore below 0.075% concentration (1,333:1) was not considered economically feasible to mine, so the 20,000:1 ore might technically exist, but nobody is digging it up.

Some mines in Canada have average grades as high as 18%.

In other words, 27 tons is going to be anywhere from 150 tons to 36 kilotons. Not megatons. Not even close.

So again, you're off by orders of magnitude.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "ObamaCare") requires all employers with 50 or more employees to offer health insurance to anyone working more than 30 hours per week, and there are strict caps for how much that insurance can cost. For someone earning O($36k) per year (the average for an Amazon warehouse worker), if the employee pays more than $3,247.20 for that insurance, the employer would be in violation of the law. The average cost of health insurance for a single employee is $7,170 for high-deductible health insurance plans. So although they don't have to pay for the *entire* cost of employee health insurance, they do have to pay for more than half, realistically speaking.

I mean, the penalty amount per employee is *slightly* less than the likely employer subsidy for the insurance, so I suppose in theory, they could save a little over $1k per employee by ignoring the law, but if any of those employees ended up buying an ACA marketplace plan on their own and got a government subsidy to do so, the penalties for the employer would go way up, and the company would come out in the red by pulling that stunt, so doing that would be a BIG risk.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure you're off by orders of magnitude there. It takes only about 27 metric tons of uranium for a gigawatt of continuous power production for a year. If you don't include any material that you have to remove to dig a tunnel down to reach the veins of uranium, that's likely to involve moving only single-digit thousand tons of ore per gigawatt-year, not megatons. At just 600 megawatts each, even if you had *fifteen* plants of that size, you'd still likely *barely* hit *one* megaton of total ore extraction by the end of the forty-year design life of a typical nuclear power plant.

That's not to say that you couldn't be horribly wasteful and do open pit mining on a brand new vein somewhere and get those numbers up, but....

Not necessarily. It could just end up being used to reduce worker hours below the level where they have to pay for health insurance. :-D

Or, slightly less cynically, it could allow them to scale up operations without hiring any additional people. For example, every warehouse could add Amazon Fresh support, and the human workers could be moved to produce packing duty while the robots do what the humans used to do. That technically wouldn't be replacing the humans, because they humans would still have jobs doing substantially similar work.

Except when you have a two-party system, that doesn't work. Instead, you end up with a yo-yo when the two parties disagree. The U.S. is not really a properly functioning democracy, though it is still several steps up from non-democracies.

Yes, and "increase worker efficiency" means "cut the number of workers". Paying fewer people more money is exactly why Republicans think we have a bad economy. And they aren't entirely wrong.

They don't get any return on that extra investment. If every employer is increasing their wages at the same time, the higher wages aren't going to make it possible to bring in higher-caliber workers than the competition. The only way you get a higher return on investment is if you pay more beyond the prevailing wage.

It really isn't. The fact that the two parties disagree is because they have different goals. One party is more focused on the interests of the individual workers and the other party is more focused on the interests of the wealthy and corporations, and the best policy is a healthy balance between the two. Having a fixed permanent policy should minimize the meddling of either side.

The problem is that our government hasn't bothered to touch the minimum wage for sixteen years. Fixing that problem so that buying power doesn't deteriorate is an urgent need, and has been for some time. Even an imperfect inflation adjustment is still better than flat wages for decades while cost of living goes up.

The cost of living adjustments have actually been pretty reasonable, from what I've seen, at leasts for people who have higher levels of Social Security income. The problem comes for folks living at or near the poverty line. It doesn't take much of a hit to your bottom line to break your finances when you can barely make ends meet, so adjusting once per year doesn't work out very well during periods of rapid inflation. And yes, you're going to have the same thing with anything tied to inflation or any other approach unless you adjust it monthly. That might be worth considering. I have no strong opinion on the matter.

Realistically, there is no single measure of cost of living that is perfect for all people in all situations or all locations. But even if it doesn't precisely track the real-world cost of living, it can't do worse than sixteen years with no increases. And it is still better than the target growth you propose significantly lagging behind CPI-W, because that would also require an act of Congress to fix (and as previously noted, it has taken 16 years for them to fix it so far).

It detects traffic cones on the hood, so presumably. :-D

A platform is any operating system or hardware device. If you build a platform or hardware device and you allow third parties to sell software for it through your store, you must also allow other stores to operate on the platform. No exceptions. Your choices should either be A. a first-party-only platform where you write all the software or B. an open platform where anyone can write software without restrictions.

That's actually reporting bias. The news stories you hear about body cameras being off became news stories because the police were getting sued or prosecuted.

If the body cameras show the police aren't doing the wrong thing, nobody is going to bring a lawsuit or criminal indictment over it, so you won't hear about any of those. The cases you hear about, therefore, are either the cases where either the police did the wrong thing (as proven by the body cameras) or the cases where the body cameras were turned off. This makes that number seem disproportionately larger.

Additionally, studies show that police who wear body cameras are significantly less likely to use unnecessary force, which dramatically lowers the number of situations where misconduct gets caught by body cameras. So the percentage of misconduct cases where the body cameras are turned off is not because the body cameras aren't doing their jobs, but rather because they are.

In other words, expect to see the number of accusations of misconduct by the DEA skyrocket. <sarcasm>But that's okay, because without the DEA being able to plant drugs on them, how would they be allowed to kidnap undocumented immigrants in the middle of the night and ship them to a concentration camp^W^Wprison in El Salvador?</sarcasm> [rolls eyes]

Yes, this is bad. This is incredibly bad. For everyone.

Phoenix has monsoon seasons and sandstorms, which can be pretty brutal, with zero visibility. San Francisco has torrential mists, which are a different kind of annoying to drive in, not to mention fog.

But you're right that neither has snow, typically.

Not necessarily. Remember that Waymo cars aren't currently owned by individuals. They drive around a large number of people in a given day. If those people would have driven themselves, then that one car drove more miles than any one driver would have, but it took 10x, 50x, or even 100x as many drivers off the road, and probably drove only a few percent more miles than the sum total of those drivers would have.

Also, people who rarely drive are likely to be out of practice, and therefore are likely to be less safe than people who drive more frequently. So there could be an even bigger safety win from getting drivers off the road who drive so infrequently that Waymo is a suitable replacement.

And if those folks would have otherwise taken a cab, a Lyft, or an Uber, then the Waymo would likely drive about the same number of miles as those other hired vehicles, assuming they have similar numbers of hired vehicles per square mile (and therefore don't have to drive farther for the pickup).

So realistically, it seems likely to be a win unless it causes the passengers to travel longer distances than they otherwise would have or to not carpool when they otherwise would have.

To be fair, that was GM's Cruise, not Waymo, and nobody is saying that Cruise is better than 99% of drivers. :-D

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.