Time for a Minimum Wage Increase !

Now is a good time to raise the minimum wage because workers at the
lowest end of the wage scale have no leverage and need increased pay to
help them face the recent price inflation. It's really that simple.
Corporate profits are strong, so there's no reason companies can't
afford this and worker pay isn't quite where it was before the pandemic.

How much of a raise is needed? Ideally probably $1.50 / hour, but to be
more politically palatable, $1.00 / hour is probably sufficient.
Economists may scream and pull their hair out, but that would just be an
added bonus. Watching them try to explain why this would mean and end to
the Universe is always amusing.

Culpability in the Modern World

I just watched the C-SPAN presentation of the SCOTUS oral arguments for
the case involving Twitter and how they handled accounts (perhaps)
associated with ISIS members. I was horrified to discover that the legal
counsels who argued there were incapable of defining what is legal and
what is not or why this or that behavior should be legal or illegal. As
one of them said, the current law is based on ancient tort law
(originally related to personal injury) which has existed a very long
time. Yet today, they are confused and kept saying, "It depends". I'm
still stunned to consider the ramifications of that.

Imagine several different possibilities: a person directly commits an
act which is violation of the law or a person gives a gun to someone who
uses it to murder or someone gives money to a person who buys a gun and
gives it to a person who commits an armed robbery with it or a person
who offers bookkeeping services to someone who is married to a
professional burglar making money by selling stolen goods. There is
direct action where culpability is pretty well established by the action
and the intent and knowledge that it is a violation of the law. There is
then a wide range of possibilities at some distance (in space, time, or
other ways) from the criminal act. Where in that distance do we say
someone is to some degree culpable for the criminal act to which they
(somehow) contributed?

Twitter, or as the Justices hypothesized the Ma Bell phone company
(Alito hypothetical) or a pager system (Thomas hypothetical) or a fence
or a bank or an Internet platform, are at various arms length distances
from a crime. They may know of the crime. They may know of some
organization to which their customer is involved (drug gang, terrorist
organization, mafia, etc.). They may give direct assistance for a crime
such as an explosive, a gun. They may give assistance related to the
crime, such as information about security guard schedules, a building
plan, etc. They may only provide the kinds of service they give to the
general public: internet access, banking, communications, taxi service,
trucking rentals, etc. How close to the crime does their assistance have
to be to be considered substantial aid and abetting? These form a matrix
which boggles the mind.

A key question I don't believe they discussed fully was the necessity
the question of who is to police the "bad guys". Is it only the military
or police or is it the grocer who sells food to the local career burglar
or the taxi driver who transports known gang members around town? Maybe
it's everyone's job to label people as "criminal" or "known member of a
criminal enterprise".

In short, where do we draw the lines. I kept hearing lawyers saying,
"maybe", "it depends", "considering all the factors", "it's complicated"
and I began to wonder if these people have a clue about the law and how
we are to have Civilization with such murky understanding.

Because the SCOTUS Justices as a group are a bit smarter, they may come
up with a ruling which settles these issues, but I am not comforted by
the oral arguments. They may open the door to legalizing many kinds of
activities or of turning all of society into police but with no real
official powers or limits. Right now as I see it we have a coin's toss
chance of losing either way.

Education

A lot is known about how to educate a child and yet we have quite a lot
of failure in our schools, both public and private. In many attempts the
people involved have tried different things. So, there are systems
thought to be ideal, there is trial and error, there is feedback and
review of attempts, and yet failures persist. Sadly or hopefully, this
is precisely how  we must approach the issue and continue until a better
system is found. A lot of people think it's about funding. Well,
certainly that's part of it. You have to pay for facilities, study
materials, teachers, and related things like feeding kids and busing
them to and from schools. The education process itself poses its own
special issues. Order in the classroom has been an issue and well-fed
children who can focus and learn are problems, but they too seem to be
only tangential to the education process. If all the known problems and
distractions are met, and we have schools like that, there is fairly
good education happening and the failure rate is fairly low. That
doesn't mean the education system is perfect, but that children are
exposed to enough educational material and experiences that most learn
enough to become self-sufficient adults. And that's a big part of the
entire goal.

Would it be enough to focus on those deficiencies and "fix" them? It
would be one of the easier things a governmental entity could do because
their position doesn't let them delve much into the educational process.
The teachers have been educated in colleges to do that work. If there is
a problem with the teacher quality, one would need to look at their
higher education and where it is failing. That too could be improved,
even with no slandering of their skills.

Technologies have changed and the idea of home-schooling with the
Internet as their connection to educational materials and teachers
simply wasn't available until this century. We can use that. There is
modern knowledge of human psychology and how the human mind works which
can be leveraged. There are ways to improve.

Hydro-Electric Power

This is one of the most interesting articles that I've read in recent months in the field of "Green Energy".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc2vTM7KMC0

There have been hydro-electric projects meant for the ocean neat land masses which are enormous. Those are being studied today and should be available quite broadly in the near future. Since I haven't been following the development of that technology it's even possible those are available today. But, they're huge and very expensive and require extensive study of the environment to determine their impact before placement. The article linked above is about much smaller turbines of 1.5 - 3 meters rather than 10 meter-wide ocean hydro.

The smaller turbines are made to be safe for fish to travel through and yet they can be installed in almost any river and serve thousands of homes, perhaps even tens of thousands.

While we read constantly about Elon Musk and Tesla, there are wind turbines and solar panels and possibly even safe nuclear energy production techniques. We rarely hear about geo-thermal or hydro-electric because they aren't so easily placed where we want them. Traditional hydro has been done with huge dams to create large reservoirs of water. These new small turbines can be placed in many more sites on much smaller rivers and serve well. If the Green Energy revolution is to succeed we will need all these. When we combine them with energy-saving conservation by better construction techniques, a lot can be achieved.