anarchei:

Minimum Wage Business Realities

Why do some employers favor a raise in the minimum wage? Profit per employee plays a major role.

See Also

• Philosophy
• Economics

Costco is doing what Amazon just did, trying to play an ignorant public to help make the market more hostile for their own competitors. 

Costco would love for the minimum wage to go up to a point that’s higher than the average starting pay of their competitors but below the starting pay at Costco. It has zero impact on Costco’s business model but will severely hurt the bottom line of others, like Walmart or Target.

Costco plays this off as if they are trying to help the people, in reality, they are aiming to hurt or even shutdown their competition, and they want to do this not through better business models but through legislation that comes from misguided economical theory based solely on emotions. 

Amazon did the same thing when it lobbied for an internet sales tax. Many people thought that, “Oh, it must be a legitimate tax if the biggest online retailer is lobbying for it!”. What these people didn’t realize is that Amazon is building local warehouses and would now have to pay local and state sales tax and they wanted the government to levy an Internet Sales Tax so that they could ensure that their competition, who don’t have local warehouses, would have to pay taxes just like Amazon. 

No one is better at playing politics than the CEOs of giant corporations. Always remember that and take what they say with a cargo container of salt. 

utilitymaximiser:

Your Mass is NOT from Higgs Boson — 1veritasium

This is really cool and interesting. 99% of the mass of a proton/neutron (and therefore almost 99% of the mass of everything) comes from empty space, coming from the virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in the vacuum between the quarks.

Nicholas Carr on What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“This is your brain. This is your brain on the internetz.”

(via sagansense)

anti-propaganda:

The REAL Reason Israel Attacked Syria (by StormCloudsGathering)

‘There is much more to Israel’s recent attacks on Syria than we are being told by the mainstream media.’

Is there a joint effort between Israel, USA and NATO to create a reason to enter Syria?

The Truth about Savings and Consumption

We regularly hear how important consumer spending is for the economy. The story goes like this: the more consumers spend, the more money circulates in the economy, which stimulates healthy job growth and profits. If people could be encouraged to go out and spend a little more of their paycheck, we’d all be better off.

Keynes went as far as to say that individuals saving their money may actually be hurting the economy, as saving reduces “aggregate demand” and therefore company revenue. Sounds troubling, doesn’t it?

Fear not. You aren’t actually hurting anyone by filling up your piggy bank. In fact, savings help the economy, as they make lending to productive entrepreneurs possible. The consumption that we enjoy is only made possible by prior production.

And that production is only made possible by savings.

For more resources about the economics of saving versus consuming, visit http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/savings-fuel-for-an-economic-engine#axzz2SdcFUHti

Buying a Ferrari isn’t progress. Buying a better Ferrari is progress. 

TED-Ed: What Happened To AntiMatter? By Rolf Landua.

A crazy theory of mine: 

What if our universe is just a single ball of matter and we’re part of a larger universe, the megaverse, where universes like ours collided with universes made of antimatter and that most of them destroyed one another and we are one of the few left just floating in this vast space, nearly all alone. The Cosmic Radiation is from the “space” that all the universes float in. What if there are still antimatter-universes but we haven’t collided with them yet, but one day we will. And it will take out our universe in a sudden flash of energy. 

Obama officially jumps the shark. 

c4ss:

The Graphene Revolution - Thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper.

jtotheizzoe:

How did feathers evolve?

Carl Zimmer, an elegant peacock among science writers, delivers this lesson on where bird feathers came from. The shared anatomy between dinosaurs and birds extends beyond the wishbone to their equally functional and extravagant plumage. Recent fossil finds give us hints about the colors and forms that adorned some prehistoric reptiles, from frilly crests to fuzzy proto-wings.

Dinosaurs didn’t take to the air for tens of millions of years after the first feathers showed up, and we don’t yet know exactly how that happened. But we know that the evolution of these delicate, beautiful and functional forms carried some dinosaurs aloft to a higher branch on the tree of life, and from that branch lept the first bird.

(view the full lesson at TED-Ed)

openbraingroup:

thinksquad:

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus

Is Stuxnet, a complex, open-source, computer virus, the greatest weapon ever created?

With virtually all of life now running on a digital platform of some sort, doesn’t it make sense that the most powerful weapon on the planet be one that can disrupt or even destroy all digital capabilities?