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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Wages in america are extremely high, its just property prices are even higher.

Go tell that to Oklahomans and others still making a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour

If you can find a single person still getting paid that, please give me their info and I will have them making twice that by tomorrow.

I'm making that much as a software engineer in a 3rd world country. Hire me :)

Hell, Google pays Junior Engineers less than that in Bangalore.

I'm making zero. I have been in IT, a developer (but out of date mostly VB and SQL), managed dev teams, managed IT departments. Unfortunately I have a record and it's hard to get someone to give me a second chance plus now I'm over 50 and too old/overqualified for the minimum wage jobs. Would love to hear your ideas.

I could probably pack a bus or several buses just with the town I live in. How many openings do you have? :P

i can introduce you to ~50 people making about that amount. let me talk to my school and i can probably get a few hundred more.

very kind of you to offer them all a job at twice that. how do i reach out to you?

Where are you located?

I'm not in NC, but Walmart starts associates at $14/hr and will (almost) hire anyone. A quick check shows they have tons of open positions throughout the state, full time with benefits.

That's a good slight of hand you pulled there. Most of the demographics here won't have taken a path through college that equips them with the specific knowledge to catch it.

(I'm not gonna spoil it, I wanna see if anyone else can figure it out)

In my state (Idaho) they can (and do) pay less than minimum wage if you are a tipped employee. [1]

"Most" who are in those positions tend to make at least minimum wage, if not more, but that is not a guarantee, and it is harder to claim tips as "stable income" when trying to get credit/housing.

Median wage/rent is hard to apply. Totally different results if you look at what the typical renter makes (at least in my area). Minimum wage is one thing...but when it takes 3-4x minimum wage to stay at 0 every month things get difficult.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

Shit, people don't even make minimum wage in states with tipped minimum. Bartenders be getting less than that, and people aren't drinking like they use to.

I'm very interested in hearing the opportunity you can give someone who's willing to work for $14.50/hr though.

They’re reaping what they sowed based on how their states population votes. Oklahoma is doing exactly what’s its people wanted and voted for.

Every time I see this I wonder what % of the population actually voted. Because it’s really hard to say this is what people wanted when the vote is made up mostly of angry seniors (for instance).

I see* that 54% voted in the 2024 general election. Let’s say that vote was close (as it usually is in the US I could be wrong.) so that the vote went 60/40 split. That 60% only represents 33% of the population of Oklahoma.

Seems hard to say thats what people wanted when nearly half of them expressed no opinion, or worse, were unable to vote for reasons we simply don’t know.

I do wonder what the results would be if voting were mandatory and there was enough time given for ALL to vote. Don’t you?

* — https://independentvoterproject.org/voter-stats/ok

"Basketball players are extremely tall."

"Go tell that to the middle school travel team in my neighborhood."

Why are you even making this comment? The comment you responded to was obviously talking about median wages of the entire US population. Real Wages are near all-time highs - it's just a fact, you can look up the data yourself.

[flagged]

You sound like you don't live in the US. Maybe read less reactionary news.

I live in the US and this seems pretty spot-on to me. Hard to hear perhaps, but best to hear it, eh?

Then touching grass remains a good recommendation for you and the person I replied to. Only hard to hear because I wish more of my countrymen were connected to reality.

Which part isn't true?

I live in the US, and it seems pretty spot on to me.

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hint: property prices are set by wage levels

really? you think it's not significantly effected by anything else? like amount of housing available?

Pretty much no.

and your evidence that property prices are almost entirely set by wages is?

Want to make a bet on what happens to rents in South Padre Island, TX (near SpaceX's Starbase) in the next 6 months?

Want to make a bet on what happens to rents in San Francisco after Anthropic's or OpenAI's rents after they IPO?

There's no reason either event should decrease supply or increase demand, correct? So prices should be stable?

so you don't have any evidence? you are just hoping there will be evidence in the future?

Separately - are you against minimum wage increases as a way to make things more affordable?

Huh? The same dynamic is evident in literally every single leap in productivity and local wages in human history.

Surely if I'm wrong, you're willing to bet on it, correct? Easy money for you? Of course you won't because you obviously know this dynamic is real lmao

https://www.nber.org/papers/w33576

Yes, minimum wage as a way to make things more affordable is mostly a bad idea. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...

> Increases in state minimum wages significantly reduce the incidence of renters defaulting on their lease contracts by 1.7 percentage points over three months, relative to similar renters who did not experience an increase in the minimum wage. This represents 10.6% fewer monthly defaults. However, this effect slowly decreases over time as landlords react to wage increases by increasing rents.

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