Does your town have a grocery store selling goods at exactly cost?

No, you're describing a co-op. Which my town does have, right across the street from the for-profit grocery store.

or estimated net worth

Walmart credit card. They don't need to estimate when you willingly provide it.

They are usually self-employed

That varies wildly depending on city, county, state, and (I'm guessing) country requirements. I drove for a few years in a small-ish city, and neither me nor anyone I ran into at the usual spots were self-employed. We all worked for one of two cab companies, making hourly wages plus tip.

Where do you charge them?

The pressure of the water against the door would've prevented her from opening it regardless of the door's mechanical features or power supply issues.

The windows not shattering is absolutely a Tesla design flaw, but there's no way that woman was ever going to open a door from inside a submerged car.

Did you even read my comment? Yes, without minimum wage an employer could theoretically pay an employee less. But minimum wage already doesn't pay enough for people to survive. All it is doing is giving employers a solid number they can point to and say, "Well, the government says this work is only worth $7.25!"

No one can survive on the current federal minimum wage, but employers are using that as a guideline when offering wages instead of looking at their business needs or local competition. That means the current minimum wage is actively harming employees. So, again:

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

But no one would actually work for free, so now the company has to actually decide how much it values the work at.

Look at what happened with retail and fast-food after lockdowns lifted in the US: wages surged for the bottom 10% of earners. These places couldn't get people to work for minimum wage, so they had to ignore minimum wage and actually value the work accordingly. As a result, income saw some pretty strong growth for those employees.

What a minimum wage does is set the opening baseline for negotiation. The company can say, "We know this is a shitty job that anyone can do, and the government says that kind of work is worth $7.25." That creates a hurdle to discourage an employee from negotiating for more.

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

The argument is that raising wages would cost business owners too much. They would need to close up shop rather than pay higher wages, and then the workers aren't making anything.

And there is some truth to that, unfortunately. Almost half of all private sector employees work for a small business. If small business labor costs doubled overnight, most could not absorb the additional expense and survive. You'd see a lot of places go belly up, and either nothing would replace them or large corporations that were able to absorb the labor costs would take over and raise prices to maintain their margin. A higher minimum wage just strengthens the position of the companies with enough capital to survive the change.

I agree that wages need to increase, but it's a lot more complicated than just the government saying, "Hey! Pay them more!"

Ironically, this is pretty much how McMahan got Lower Decks. He used to write the TNG Season 8 Twitter, where he'd post fake synopses for his imagined episodes. It was almost always a fairly serious A-plot and a hilariously bananas B-plot.

After WotC sold their own official proxies in those anniversary packs, I gave up on official prints. Now every deck costs me $22 plus shipping.

Seconding Player Piano. Both it and Cat's Cradle were almost explicitly based on his time with GE, and they've both gained more cultural relevance over the years.

I always figured this was an intentional part of the design philosophy. The game lets players write and read one- or two-sentence strategy guides anywhere in the world. I took the hint and figured they wanted me to look up strategy guides.