Quotulatiousness

September 5, 2015

Raising the minimum wage also means raising prices for many retailers

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Louis DeBroux on the plight of some marginal businesses in California who are seeing lower support from their customers as they raise prices to ensure they can keep paying their current employees at the new mandated minimum wage:

Earlier this year, labor unions in Los Angeles whipped up low-wage workers into a frenzy with demands for a minimum “living” wage of $15 per hour. They achieved their goal and the $15/hour wage bill was signed into law. This was supposed to be a huge victory for the workers (though, it should be noted, within days of the law going into effect, the same labor unions that lobbied for the $15/hour minimum wage were lobbying government for an exemption for union companies, so that union companies could pay well below the new minimum wage).

Even so, some California business owners decided to show solidarity with the cause of low-wage workers, significantly increasing their starting wage of their own volition.

Vic Gumper, owner of Lanesplitter Pizza (with stores in Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, and Emeryville, California), voluntarily raised wages for his employees to between $15 to $25 per hour. In order to cover the cost of the higher “living” wage, Gumper began advertising $30 “living wage pizzas” to his customers, which include patrons from the Pixar Animation Studios and biotech companies located near his shops. In doing so he declared these pizzas “sustainably served, really … no tips necessary”.

The result? Sales have dropped by 25% as liberals in these communities have balked at having to pony up more money for the pizzas. The hit has been so significant that Gumper has had to close during lunch hour at several locations (think about that…a restaurant that has to close during LUNCH because it can’t afford to stay open!).

Gumper says that “The necessity of paying a living wage in the Bay Area [which has one of the highest costs of living in the nation] is clear, so it’s hard to argue against it, and it’s something I’m really proud to be able to try doing…At the same time, I’m terrified of going out of business after 18 years.”

There really isn’t a free lunch … if you use the power of government to raise the costs of doing business, either the local businesses pass on that increased cost by way of the prices they charge to their customers or they economize by reducing their labour costs (and the number of employees they support). A more drastic solution is going out of business or moving out of the jurisdiction: neither of which is typically considered during the legislative process.

Preseason football finally finishes … and the Vikings finally lost in preseason action

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mercifully, the Thursday night game between the Vikings and the Titans wasn’t available on TV in the GTA, so I had an excuse to go play World of Warships or Guild Wars 2 instead of watching the carnage as third- and fourth-string players risked life and limb to try to stand out to their coaches in advance of Saturday’s final cut-down to 53 players.

At quarterback for the Vikings was third-stringer Taylor Heinicke, who played what sounds like an excellent game despite the rapidly crumbling walls of the second-string offensive line in front of him. In fact, Heinicke did so well that he made it almost unthinkable for the team to try to sneak him through waivers onto the practice squad — he’d be snapped up very quickly by a team looking for a good backup/developmental QB). If he continues to improve, he might make current backup Shaun Hill expendable next year. Despite his good work in earlier games, I think the team was expecting him to sit on the practice squad this year, but they shouldn’t risk losing him (so another player will have to be cut who might otherwise have made the roster).

By the time this gets posted early Saturday morning, any predictions I might want to make about who will make the final roster will be overtaken by events … but I’m still going to take a stab at it anyway:

  • QB (3) — Teddy Bridgewater, Shaun Hill, Taylor Heinicke
  • RB/FB (4) — Adrian Peterson, Jerick McKinnon, Matt Asiata, Domonique Williams
  • WR (6) — Mike Wallace, Charles Johnson, Jarius Wright, Stefon Diggs (R), Adam Thielen, Cordarrelle Patterson
  • TE (4) — Kyle Rudolph, Rhett Ellison, Mycole Pruitt (R), Chase Ford
  • OL (8) — LT Matt Kalil, LG Brandon Fusco, C John Sullivan, RG Mike Harris, RT T.J. Clemmings, C/G Joe Berger, T Austin Shepherd, C/G Zac Kerin (this is the most likely position the team might fill from the waiver wire)
  • DL (9) — RDE Everson Griffen, NT Linval Joseph, UT Sharif Floyd, LDE Brian Robison, DE Justin Trattou, DT Tom Johnson, DT Shamar Stephen, DE Scott Chrichton, DE Danielle Hunter
  • LB (7) — WLB Chad Greenway, MLB Gerald Hodges, SLB Anthony Barr, LB Audie Cole, LB Eric Kendricks, LB Brandon Watts, LB Michael Mauti
  • CB (5) — Xavier Rhodes, Terence Newman, Captain Munnerlyn, Trae Waynes, Jabari Price (suspended for first 2 games, won’t count against roster), Marcus Sherels
  • S (4) — Harrison Smith, Robert Blanton, Andrew Sendejo, Antone Exum
  • P (1) — Jeff Locke
  • K (1) — Blair Walsh
  • LS (1) — Kevin McDermott

Practice squads can start to be assembled about 24 hours after the final cut-downs, and up to ten players can be signed. Two of the spots can be used for more experienced players.

The subtle lure of “research” that confirms our biases

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Megan McArdle on why we fall for bogus research:

Almost three years ago, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman penned an open letter to researchers working on “social priming,” the study of how thoughts and environmental cues can change later, mostly unrelated behaviors. After highlighting a series of embarrassing revelations, ranging from outright fraud to unreproducible results, he warned:

    For all these reasons, right or wrong, your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research. Your problem is not with the few people who have actively challenged the validity of some priming results. It is with the much larger population of colleagues who in the past accepted your surprising results as facts when they were published. These people have now attached a question mark to the field, and it is your responsibility to remove it.

At the time it was a bombshell. Now it seems almost delicate. Replication of psychology studies has become a hot topic, and on Thursday, Science published the results of a project that aimed to replicate 100 famous studies — and found that only about one-third of them held up. The others showed weaker effects, or failed to find the effect at all.

This is, to put it mildly, a problem. But it is not necessarily the problem that many people seem to assume, which is that psychology research standards are terrible, or that the teams that put out the papers are stupid. Sure, some researchers doubtless are stupid, and some psychological research standards could be tighter, because we live in a wide and varied universe where almost anything you can say is certain to be true about some part of it. But for me, the problem is not individual research papers, or even the field of psychology. It’s the way that academic culture filters papers, and the way that the larger society gets their results.

QotD: The existential problem facing Reddit

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Network effects are wonderful for a technology firm when it’s growing. Early movers can gain an advantage that is very hard to displace, because once everyone else is using Microsoft Word or a Playstation, there’s a cost to switching away. On the other hand, investors (and antitrust lawyers) often assume that network effects are more durable than they actually are. In fact, they can be quite fickle. Once your network starts shrinking, the collapse can be sudden, because every node that gets subtracted from your network makes it less valuable to the people who remain. Networks that start growing often start shrinking — and a modest decline can quickly prompt a stampede for the exits. Anyone remember MySpace?

And so the problem that Reddit has is this: Having attracted a bunch of people on the promise that they could say anything they wanted, the company risks alienating those people, shrinking the network and shrinking itself right out of existence. Reddit would probably be a better place if the fat-shaming hobbyists and racist trolls were surgically excised. But they won’t be; they’ll be forced out bluntly, along with others, and that will drive away many of the users Reddit would like to keep.

Deciding what is offensive is inherently a political act, because one man’s deep truth is often another person’s deep offense. To take one obvious example, do you treat conservative Christians who say terrible things about gay rights activists the same as gay rights activists who say terrible things about conservative Christians? Men’s rights activists the same as feminists?

We are all more attuned to the offenses against our own beliefs than we are to what may seem terribly offensive to others. And with the culture war raging hot, it is going to be very hard to make choices that don’t look as if you’re taking sides. Even if you try to be scrupulously fair, chances are that you will miss something, causing one side to understandably point out: “See, they crack down on us, but not on those equally offensive other people!”

Reddit is trying to avoid this by splitting the baby in half: designating much of the worst content as questionable, and then segregating it, but not banning it. It’s far from clear, however, that this compromise will work. I don’t think a lot of people are going to mourn when the racist subreddits are segregated. But those are among the most notorious cases precisely because most people can agree that racist epithets are not okay. The border cases are likely to be more numerous, and the decisions will convince some users that Reddit is not for them.

Megan McArdle, “Policing Reddit Could Kill Reddit”, Bloomberg View, 2015-07-17.

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