ITW Morning Edition (1/4): Business
This… actually seems reasonable from a legal perspective, but also indicative of not being able to have nice things.
Melanie Trottman looks at whether or not boosting the minimum wage decreases reliance on government assistance.
Amazon may be getting into the air cargo business.
I can always get behind labor victories that involve companies not paying their employees for the time they demand.
In looking at the “reality distortion field” in Elizabeth Holmes and her troubled tech startup Thanatos, Uncle Steve looks at prolific board members and what information we can derive from it.
Image by NS Newsflash 
[Ed Note: ITW Morning Edition will be be a collection of a handful of links to start off your morning, every weekday morning from Monday to Thursday. This is a trial run and as with Linky Friday, adjustments will probably be made along the way, or the project may be discontinued in favor of something else.]
re: minimum wage and public assistance:
I’m generally opposed to minimum wages, or raising the current wage, and some of the information from that article seems to support why I do. For example [bold added by me]:
However, the key point of this article–that raising the minimum wage does not significantly reduce reliance on government assistance–actually tilts me a little in favor of such an increase.
One of my arguments against raising the minimum wage is that government assistance should be improved and expanded to help people instead of relying on wage mandates. But such improvements and expansions don’t seem to be in play. And while I do support an increase in the EITC (as well as making it more widely available), that also seems less in play. In other words, maybe one of the few ways to get poorer people more money that is politically doable is through increasing the minimum wage.Report
In a political sense, there may be some truth to this. Or, at least, it is the most politically doable way. Mostly, though, it’s because it gives the appearance of passing off the expense to somebody else.
(I don’t oppose raising the minimum wage mostly, but some of the proposals have me wary, and prefer action be taken on county levels rather than national.)Report
I could see county-level wage mandates, but one reservation I have is that there’s a lot of incentive to undercut neighboring counties. However, a national or state wage mandate overrides local differences in cost of living and labor markets. There probably isn’t a great solution to either of those problems, but maybe one that’s less bad than the others.Report
Most minimum wage jobs are pretty location-specific, though. A burger joint isn’t going to change counties to save a bit in labor costs. Or if they are, that says something pretty significant about the minimum wage hike.Report
I hadn’t thought of it that way before. But it might be different if we’re talking about Walmart or other big box store that hasn’t decided on a location yet but takes into account the local wage. Perhaps that’s more of a thing where counties are close together and there’s a strong car culture that makes it easier for larger numbers of people to drive. In Big City, a countywide minimum wage wouldn’t, by itself, prevent a Walmart from setting up. (If anything, it’s the local living wage activism and the small-retailer clients of influential aldermen that’s made it difficult for Walmart.)Report
Economists would take a strong interest on seeing what goes on this side of that one of the county line. You may see some disparity there.
However, advocates for a higher minimum wage say that higher minimum wages don’t hurt businesses because they reduce turnover. So that theory would get a test.
Also, employers on the lower minimum wage would be competing with employers on the higher for employees. They’ll be more motivated to close the gap themselves.
And also, too high a disparity is unlikely to stay the case for very long. An employer would not be wise to base long-term decisions based on the whims of a county commission.Report
I know i posted this link before but it is directly about what GC is wondering.
It’s a Planet Money story about a mall that straddles two towns so it had two MW’s depending on which side of the mall you are in.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/28/343430393/a-mall-with-two-minimum-wagesReport
Problem looks like it’s with the owners of the shoe store, who are willfully blinding themselves to the change in the economic environment and not allowing their manager to respond appropriately.Report
I pretty much agree with all that except that I suspect (and it is really only a suspicion…I don’t have any facts to base this off of) that some county commissions are reliably pro-keeping-business-in-the-county, especially if the business(es) is(are) a huge contributor to the county’s sales taxes.
Again, I don’t have any facts to back this up, just that I can imagine it happening.Report
I think the EITC is fine in general but i do have a concern. It is a tax break and looks like the gov giving something instead of people earning their own money. In 2012 it became a bit of political football among people who didn’t understand it ( 47% dont’ pay taxes bs). I’ve heard a few R’s say they want to cut it. It is simpler to have people just get paid for their work instead of routing it through a tax break.Report
Another problem with the EITC, along with the one you cite, is that people have to wait a year for it while a wage increase is more immediate.Report
The big problem with the EITC is that it costs the government money directly, instead of indirectly costing employers, consumers, and hypothetical workers that can’t find work money indirectly. So the EITC is more economically efficient, but also a more difficult political lift.Report
You’re absolutely right, @don-zeko , but that’s also strange, too, when one thinks about it. I seem to recall–and my memory is hazy hear and I’m too lazy to google it–that a lot of Republicans in the ’90s were on board with the EITC because it was at least formally a tax credit.Report
(not having read any of the links yet…)
What does ITW stand for?
(something) The Week?Report
We kind of chose it because it can mean any number of things. In The World, Internet by TrumWill, In The Web, In The Week, InTerWebz.Report
I find the Citgo link quite amusing, given who own Citgo.Report
Did the genealogy websites make any promises about the privacy of the information it collects? If so, it’d seem giving it to the police short of a court order would put them in violation of the contract. And if the police have a court order to access the entirety of the database, that is kind of scary.Report
I’m a lot less concerned about them finding out who one of my ancestors was screwing than them finding out who I’ve been talking to lately.Report
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. What it looks like happens is that they can search the database because anybody can, and having found a match, they can get a court order to get names. So it’s not clear that there is a policy solution to do much, and it’s hard to fault the police for using this particular tool when it’s at your disposal. The solution, to the extent that there is one, is for people not to have the DNA out there, which defeats what I gather they are trying to accomplish (which is to connect various family threads. Hence… why we can’t have nice things.
But my knowledge of how these sites work is pretty limited. People who do know how it works are welcome to elaborate.Report
I wonder if these sites could prevent the cops from doing this (if they wanted to, which it seems they would to protect their customers and business model) but including in the Terms of Service that the site is intended for the explicit and sole purpose of identifying family bonds, yada yada yada and anyone found to be using the site for other purposes — including law enforcement and agents of the government — will be in found in violation of the TOS and subject to fines no less than $9B… or something. Assuming such language would be enforceable, it’d prevent the cops from just signing up as regular users and snooping around.
I have no idea if that is enforceable though and it wouldn’t shock me if the courts ultimately determined that TOSs don’t apply to the government.Report
Legal issues aside, this sounds methodologically flawed. Isn’t the false-positive rate on DNA testing high enough that you’re pretty much guaranteed to come up with more false positives than actual hits using this approach?Report
Even if that’s the case, having one of your existing suspects end up on the list would be a very strong indicator. Assuming you could get the court to allow you to compare every name on the hit list to your “usual suspects” list instead of requesting data one person at a time, anyway.
Even if you’re trying to pick one person out and you don’t have a list of people to compare against, you could compare the hit list to people who live in a certain area. Sure, you’d probably turn up entire families from time to time, but every little piece counts as you build up your Venn diagram.Report
In looking at my calendar, I’d like to wish everyone a good “Day After New Year’s Day (Observed-New Zealand)”.Report
Dude…don’t type so loud. My head is killing me.Report
Thanks, we have the best holiday names.Report
Yup, that is Steve Sailer. When something positive, but supposedly undeserving, happens to a woman or a minority, it’s likely about some form of affirmative action. Never mind the scores of white men who have been pumped up by the tech hype machine only to ultimately under-deliver on a product.
Sailer is an interesting guy for a number of reasons. One is that the board angle is compelling enough for a blog post. That is an awful lot of high-powered political muscle for a tech startup with an undeveloped product. There is something there without the Sailerbait angle, but then I guess he wouldn’t be him without it.Report
What j r said. I always wonder why Will keeps linking to him; maybe they really are related.Report
I have mixed feelings about linking to Sailer. On the one hand, I hate the idea of lending him legitimacy. On the other, though, I realize that his biggest appeal is in the illusion that he is speaking some truth that the mainstream blogoshpere is either too afraid to say or is intent on keeping suppressed. Once you scrape away that veneer of the profane, you realize that he’s just peddling garden-variety racialism.
So if he says something interesting, I say go ahead and link.Report
Not related. Not even a regular reader [1].Was kind of disconcerted when he showed up here, to be honest. But if he has an interesting angle on something, I’m not going to not link to it because it’s him or because of a stray sentence (unless that sentence is grotesquely bad, maybe).
[1] I follow people who read him or link to him, or are on Unz.com beside him, and run across some of his pieces that way. His items are conspicuous because of the attention they draw and because I always try to mention him when I link to him, which has been about a half-dozen times in the last year.Report
Why would you link to a noted WrongThinker in the first place if you didn’t want to spread the memes of WrongThink?
Justify yourself more. Apologize when you are done.Report
This is of course precisely the same thing that it criticizes. That’s what makes it so easy.Report
But it’s different when I do it.Report
It is different when you do it.Report
And if Stormfront has some interesting insights on The Force Awakens in the middle of a post that’s otherwise about how all of the real Jedi were European-Americans, feel free to link it.Report
That would take a hell of an insight. Which I probably wouldn’t even get to because the central thesis would not keep my attention.Report
Do you think you can summon Sailer like Beatlejuice on blogs?Report
One should not taunt the Google News alert spirits if one can avoid it.Report
I’ve seen it happen on this very blog.Report