It appears that despite there being an MBA program in every college in the nation, ostensibly teaching the administration of business, it appears that some knowledge has eluded business owners. Like the many scrolls lost in the burning of Alexandria, many arcane business practices have been lost, but all is not lost, as some new ideas have been rediscovered:
The owners of Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor had hit a wall.
For months, the 98-year-old confectionary in Pittsburgh couldn’t find applicants for the open positions it needed to fill ahead of warmer weather and, hopefully, sunnier times for the business after a rough year.
The job posting for scoopers — $7.25 an hour plus tips — did not produce a single application between January and March.
So owner Jacob Hanchar decided to more than double the starting wage to $15 an hour, plus tips, “just to see what would happen.”
The shop was suddenly flooded with applications. More than 1,000 piled in over the course of a week.
“It was like a dam broke,” Hanchar said. Media coverage that followed his decision soon pushed other candidates his way.
We’re the stupidest fucking country in the world that “giving people more money to get them to work for you” is apparently a relevatory piece of information. I mean jesus christ. Fast Freddie Herzberg just died in 2000, how the hell did everyone forget this shit.
japa21
Mr. Big Foot strikes again. //
Anyway, since we, like most normal people, can actually track two things at a time, no harm done, and this is an important story.
billcinsd
@japa21: you know what they say
Big feet …
Big shoes
Mike in NC
Back in the day it was quite common for newspapers to published Letters to the Editor denouncing the minimum wage. These letters were inevitably written by retired conservative assholes who would never dream of working for a couple bucks an hour.
Villago Delenda Est
They forgot it, John, because they really, really want a new yacht, and paying employees more will not get them what they really, really want.
Parasite boneheads.
HeleninEire
I am bored to death with liberals being right and then everyone saying “Meh.”
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I guess they don’t teach how Henry Ford offered a high wage to increase retention, production and create a market of individuals who would by his cars.
Omnes Omnibus
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Heretic! Besides he was a crypto-Nazi.
The Moar You Know
Astonishing. I wonder if this crazy fad will take off.
In seriousness, this has always been THE blind spot in American labor relations. Can’t get people to your standards? Yell at them , saddle them with abusive management, install millions of dollars worth of computerized surveillance equipment. Paying people more literally never enters the mind of most employers.
Save for really successful ones.
Villago Delenda Est
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: He was sued by the scum that were the Dodge Brothers for doing exactly that.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t think there was anything crypto about it.
Chetan Murthy
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Not trying to “well ackshually”, but … I learned a few years ago at LG&M (courtesy of Erik Loomis) that he did it for the first two reasons (retention, production) and not to create a market for his cars. It was purely selfish. Factories back then (and today! who knew?) were really unpleasant places to work: really regimented, no creativity, no sense of accomplishment — workers were just human cogs in a vast machine. So retention was a -real- problem, and it took significant time to train a worker to do their job well (and not fuck up all the time, b/c it’s not easy mimicking a machine). That’s why Ford paid more $$.
And yeah, they don’t teach that first bit in B-school, so they go out thinking that it’s all generosity.
Ruckus
The business my dad started, and that I owned for longer than he did, all the employees were highly skilled craftsmen or apprentices. I had a couple over the decades who asked for far more than normal for us and that was a lot, we always paid better than most because we wanted better craftsman and we belonged to an organization based upon our type of business. That organization tracked wages among it’s member companies across the country and published the results for us. We were at the top of our area because we believed that you get what/who you pay for. And we did.
debbie
@Chetan Murthy:
Maybe he just didn’t say that part out loud? I can’t believe it didn’t factor into his thinking.
TriassicSands
John, I am currently reading “The Reactionary Mind,” by Corey Robin. Apparently, you are overlooking the “fact” that inferior people should feel honored to work for next to nothing for superior people. Clearly, this country has lost its way when inferior people start demanding a living wage. On the other hand, if the superior people were actually superior they would realize that even they will be better off (if not quite as wealthy) when their inferiors do better.
Note: in the book, the (white) “conservatives” often refer to themselves in quotations as “superior” and others (often or usually people of color) as “inferior.”
HypersphericalCow
No doubt, he’s a two-time Trump voter.
Chetan Murthy
@debbie: What I remember was Erik showed the receipts for the fact that similar factories in the region suffered massive quit rates, and this was a significant hindrance to productivity. It’s certainly possible that he might have done it also to create a market for his cars, but ….. well, there was more than enough reason in pure short-term selfishness.
randy khan
I was in a little Facebook discussion with a RWNJ earlier this week about why it might be that restaurant owners were having trouble hiring people. He, of course, thought that it was because unemployment insurance was giving them a sweet, sweet life, and cited examples of people who he knew who couldn’t fill jobs ostensibly because of this, and we had an ongoing back and forth for a while where he accused me of living in a bubble because he had anecdotes and all I had was evidence that people actually were taking restaurant jobs from, you know, the employment statistics.
Anyway, somewhere along the way one of his friends piped up and said her company was having a terrible time hiring people and they were munificently offering $12 an hour, which for a 40 hour week/50 weeks a year comes to a whopping $24K (or $24,960 if you don’t take any time off). When I pointed this out, the response was that if you wanted to earn more money, you should get better educated. The idea that, perhaps, even people who aren’t educated by my interlocutors’ standards might feel like their work was worth a living wage apparently was beyond comprehension.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TriassicSands: Art Laffer, ladies and gentlemen
Mr Potter (first name unknown, at least to me)
debbie
@randy khan:
They need to understand and accept that they would be nothing without their workers. They may have come up with clever ideas for businesses, but those businesses will never get anywhere or sustain any level of longevity without workers. Workers are more important than owners.
Benw
To pay all those high salaries, I bet the owner has to raise the ice cream price by $0.03 per scoop, completely validating any and all conservative economic theories and Krugman is shrill. Amen
JoyceH
Reminds me of that time that Cong. Katie Porter grilled Jamie Dimon about how a starting employee at his bank could make ends meet and not run a $500+ monthly deficit just for the essentials. It was somewhat humorous to watch him dance around the issue and avoid saying, she needs to be paid more!
eclare
@Benw: Hahaha
mrmoshpotato
@Villago Delenda Est:
Stop disparaging boneheads when they’re really parasite assholes.
mrmoshpotato
@HeleninEire:
A tiring 40+ years.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT, cause I’m old school:
Not seeing any numbers yet at the main Politico site. Which is kind of a mess
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You will not find that.
LongHairedWeirdo
I can’t say this is *true*, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
It seems to me a lot of MBAs are trained in extracting money from the economy. For example, delivery services don’t want to hire full time employees, and certainly not Teamster members. They want contractors, with a nominally higher salary, but the need to pay Social Security, Medicare, liability insurance, and provide/maintain their own truck. This saves money for the company, but remember, that usually means less money is getting spent, and thus, less is available to end up in paychecks.
(One of the reasons economics is science-like – there are certain identities that we can count on, and one of those is, one person’s spending is another person’s paycheck. Remember that when people insist the government has to tighten its belt, because everyone else is tightening theirs – it means even smaller paychecks, axiomatically.)
The more people are trained in extracting cash, the more other people get squeezed.
By the way, this is why the GOPP (that’s GOdawful Parasite Party) is so racist. They pretend that all this squeezing is because poor people, POC, and other minorities, have it easy. You can’t get paid more, because IMMIGRANTS stole your job! Because AFFIRMATIVE ACTION stole your job. Because your job was TOO EXPENSIVE after PAYING TAXES to support those loafers!
(NB: every corporate, individual, or pass-through, tax rate cut makes jobs *more* expensive. Yes, really! Wages and benefits are tax deductible – reduce the rate, reduce the value of the deduction, and hence, make things more expensive to the net (after taxes). At a tax rate of 70%, each dollar paid in salary and benefits costs a net 30 cents. At a 40% rate, it costs 60 cents – twice as much!)
Anyway: yeah, people are doing their best to cripple the economy, according to GOPP protocol, and it’s working.
But good for the people who actually *remember* that economics isn’t just about how you can squeeze money out of the system – it’s also about how you can influence others in the way you hope to (i.e., getting them to apply for, and accept, a job).
Ken
“If I cook food, people will give me something for it” has been around since Sumeria
(OK, I’ll give a couple of points to people using their grandmother’s fried chicken recipe. But franchisees get a negative score.)
Ken
How’d he forget women?
Wapiti
@randy khan: Yup. Those people who barely finished high school can, in many cases, still do the math and determine that $12 an hour, or $24K a year, isn’t a living wage.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie:
How dare you utter such heresy about the JOB CREATORS!
There would be no jobs without them! That’s just common sense!
Wapiti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I had to check the article. That was in 2021 – this year – that Mr. Laffer said that minorities aren’t worth $15/hr? Wow.
Chetan Murthy
@LongHairedWeirdo:
There is a story attributed to Amartya Sen about this subject. He related that one of the courses taught at the business school at a university where he was teaching, was in how to convert “implicit value” into “explicit value”. So for instance (his example) a company that has always treated its company well, has a implicit value, in its good employee relations. When bad times come, the employees are willing to tighten their belts, take a hit, knowing that when good times return, they’ll be made whole.
A freshly-minted MBA, coming in and taking over in a downturn, can get that tightening-of-belts, and then when the upturn comes, he can *not* make the workers whole, and take that extra money as profit (voila, “explicit value”), which pumps up the stock price and voila, his stock options are in the money.
Sen was obviously saying this is a bad thing.
So much of what *little* is taught in B-school is sociopathic shit.
Anne Laurie
@japa21: Adding to the insult: I front-paged the Klavon Ice Cream story back in May!
(sulksulksulk)
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: The laffer is now the laffee.
I’ll see myself out.
Art Laffer's typing finger
@Ken:
Who?
Cameron
@randy khan: That’s why I never argue with these types any more. I can achieve just as much by talking to myself.
Baud
@Anne Laurie:
I look forward to reliving Biden’s inauguration when Cole posts about it.
david
Coach is overruling the play calling from upstairs.
Spanky
@Wapiti: I was just wondering how old that quote was.
zhena gogolia
This guy is sending tingles down my leg.
eclare
@LongHairedWeirdo: I worked at a company where the most profitable unit was all contractors. What a miserable life, yet each contractor thought they were special and would make it.
Baud
@david:
Damn. I’m legitimately surprised.
Mallard Filmore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Is that why I can’t find an open McDonalds before high school lets out for the day? All those minimum wage workers are still in class?
Cameron
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Fully paid for, but with no tax increases? Gee…I wonder where the $$ will come from.
debbie
@Ken:
Not just the actual food, but the entire package. The highest falootin’ restaurant concept—no matter how innovative and exciting—will never fly without workers.
MomSense
The percentage of psychopaths in the general population is about 1%. The percentage in prisons is about 15%. For CEOs, the estimates for psychopaths or people with psychopathic traits, narcissistic, manipulative, lack of empathy being the key traits, is in a range from 4-12% with most estimates in the 8-12% range.
debbie
@MomSense:
And they all end up in the GQP.
Procopius
@debbie: Well, as John Dos Passos pointed out, the $5 came with strings. If you bought a bucket of beer on a Friday night, you didn’t get it. If the grass in your front yard (if you had a yard) was too long you didn’t get it. If you didn’t go to the right church on Sunday, you didn’t get it. Many other strings, so actually very few of his employees got it. That was the origin of his Service Department, by the way, the people who spied on his employees. He decided it was cheaper to hire spies, thugs, and scabs than to pay decent wages (kind of like Jeff Bezos that way). Old Henry was an evil man.
Belafon
@Chetan Murthy: If that’s your definition of selfish, you might need to back off a bit.
Belafon
@Benw: from what I remember reading, prices didn’t have to change.
Sure Lurkalot
Listening to NPR today and heard the word “INFLATION” several times in horrified tones…how it was up 5% from a year ago and is this going to turn into the 70’s? Cut to commercial and then learn that the steepest increases were in things like used cars and airline tickets. Then cut to Hannity-type and learn that is just Biden spin and the economy is overheated…people are getting paid too much! That gives them money to spend! That creates demand! We’re gonna be like Weimar! Or Greece or Argentina or….
debbie
LOL
WaterGirl
@japa21: I am pleased whenever the blog father posts, even if it does step on someone. I don’t care, do you? :-)
Procopius
Back during the long, slow recovery from the GFC, I guess around 2015 or so, I read an article about employers complaining bitterly about not being able to get qualified workers. One woman who owned a construction business explained that if she offered wages higher than the Bureau of Labor Statistics published wage, she would not be able to compete with others in the same business. Essentially, she was saying there was a nationwide unspoken conspiracy to keep wages down that was enabled by the government.
eclare
@Sure Lurkalot: Why is Greece continually the boogeyman? I’ve been there, and it was lovely, especially the isles.
Feathers
@randy khan: Even at the time, “get an education so you can get a good job” was terrible messaging. It let collage tuitions soar, college loans grow to the point where many college grads end up in a sort of indentured servitude that blights their lives, and gave a generation permission to treat the working class like shit and feel morally righteous about it. “But I’m teaching the next generation the importance of a college degree!”
gene108
Interesting the owner went straight from $7.25/hr to $15/hr, and did not increase the wage offered incrementally, like $10/hr and see who applies, and then $12/hr if no good applications came at $10/hr.
I think it’s decent of him to jump to $15/hr.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@david: Good for Tuberville.
Mary G
My otherwise very finance-savvy mother was always afraid of running out of money, probably from being a Depression child. “I wouldn’t marry the man your grandfather picked out, and he refused to pay my college tuition, so I got a job in in the department store making 40 cents an hour, so I’m not buying you a Diet Coke for ALMOST TWO DOLLARS, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE MARKUP HE’S MAKING ON THAT IS??!!!!
(She ran the school district’s food services department, so she could tell me down to five digits after the decimal point exactly what the restaurant was making as I defiantly swigged away so I could get as many free refills as possible to change the equation.)
The whole argument I hear from boomer acquaintances is the same kind of thing – “I took four years to pay back my school loans (total in 5 digits at most) and I did it, why should kids these days get out of it?” They are good liberal Democrats, but it seems like many Americans’ notion of money equivalents gets stuck at some point in time, and it’s worse after retirement when you stare at a fixed income that’s never going up enough to keep up with actual prices.
Then I call them totebaggers and in danger of voting for Republicans and I have fewer acquaintances running their mouth when I’m trying to garden.
Edited for egregious punctuation errors.
WaterGirl
@Anne Laurie: It’s true. But they hadn’t figured that out in May, had they? I thought when you posted yours in May that they hadn’t figured out the flaw in their logic yet.
Am I remembering that wrong?
WaterGirl
@Baud: Laugh out loud funny.
Benw
@Belafon: in that case I predict a rocky road for that ice cream shop!
Chetan Murthy
@Belafon: Improved retention and increased productivity for an industrial magnate is a matter of self-interest, though, yes? I mean, he wants to make more $$, and these factories required *trained* workers. I don’t see how this isn’t pure self-interest. Sure, it’s not “very short-term self-interest”. But no magnate builds a giant car factory, out of “very short-term self-interest”.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
I think the really hard concept for a lot of people to grasp is that while an owner or executive may actually be more important than any individual worker, they are much less important than all the workers put together. This is why the company keeps functioning smoothly when the owner or executive goes on vacation, but it grinds to a halt if all the workers go on strike.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: That was a great ad. But here’s the tough question, if you have to choose between this guy and Calvin, who wins? :-)
WaterGirl
@MomSense: What group is in the 4 or 8-12 range? Republicans?
boatboy_srq
We’ve had four decades of Conservatists reading Dickens as instruction manual and not cautionary tale, and now suddenly when a few have momentary fevered experiences of being post-visitation Scrooge for a day or two, suddenly it’s revelatory. And somehow this is shocking.
Humbug.
Emma from Miami
@Chetan Murthy:
debbie
@Roger Moore:
I guess the stardom goes to their heads. //
NotMax
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Leave us not forget George Westinghouse, who introduced the then radical concept of the nine hour workday and whose companies’ imminent extinction was predicted by other captains of industry when he cut Saturday hours to a half day – in the 19th century.
“If someday they say of me that in my work I have contributed something to the welfare and happiness of my fellow man, I shall be satisfied.”
— George Westinghouse
.
Emma from Miami
And for the first time I have a problem. A random times the comment box is defaulting to text and I can’t switch to visual.
japa21
@Anne Laurie: I know, but I didn’t want to rub it in.
@WaterGirl: I agree. It is good to know he hasn’t forgotten about us.
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
CEOs
japa21
@Emma from Miami: I never know what I am going to find. I use Firefox and for this response, visual showed up. Earlier today it was text. I like surprises though, so I’m not complaining.
Roger Moore
@Procopius:
That’s not exactly what she was saying. What she was saying is that she was a bad businessperson. Smart businesspeople know good workers are enough more productive than bad ones that they can pay them more and still wind up ahead. It’s the bad businesspeople who think workers are interchangeable parts and the only way to get ahead is to pay as little as possible. One of our big national problems is we’ve been teaching people the attitude of the bad businessperson rather than the good one.
opiejeanne
@HypersphericalCow: Does it say that in the article or are you just guessing?
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: There is a difference between leadership and management.
Baud
FWIW, original story is from May 19.
Cameron
@eclare: IIRC, Greece was a victim of austerity in the economic mess in the mid-2000’s. They had a very hard time making debt payments.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: Would you like me to add that to your comment? I didn’t see it in there, but maybe I’m blind?
JaneE
But raising wages will cause inflation and inflation is good for debtor, not creditors.
We heard that in the 70’s too. The second half of that statement is true, but I am not so sure about the first part. When we got COLA raises they were always a day late and a dollar short.
People who want to operate a successful business will pay whatever they need to to get the employees they need to operate the business. If the business is more important to them than the money, they won’t complain, they will just do it. If the money is more important they will whine about the minimum wage and lazy employees and probably vote Republican.
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
I’m just tired and probably forgot to add it. yes, please add it.
Ohio Mom
Maybe about 15 years ago, the custodial staff at the local Jewish nursing home was threatening to strike.
I got into one of those pointless arguments with an acquaintance who insisted that “if they don’t like the pay, they should find other jobs.”
“Then who is going to mop the floors,” I said. “I want the floors to be clean, don’t you?”
Like I said, pointless.
Another Scott
In other shock, shocking news:
https://reut.rs/3pFisj3
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cameron: Greece was the poster child for austerity. The EU, with strong German influence, would not countenance Greece doing anything other than cutting to the bone to meet EU standards. As I mentioned earlier this week, the Germans still have a huge bee in their bonnet about any inflation.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
I bring him up because everyone always goes to the example of Ford as being a unique innovator when it came to labor relations.
With the blot that both men were also staunchly opposed to the nascent movement for unionization.
dm
Used to be the managers of companies got their start in places like the mail room, or on the line. They got promoted because they were good at their jobs. Eventually they became managers (at which point they probably had to give up their union membership), then they moved up the hierarchy, and really good managers might end up as the CEO.
Then, around the 1960s or 1970s the first waves of MBAs came out of the business schools. Trained, not for the business but for generic “business administration”. You can see this infection taking effect because that’s when the productivity/wage gap began to open up. That is, worker productivity continued to grow (though slower than before), but their wages weren’t following suit — the benefits of productivity growth were going to owners and managers more than they had in the past.
Jeffro
I guess our capitalist overlords just thought, “eh, $7.25 an hour should be good from now until oh…the end of time”. WRONG
In other news, I see Caitlyn Jenner “doesn’t want to get into” whether or not trumpov won the 2020 election. I have news for you, GQP and assorted lackeys: we. are. going. to keep. asking you. the question. We ARE going to keep asking until you answer one way or another. Figure it out, but there is NO having it both ways.
Feathers
@MomSense: I took a sociology course on white collar crime. One of the things I learned is that if you want to study sociopaths/psychopaths, you recruit for subject at the business school. Another was that part of the reason CEO salaries are so high is that money is motivating for sociopaths. They compare their salaries to their peers. Also, with sociopaths at about 1% of the population, there really aren’t that many who also have the brains, looks, and social skills to be able to function as the CEO of a corporation.
Jeffro
Let’s not forget ‘drug test them’ and ‘make them work odd shifts’ and ‘offer them no benefits’ and and and
Omnes Omnibus
@dm: I am not sure that is completely accurate. There have been two tiers of management for a long time. The people from the factory floor usually only rise to a certain point. It is like the military a bit. There are NCOs and officers. Both are management, but there’s a difference.
Feathers
@dm: Well, then Reaganism came along. I’ve also heard the theory that a huge part of the problem was Bill Gates and that generation of tech executives, like Larry Ellison. Their enormous wealth and its rapid growth was on the cover of all the business magazines. They were founders, which somewhat justified the enormous about of money they were getting from the companies they began. But everyone else, even people stepping into a company whose wealth they had done nothing to build, wanted similar payouts. Which has been disastrous for everyone, not even counting when the Wall Street and the hedge fund guys started showing up.
Bill Gates is terrible in the ways we’ve always known, and the new ones were finding out as his divorce plays out. However, his fortune is from his original ownership share from founding Microsoft. Unlike Ellison, Jobs, et al., he didn’t keep giving himself more stock each year. Realizing as I type this, we are probably going to learn more as the divorce lumbers on.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
Who’s Calvin?
Kay
@gene108:
I think it’s weird how they’re all acting like they operate in total isolation. It isn’t true. He wasn’t getting any applicants at 7 because everyone else is paying 12 to 15.
We may have to reteach them the most basic business concepts- supply and demand, competition, the whole works. His competitors were getting the employees.
They got so used to a giant pool of low wage employees they could burn thru and discard they don’t know how to be managers. You have to pay attention!
TriassicSands
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sadly, Art Laffer never realized how his last name is actually spelled. He has a singular place in history as an extraordinarily negative influence on the Republican Party (more justification for what they already wanted, than true theoretical basis for policy). If there is any justice in life, Laffer will meet his end choking on a napkin.
Another Scott
Newsweek (from April 2021):
Unpossible.
Insecurity and existential dread are the keys to a compliant workforce and a successful business. It’s right there in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations!!1
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
randy khan
@Cameron:
It was largely for recreational purposes.
Today he posted a dumb meme about how the government should give the extra $300 a month to people who’d taken jobs, so I suggested that it would be a great idea for employers to do that instead.
Kay
@TriassicSands:
There’s a ton of “Art Laffers”. The whole ideology is rock-hard, entrenched conventional wisdom and it will take 20 years to turn it around. They all return to that comfortable Reagan-era groove at every opportunity and it isn’t just conservatives- it’s “centrists” too. They have an opportunity to look at wages and work differently, and in the nick of damn time too, I might add, since we were rapidly heading for stagnation and income inequality at such levels democracy wouldn’t have survived. They should grab the lifeline and re-examine their priors- their plans failed. They need to change course.
Ken
There’s only two of note, and since you and WaterGirl were talking in terms of tingles, I hope it’s not the kid with the tiger. That leaves the dead religious fanatic.
Kristine
More than one someone has probably already mentioned this, but the disconnect between ‘consumer’ and ‘worker’ that’s a belief in too much of the business world never ceases to puzzle me. In an economy that is iirc 70% consumer-driven, it’s sheer malpractice.
Ken
One of our Balloon Juice commenters noted a few weeks ago that employers can pretty much do that, if they take advantage of one of the provisions of the recovery act which will reimburse them for a portion of salaries. I forget the details, though.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia: I think she means JL Cauvin?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Biden trolling Dump (link)
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
Oh, prompted by a commenter, you mean JL Cauvin! Nobody wins out over JL!
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes, I think you must be right. Although Cauvin doesn’t give me tingles, just giggles.
Daoud bin Daoud
Pay your workers a living wage?
THAT’S UNAMERICAN!
John S.
@Another Scott: I know Dan. He’s a pretty great guy, and his company is one of the best ISOs in the payments industry.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the editor who left “beleaguered” in there….
Schiff is going to be the Maddow program tonight
Another Scott
@Another Scott:
(sigh) Linky fail.
Wealth of Nations.
Cheers,
Scott.
TriassicSands
I never considered myself a pessimist before and although I won’t be around much longer, I don’t want people to ever give up. However, today, it’s hard to see how this gets turned around. The level of ignorance, stupity, and selfishness among millions of Americans has reached a horrifying point. Our hope has to be that many millions of young people grow up and reject their parents’ beliefs and choices. Is that likely?
Currently, I see no possibility of significant change for the better in the GOP. Change for the worse seems almost a given in the short term. If, despite all the anti-democratic legislation now passing in Red states, Democrats can maintain control of the House, Senate, and presidency, then, maybe in time, the GOP will begin to change. That might take your twenty years — two decades of being shut out of national power. But right now, there doesn’t seem to be any credible movement within the Republican Party to become a country-before-party organization, which most definitely does not mean “America First.” For the most part, those Republicans opposed to Trump have mostly repugnant policies (see Rep. Cheney).
Perhaps, the biggest problem on the Right is that the voters are often worse than the national politicians as evidenced by what is happening at the state level.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: done!
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: And so it begins.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: sorry, your guy Cauvin.
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yep. I think I got autocorrected.
Just One More Canuck
@Baud: Laffer is even a bigger dick than I remember
Spanky
@TriassicSands:
Worked for me in the 60’s!
Happens every generation, son.
Anoniminous
@WaterGirl:
And here I was all ready to have a rousing discussion about “The Institutes of the Christian Religion.”
:-(
CaseyL
Totally OT – If anyone here was following Tom Nichols’ Indian Food Global Controversy a few months ago, he is right now about midway through an Indian food feast curated by Preet Bharara, as payment for a bet he lost. The event is also a fundraiser for getting medical supplies to India.
I’ll keep eating if you’ll keep donating.
Kay
@TriassicSands:
The levels of “homeschooling” in conservative areas like where I live have started to concern me. I put it in quotes because no one at all is “schooling” these children. They simply just no longer go to school.
I think we’re going to start to see levels of illiteracy go up, as in, won’t be able to read directions on a label. This is not some carefully constructed home instruction provided by committed caretakers. This is “I no longer send them to school, because liberals in schools(!) and I work outside the home all day”. They’re destroying any possible shot these kids have and they’re so incredibly naive about it!
“He’ll have his own business….” Oh yeah? Doing what? He can’t read. These parents went to school. They just have decided to deny their own kids that.
CaptainObvious
@Chetan Murthy:
To get the full $5 you had to let company inspectors into your home so they could see that you were living right. Like, no premarital sex, homosexuality, or other deviance, like being a Jew.
Ken
@CaseyL: I wasn’t following, what was the controversial part?
I do sometimes wonder what Indian food (and Szechuan, and German, …) were like before the chili pepper and the potato, but I hope that’s not controversial.
Raven
We’re at Isle of Palms paying and insane amount of money for a room with an ocean view. The pizza joint across the street has a sign “pizza maker wanted, $18.50 per hour”. I asked the dude about it and he told me he was fully staffed but no one can get help!!!
Cameron
@WaterGirl: I have no idea what Royal’s management was thinking. Norwegian had exactly the right response in telling DeSantis to pound sand with a mallet.
CaseyL
@Ken: Lookee here:
I tweeted that I couldn’t stand Indian cuisine, and started an international food fight.
My favorite line from the column:
Cameron
@Kay: They can spend all day watching wingnut TV. How much education do elitist libtards think these children need?
Puddinhead
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: just like his famous curve that has no numbers on either axis, his statement regarding what workers are worth is very non-specific. Why are they not worth $15/hour? No state in the union has a median wage that low, so why is $15/hour seen by him as so out of bounds when it is likely to be far below the median wage in the state (with a few shithole exceptions)?
Nothing makes a republican madder than when someone who works for a living actually makes some money.
Chetan Murthy
@CaseyL: Poor Tom. He doesn’t realize that the perfect amount of heat for Thai Spicy Chicken with Basil is enough so that you sneeze twice in the first five minutes of eating the dish. I suppose he’s also a non-fan of Cajun food: I remember well eating a bowl of gumbo and my friend Robert telling me that you knew it was spicy enough, b/c you *just* broke a sweat. Poor Tom.
Omnes Omnibus
That was always the fun thing about it. For some set of values, his curve may have been accurate.
Cameron
@Ken: Many years ago I read that black pepper was used in many of the dishes that evolved to include chili peppers when they crossed the waters. Alas, no more spicy for me – too much smoking, too much alcohol and too much spicy have given me GERD to the point that I have to take acid blockers daily. Repent at leisure, indeed.
CaseyL
@Chetan Murthy: Preet Bharara is being really kind to Tom: only one dish so far was too hot for him. They’ve finished the appetizer portion (many small-portion appetizers, like an Indian food tapas, which frankly I would go for in a huge way), and are resting up before embarking on the main dishes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy: I had a Laotian friend who said that food wasn’t really hot unless it made your ears buzz.
Kay
@Cameron:
It scares me. It’s (frankly) completely delusional too. Public schools in conservative areas reflect the area. The public schools here are conventional and Right leaning. My children had high school classes where they were one of two or three liberal students. It just isn’t true and as I said these parents themselves attended these same schools so to believe this they have to deny their lived reality.
We have a juvenile judge who is worried about it too. She’s brand new and she’s just discovering this new and growing trend and she’s fucking appalled, so I have an ally to talk to. But she’s a “normie!” She doesn’t wander around in the Right wing swamp. She’s only vaguely aware such a thing exists.
zhena gogolia
@CaseyL:
Oh, thanks, I was wondering about that.
Another Scott
@Puddinhead: Relatedly, Phys.org:
“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” – Uncle Joe Biden.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
This is a great point, thanks for making it so forcefully. Power to the Workers! Wife was an elected Union Officer for many years, so proud of the work she did and her attitudes about working people.
Drove into the southern WV coal fields back in the late 1960s to cover wildcat strikes over Black Lung benefits, which did not exist in that benighted age. Found huge coal mining plants with two old guys sitting out front, idle, quiet, when they should have been churning and making a lot of noise. Was proud of those guys stopping work for medical benefits!
But in reality, coal miners still do not have decent medical coverage, especially not for black lung.
debbie
@Chetan Murthy:
Good wasabi makes the back of your head sweat.
Chetan Murthy
@debbie: Heh, sets off fireworks in my nasal passages, and I don’t even snort it!
Ken
@Omnes Omnibus: If Laffer truly believed in his curve, when the Reagan tax cuts reduced revenue, he would have said “whoops! We’re left of the peak, we should raise taxes instead!”
Mary G
@CaseyL: Link to the fundraiser helping India’s coronavirus fight, if you don’t watch to watch Tom Nichols acting like a three-year-old meeting an unfamiliar food. It’s still a very worthwhile cause and I trust Preet to have chosen the recipients well.
CaseyL
@Mary G: He’s actually liked some of it so far but he’s being Tom and saying that doesn’t mean he’ll want to have any of it again.
I’d love to know where Preet took him; all I know is it’s somewhere in New York City. They’ve ordered things I’ve never heard of, or at least have never tried. Potato patties. Mutton cutlet.
ETA: Mystery revealed!
@PreetBharara
6m
Intermission. We can now disclose we are at the wonderful SONA restaurant. Here’s
@RadioFreeTom with chef @chefhari and co-owner Maneesh. It’s going well! Keep donating. http://gofund.me/7d95025e
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: I love spicy food as much as the next person, but I’ve long been convinced that the reason it’s popular with the hot-climate peoples is that, pre-refrigeration, you needed to mask the taste of proteins that maybe had spent too long in the sun. I mean, name a flaming-hot Danish dish.
Gin & Tonic
@CaseyL: The thing about NYC is that no matter where in the world you’re from, there’s a restaurant that serves home cooking.
Cameron
@Kay: It’s a problem everywhere. I don’t have any solutions, but I recently joined the supporters of my local library branch (which is right across the street from an elementary school). Won’t be meeting for a few months, but I’d like to go in with some suggestions that are just good education/non-political if possible. I figure acid test is if I suggest getting a couple buddy benches (which I would write the grant proposals/marketing materials for). If that’s shot down, I know that anything else I’d have to say would be meaningless.
CaseyL
@Gin & Tonic:
Viggo Mortensen.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Well, to be fair, the Icelanders have that rotten whale stuff that they don’t bother to cover up with spices. And can you argue that lutefisk is a better solution?
Cameron
@Gin & Tonic: A lot of spices are also preservatives, so food cooked with them will do a little better (as, hopefully, the people eating the food) in hot climates.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: What about the Upper Midwest? Is there really anywhere you can get a good hotdish?
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: To be pedantic (who, me?) it’s rotten shark, not rotten whale.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: Not in NYC. That’s why it’s a great city.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Like that makes it better.
@Gin & Tonic: I’ve got a Lutheran Church cookbook from central Wisconsin and i am not afraid to use.
CaseyL
Preet Bharara’s fundraiser just hit the $50K goal, which means he will now order Butter Chicken for Tom.
(I can’t imagine not liking Butter Chicken. Someone on the twitter threat said, “It’s practically candy.”)
Ken
@Omnes Omnibus: Do you mean “spicy-hot dish”, in which case I could name a number of Chicago-area restaurants? Or “hotdish“, which can be good but usually isn’t?
(I hadn’t heard that term until now, though I certainly ate enough of them growing up.)
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: Some other ideas – Temperature:
Lots of interesting information and discussion of various possibilities there. I won’t spoil it – click on over.
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott: HTML fail.
ETA: Thanks for fixing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: I meant what I typed. The staple of church dinners and funeral lunches throughout WI, MN, and the UP.
J R in WV
Many years ago, when the first Indian restaurant opened here in WV, after a few meals there, I ordered a Lamb Vindaloo, Indian Hot. Vindaloo is an especially hot curry dish, and Indian Hot is WOW hot. But I am an adventurous eater and love spicy foods.
It was really, really hot. They said, “He wants it Indian Hot, we will make it Indian Hot for him!” and it was. As I was just starting into it, I saw the door into the kitchen open, and the cooking staff peeking out to see how white boy did with their hottest dish.
It was really good, tangy with vinegar, hot, hot, HOT! I had sweat dripping from my ear lobes! I asked for new dry napkins, and more cold beer… But I ate nearly all of it. I will confess that I no longer ask for it “Indian Hot” but just regular Vindaloo.
So this Tom guy should be quiet and eat the food. Tingles, sweat on the back of his head, the works. Hope they raise a shit-ton of money for India’s health care. I love sushi too. Except for octopus, which is too tough to chew. But I loved raw oysters long before I tried sushi, and if you can do a raw oyster, sushi is just another sea food dish.
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV: Well, uni isn’t for beginners, IMO.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: I blame TFG.
Cheers,
Scott.
CaseyL
I’m a spice wimp myself. I love flavors but not mouth-on-fire. The one exception is Thai food – it still burns like crazy, but is so freaking good I can’t stop eating it.
Steeplejack
@CaseyL:
Well played.
CaseyL
@Steeplejack: One does try ?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus:
“How to Cook with Cheese”
Omnes Omnibus
@?BillinGlendaleCA: My dad once described Norski cooking as cook it until it turns gray and, if it won’t turn gray, put a white sauce on it.
Chetan Murthy
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
FTFY
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Chetan Murthy: You monster!
Ken
@Chetan Murthy: I have a dip recipe that has two kinds of cheese and mayonnaise
EDIT: Ooh, after checking, it also has sour cream!
Chetan Murthy
@?BillinGlendaleCA: “Everything I know about Upper Midwest Cooking, I learned from LG&M Posts by Erik Loomis”
Scuffletuffle
@CaseyL: Well played!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy:
Okay, fine.
That’s just one. Peruse the site; there’s more.
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus: Shudder. Confirms everything Erik ever claimed.
ian
The library of Alexandria was an act (or two) of nature. The lost arts of business acumen were sacrificed to the god of profit at least forty years ago.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy: And yet there is good food here too. Just not so much in the winter. I’d put a Sheboygan style brat up against sausage in a bun out there. Italian with onions and peppers can give it a run for its money, but that’s about it.
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus: OK, I *have* had excellent brats in Madison, decades ago.
CaseyL
@Omnes Omnibus:
Holy cholesterol, Batman! And soup, soup, so many cans of condensed soup!
Yikes.
Ruckus
@Wapiti:
I could do that early on in elementary school. Although the totals were a lot less and the minimum wage was $1.25 when I started working.
Kayla Rudbek
@CaseyL: yes, I grew up in Minnesota and I had to make a lot of alterations to my diet once I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy (back in the 1990s)…no more hotdish, no more ice cream, no more string cheese, no more drinking at least a pint of milk a day.
Mister Dairy Junkie (my cat) passed away that same summer I was diagnosed, so I really didn’t get much chance to see whether he would have eaten the non-dairy alternatives.
Someday I need to borrow my cousin-in-law’s cats and see if they would eat the present day dairy alternatives. I suspect that anything with enough fat in it might get cat approval.
NotMax
Memory fail on exactly who was looking for prices on the lowest end Mac M1.
Was in Costco today and saw they have it in stock at $899. Which, coincidentally, is the precise bottom price at which I predicted it would settle until the newer models roll out en masse.
Ruckus
@Kristine:
Business is 100% consumer driven. It’s just who the consumer is. But every business is trying to sell something, be they a chicken grower or restaurant or exterminator or space ship builder or gardener or whore house. Every company is selling something, good, bad or indifferent, solid, liquid, lighter than air, wetter than water.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
iPad Pro 11″ is $799, has the M1 chip.
NotMax
@Ruckus
The person who asked was specifically looking for a Macbook.
Kay
@Cameron:
That’s good- to have a test. Don’t waste your time if they won’t snap up the buddy bench.
Stuart Frasier
@Ruckus: You can get a refurbed M1 Mac Mini from Apple for $589. Sometimes new ones show up on sale for $599. My wife has one and it’s pretty impressive.
sdhays
@david: Wow, I guess he’s given up on the race to be the stupidest member of the Senate.
And he showed such promise.
Seriously, though, I hope this makes a difference in Alabama. The Deep South is ticking time bomb of variant kindling.
Ruckus
@Cameron:
Royal’s management was thinking they could get one over on Norwegian and fill up their ships, while Norwegian would be sailing 1/3 full.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think to even be considered your tongue has to go numb.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: Maybe I’m not understanding the problem here. Royal’s cruise was with 100% vaccinated staff and passengers: proof of vaxx required, right? [that’s what the article said] I mean, sure there’ll be some covid infections, b/c there’s still community spread. But vaccinated people shouldn’t be badly affected, so this isn’t a big deal.
What am I missing?
Ruckus
@Kayla Rudbek:
Last time I had milk was over 45 yrs ago and that was after trying all the alternatives of the time, all the lactate free stuff, etc. Until almond milk I also couldn’t have cereal.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
I figured that but still I believe it’s the cheapest M1 chip device. I’d pop the extra hun for the key board and bigger screen.
TriassicSands
I taught 9-11th grade honors history and economics in a school system in southern New Mexico. The situation was frightening. More than 90% of the kids were on free or reduced price lunches – – so lots of poverty. The principal was born in the town, graduated from high school there, went off to a mediocre college, returned to teach, got his administrator credentials, and became one of the highest paid and most successful people in town. His own history told him that the education he got was good enough to lead to real success. He was a disaster for the kids.
The town had a lot of religious zealots who tried to tell me what I should teach and how. A minimum of 2/3 of the students were on the honor roll, but in the “honors” classes I taught, kids would routinely skip assignments they didn’t like or that required effort (they’d been brought up on a diet of worksheets and my predecessor gave grade-changing extra credit for toll house chocolate chip cookies).
They hired a well-thought-of superintendent from the Midwest and fired her when she told them they couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer before football games. This is only the tip of the iceberg of profound dysfunction. Eventually, after I left, the school was put on state probation, but that wasn’t long after the principal was chosen “Principal of the Year.” It was all quite horrifying.
I have no idea what conditions are like there now, but it was a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing situation, so it’ s hard to imagine any real improvement.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
question for NYers in the house:
leaving aside Eric Adams housing and other questions, like the (I believe) mythical cabinet post: Has Yang said where/how he’s gonna get that billion? is more Bernie-ish ‘look out the window’ stuff?
TriassicSands
Not to argue, but poor people getting SNAP or Medicaid makes them even madder.
Ruckus
@Stuart Frasier:
I forgot about the mini. Of course I’m still trying to figure out why it exists in the first place. Add a keyboard/mouse/screen and you are at the iMac price. And a new one is $699 base model.
NotMax
Sheesh. Need to replace a couple of AA batteries. Smallest package of AAs at the battery display in the store had ten of them. Could swear there was a time one could get a pack of four.
James E Powell
@Baud:
Not that we should ever expect him to be good, but a guy who’s a big time college head coach usually thinks very highly of himself and is not accustomed to following orders.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
I understood that Royal was allowing non vaccinated passengers or at least specifically not asking for proof. And a report I just saw said RC changed the requirements to not having to be vaccinated – sucking up to DeDipshit and his insane bull.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: aaaaha. OK. If they’re not requiring proof of vaxx and negative tests before boarding, then …. that’s *barking madness*.
Ken
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: NYC population is about 18 million, so a billion would give each person about 55 dollars. Even if you assume 99% of New Yorkers already make above the threshold, that means the others get about 5500 dollars each. It’s a rather small basic income.
Ken
@Ruckus: This raises the question — if hundreds of passengers get COVID, will DeSantis allow them to disembark in Florida, or keep the “plague ship” from docking? I guess it wouldn’t hurt his numbers since Florida’s not reporting them any more.
Mo Salad
@Ken: Hey, I remember that. It is the expanded Employee Retention Tax Credit. Employers are entitled to a 70% credit for wages and health insurance paid to employees, up to $7,000 a quarter. The key is that your sales have to be less than 80% of the equivalent quarter on 2019. The fun part is, you won’t truly know that answer immediately. They do allow for “grandfathered” quarter, for example, if 1st Q 2021 sales were 75% of 1st Q 2019, you would qualify for the credit for the first AND second quarters of 2021, even if your sales have fully recovered in that 2nd Q. If that happens, then you no longer qualify, starting in the 3rd Q
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken:
It’s a bit over 8 million.
Omnes Omnibus
@?BillinGlendaleCA: He’s counting the rats as well.
Mike G
New York metropolitan area is 20.3 million.
“The metropolitan area includes New York City (the most populous city in the United States), Long Island, and the Mid and Lower Hudson Valley in New York State; the five largest cities in New Jersey: Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, and Edison, and their vicinities; and six of the seven largest cities in Connecticut: Bridgeport, New Haven, Stamford, Waterbury, Norwalk, and Danbury, and their vicinities.”
Kayla Rudbek
@Ruckus: I concur on the almond milk. Mr. Rudbek on the other hand eats his dry cereal with a spoon and no milk or milk substitute at all.
Non-dairy substitutes have improved a lot in the last 30-something years. Daiya makes vegan cheese that actually melts when you cook with, and they’re at the point of selling that to pizza restaurants as well as home consumers. So I can order at &pizza or UNO’s and actually get something that tastes like a real pizza.
And even Breyer ice cream offers a few vegan options now that have a texture and mouthfeel like proper ice cream, and are sold in something larger than a pint (although I still miss ice cream sold by the plastic pail).
If I was 25 years younger and had any organic chemistry chops, I would probably go into food science/chemistry and have a lot of fun at work.
Kayla Rudbek
@Kayla Rudbek: And I just saw that there’s both Food physical chemistry and food physics.. as specializations (although from reading the food physical chemistry article it seems like chemical engineering might be a pathway into food chemistry).
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: One might expect a small number of infections, true, because no vaccine is perfect.
What struck me was:
There’s no way to know from the short Reuters story.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cameron
@Ken: DeCovid doesn’t give a tin-plated shit about Florida. He’s a pure Trumpazoid, so the state only exists as a platform for his presidential ambitions. Of course, he’d refuse to let the ship land – and he’d deny any and all responsibility for what was obviously going to happen.
SWMBO
@Feathers:
Bill Gates was terrible in ways a lot of us didn’t know until Triumph of the Nerds aired. Allegedly Gates was furious about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
SWMBO
@?BillinGlendaleCA: How to cook with cream of mushroom soup.
Jake Gibson
@Chetan Murthy:
This. I have said for years that an MBA is an
advanced degree in sociopathy.