Tag Archives: broward

Iran Releases American Sailors

Mother Jones

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Am I the only who senses that conservatives are pretty disappointed that Iran released our sailors quickly and without any fuss? Maybe I’m just being hypersensitive….

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Iran Releases American Sailors

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Map of the Day: We Have Met the Enemy, and the Enemy is Squirrels

Mother Jones

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The American electrical grid remained under sustained assault in 2015 from squirrel attacks. The Obama administration, feckless as always, failed to understand the threat and protect the American people. If they refuse to even say the words “evolutionarily maladapted squirrels,” what chance do they have of defeating the enemy?

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Map of the Day: We Have Met the Enemy, and the Enemy is Squirrels

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper and Hilbert like to (a) play-wrestle with each other, and (b) jump up on the fireplace mantel. Here they are doing both. Hopper has lately been taking control of these affairs, finally realizing that she’s the real alpha cat in the household even if her brother is bigger. As she’s finally figured out, being alpha is more about will and energy than about size, and she’s got both. Nonetheless, you can see in this picture about how seriously she takes it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

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Does Amazon Have to Pay Workers for Going Through Its Security Lines? The Supreme Court Is About to Decide

Mother Jones

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Here’s the newest front in the war to pay low-wage workers even less:

The latest battle, which goes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, was launched by former warehouse workers for Amazon.com, who argue they should have been paid for the time they spent waiting in security lines after their shifts….Those security lines could take more than half an hour, the workers said, and that was time when they should have been getting paid.

….Amazon said it would not comment due to the pending litigation, but a spokesperson said the “data shows that employees walk through post shift security screening with little or no wait.”

Well now. If employees truly walk though security screenings with “little or no wait,” then it wouldn’t cost Amazon anything to pay them for that time. So why are they fighting this? Perhaps it’s because Amazon is lying. Sometimes the wait really is substantial, and Amazon doesn’t want to (a) pay more security guards to speed up the lines or (b) pay workers for the time spent in slowpoke lines.

So this really does seem like a simple case. If Amazon is telling the truth, they should have no objection to paying employees for time spent in line. If they’re lying, then they should be given an incentive to speed up the security process—and the best incentive I can think of is to pay employees for time spent in line. Either way, the answer is the same: pay employees for time spent in security lines.

Needless to say, the Supreme Court will figure out a way to spend a hundred pages making this more complicated so that they can justify a different ruling. After all, it wouldn’t do to allow workers to get above their stations, would it?

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Does Amazon Have to Pay Workers for Going Through Its Security Lines? The Supreme Court Is About to Decide

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

Mother Jones

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Here’s a stunning chart for you. It comes from a paper by a team of Swedish researchers, and it shows the relationship between earnings and weight among men. As you can see, adult earnings reach a peak around a BMI of 23—smack in the middle of the normal range—and then steadily decline as you get more overweight. But here’s the kicker:

In particular, we contribute to the existing literature by showing that there is a large labor market weight-related penalty also for males, but only for those who were already overweight or obese in adolescence. We replicated this pattern using additional data sets from the United Kingdom and the United States, where the results were strikingly similar. The UK and U.S. estimates also confirm that the penalty is unique to those who were overweight or obese early in life.

The earnings penalty for overweight (and underweight!) men isn’t due to simple discrimination. Men who become overweight as adults face no special career penalty. It’s only a problem for men who become overweight as teenagers. The Economist summarizes the paper’s conclusions:

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest….But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers….They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the “obesity penalty”? They reckon that discrimination in the labour market is not that important. Neither is health. Instead they emphasise what psychologists call “noncognitive factors”—motivation, popularity and the like. Having well-developed noncognitive factors is associated with success in the labour market. The authors argue that obese children pick up fewer noncognitive skills—they are less likely, say, to be members of sports teams or they may face discrimination from teachers.

In other words, social ostracism of both underweight and overweight teenagers produces lower cognitive skills and lower noncognitive (i.e., social) skills, and this in turn leads to lower earnings as adults. It may seem like harmless teenage clique behavior, but it has real consequences.

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

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Americans Are Rebelling Against Phone Surveys

Mother Jones

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Carl Bialik reports on the state of the state in political polling:

Fifteen pollsters told us their response rates for election polls this year and in 2012. The average response rate this year is 11.8 percent — down 1.9 percentage points from 2012. That may not sound like a lot, but when fewer than one in seven people responded to polls in 2012, there wasn’t much room to drop. It’s a decline of 14 percent, and it’s consistent across pollsters — 12 of the 15 reported a decline, and no one reported an increase.

These results are consistent with what pollsters have reported for years: that people are harder to reach by phone, and are less likely to want to talk to strangers when they are reached. Here, the pollsters show just how quickly response rates have fallen in only two years.

I assume the problem here is twofold. First, there are too many polls. A few decades ago it might have seemed like a big deal to get a call from a Gallup pollster. Sort of like being a Nielsen family. Today it’s not. Polls are now conducted so frequently, and the public has become so generally media savvy, that it’s just sort of a nuisance.

More generally, there are just too many spam phone calls. The Do Not Call Registry was a great idea, but there are (a) too many loopholes, including for pollsters, and (b) too many spammers who don’t give a damn. When the registry first went on line, my level of spam phone calls dropped dramatically. Since then, however, it’s gradually increased and is now nearly as bad as it ever was. I won’t even pick up the phone anymore if Caller ID suggests it’s a commercial call of some variety. Nor is there much likelihood that this situation is going to improve as long as the spammers are smart enough not to call Chuck Schumer’s cell phone.

So perhaps polling is going to end up being a victim of its own success. During election years I get two or three calls a month from pollsters, which is pretty remarkable if I’m anything close to average. It means pollsters are making something like 100 million or more calls per month across the country. Is that possible? It hardly seems like it. Maybe I’m an outlier. But one way or another, it’s a big number, and it’s no wonder that people are hanging up on them in droves.

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Americans Are Rebelling Against Phone Surveys

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Friday Cat Blogging – 15 August 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, in a surprising act of cooperation, Domino just sat in the sun while I took her picture from a distance. Usually I can get off maybe one or two shots before she realizes what’s going on and heads directly over to the camera. Is it because she loves the camera? Distrusts the camera? Just wants to say hi to me? I don’t know, but this time she just let me click away. This one reminds me of Inkblot’s presidential campaign portrait.

In other news, click here to meet Meatball, possibly the world’s biggest cat.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 15 August 2014

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Everyone Is Now Officially Banned From Whining About Presidential Vacations. Forever.

Mother Jones

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Yes, yes, yes: sign me up as a charter member of the movement to STFU about presidential vacations. Both sides do it. Bush got hit with criticism from Democrats. Obama gets it from Republicans. Clinton got it. Reagan got it. Fine. We’re all guilty. Now let’s just stop.

No more golf mockery. No more charts showing how many days Bush took off compared to Obama. No more whining about how this week—yes, this very week!—is the worst week ever in history for a vacation because the world is in crisis. You know why? Because there’s always a crisis somewhere in the world.

So that’s it. Don’t argue about it. Just stop. Right now. It is officially the stupidest thing in the world.

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Everyone Is Now Officially Banned From Whining About Presidential Vacations. Forever.

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