Tag Archives: summer

In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

by BrendanMauger Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Wonkblog, here’s a chart showing the pay gap between men and women in the restaurant industry. It comes from a recently released EPI report, and as you can see, not only are men better paid in virtually every category, but the premium goes up for the highest paying jobs. Bussers and cashiers are paid nearly the same regardless of gender. But when you move up to cooks, bartenders, and managers, the premium ranges from 10-20 percent.

This data isn’t conclusive. There are other reasons besides gender for pay gaps, and the EPI report lists several of them. Whites make more than blacks. High school grads make more than dropouts. Older workers make more than younger ones. You’d need to control for all this and more to get a more accurate picture of the gender gap.

But in a way, that misses the point. There are lots of reasons for the gender gap in pay. Some is just plain discrimination. Some is because women take off more time to raise children. Some is because women are encouraged to take different kinds of jobs. But all of these are symptoms of the same thing. In a myriad of ways, women still don’t get a fair shake.

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In the Restaurant Biz, It Pays To Be a Man

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New Discovery Cuts Brainwashing Time in Half

by adndseu13da Posted on August 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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The frontiers of science continue to expand:

In experiments on mice, scientists rewired the circuits of the brain and changed the animals’ bad memories into good ones. The rewriting of the memory wasn’t done with drugs but by using light to control the activity of brain cells. While science is a long way from achieving a similar feat in people, it adds to a body of research that is starting to uncover the physiological basis of memory.

Yes, I know what you’re wondering. And the answer is yes:

The researchers said they were able to do the opposite as well—change a pleasurable memory in mice into one associated with fear.

So I guess that wraps up both Brave New World and 1984 all in one nice, neat package. What could go wrong?

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New Discovery Cuts Brainwashing Time in Half

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

by WillUHJbrl Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Brad DeLong notes that Mario Draghi, the head of Europe’s central bank, went off text in his speech at Jackson Hole. Here’s his summary of Draghi’s extended ad-lib:

The speech text says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. The decline in inflation has not led to any decline in expectations of inflation.
  3. THE ECB will, if necessary, within its mandate, use QE and other policies to keep expectations of inflation from declining.

The speech as delivered says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. My usual line is that the decline in inflation is due to temporary factors that will be reversed.
  3. That explanation is now long in the tooth: the longer “temporary” lasts the greater the danger.
  4. In fact, it is too late to “safeguard the firm anchoring of inflation expectations”.
  5. Inflationary expectations have already declined.
  6. We will use all the tools we have to reverse this.

Is this deviation a mere line wobble….Is this deviation an audience effect….Or does it signal a recognition on Draghi’s part that the Eurozone is heading for a triple dip, and that if he doesn’t assemble a coalition to do much more very quickly to boost aggregate demand we will have to change the name “The Great Recession” to something including the D-word, and he will go down in history as the worst central banker since the 1930s?

I would like to know…

I suppose we’d all like to know. The Germans better start taking this stuff seriously pretty soon. They can’t stick their heads in the sand and live in the past forever.

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

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Ukraine Claims it Has Captured Russian Soldiers

by JasmineSeymour Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Ukraine claims that it now has proof that Russian soldiers have been involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil:

Ukraine released video footage on Tuesday of what it said were 10 captured Russian soldiers, raising tensions as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, for talks later in the day with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Petro O. Poroshenko.

….The release of the videos and the high-level talks came a day after Ukraine accused Russia of sending an armored column across the border, prompting Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, to express alarm on Twitter. “The new columns of Russian tanks and armor crossing into Ukraine indicates a Russian-directed counteroffensive may be underway. #escalation,” he wrote.

….“Everything was a lie. There were no drills here,” one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator. He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine. After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Mr. Smirnov said.

This kind of thing represents a cusp of some kind. If it’s true, Putin has to decide pretty quickly whether to gamble everything on an outright invasion, or whether to back off. If it turns out to be a Ukrainian invention, Putin has to decide whether to use it as a casus belli. These are dangerous times.

UPDATE: Apparently Russia has admitted the soldiers are theirs:

Sources in Moscow have admitted that a number of men captured inside Ukraine were indeed serving Russian soldiers, but said they crossed the border by mistake….”The soldiers really did participate in a patrol of a section of the Russian-Ukrainian border, crossed it by accident on an unmarked section, and as far as we understand showed no resistance to the armed forces of Ukraine when they were detained,” a source in Russia’s defence ministry told the RIA Novosti agency.

Uh huh. I suppose Putin will now claim that detaining the soldiers is an act of war unless they’re immediately released.

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Ukraine Claims it Has Captured Russian Soldiers

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Here’s the Latest Right-Wing IRS Fantasy

by HelenaHastings Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a great example of the conservative media bubble at work. I was browsing The Corner a few minutes ago and came across a post telling me that the government has, rather astonishingly, acknowledged that it has another backup of Lois Lerner’s missing emails. Judicial Watch, which has been trying to get hold of these emails, sent out a press release trumpeting its discovery:

Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe….This is a jaw-dropping revelation. The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails….The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be — but dishonestly withheld this information.

Well. That’s fascinating. But I wondered what was really up. I went to Google News but all I found were links to conservative news sites. The Judicial Watch story was plastered over all of them: Forbes, The Blaze, NRO, Breitbart, Fox, Townhall, the Washington Examiner, the Free Beacon, and the New York Observer. But none of the usual mainstream news sources seemed to have anything about this.

Except for The Hill. Hooray! So I clicked:

An administration official said Justice Department lawyers had dropped no bombshells last week, and that Judicial Watch was mischaracterizing what the government had said.

The official said that Justice lawyers were only referring to tapes backing up IRS emails that were routinely recycled twice a year before 2013, when the investigation into the Tea Party controversy began….The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch.

Roger that. What he’s saying is that backup tapes are routinely recycled and written over, but it’s possible that some of the tapes weren’t entirely written over. There’s a chance that old emails might still be at the tail end of some of the tapes and could be recovered. And who knows: maybe some of them were Lerner’s. This is, as you can imagine, (a) the longest of long shots, and (b) a pretty difficult forensic recovery job even if some parts of the backup tapes contain old messages. It’s certainly not a jaw-dropping revelation.

But in right-wing fantasyland, it’s no doubt already become conventional wisdom that the feds have some kind of massive government-wide backup system that contains every email ever written by any federal employee. The Obama administration has just been hiding it.

Which is exactly what you’d expect from them, isn’t it?

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Here’s the Latest Right-Wing IRS Fantasy

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Bonus Sunday Cat Blogging – 24 August 2014

by KarmaSpell Posted on August 24, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve gotten several queries about how Mozart is doing, and as you might expect, the answer is that Mozart is delighted with his new home. Last night at dusk he was leaping around in my mother’s native habitat garden and chasing all the little things that only cats can see at dusk. Everyone else is doing fine too. So as a bit of bonus catblogging, here’s my mother’s entire brood. From top to bottom, we have Mozart, Ditto, and Tillamook. Enjoy.

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Bonus Sunday Cat Blogging – 24 August 2014

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Did Obamacare Wreck a Baseball Game?

by HwaCopewic Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

A few days ago, a Chicago Cubs game was called in the fifth inning after the grounds crew had so much trouble spreading a tarp that the field got soaked during a rain delay and play couldn’t be continued. The Corner reveals what really happened:

Insiders at the ball club report that the real culprit is Obamacare. Because the Affordable Care Act requires offering health benefits to employees who work more than 130 hours per month or 30 hours a week (“full time”), the Cubs organization reorganized much of its staff during the off-season. Sources that spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that, on Tuesday night, the crew was drastically “undermanned.”

Huh. What do you think of that, Dean Baker?

The problem with this story is that employer sanctions are not in effect for 2014. In other words, the Cubs will not be penalized for not providing their ground crew with insurance this year even if they work more than 30 hours per week. Apparently the Cubs management has not been paying attention to the ACA rules. This is yet another example of the skills gap that is preventing managers from operating their businesses effectively.

Quite so. My guess is that this is just another installment in the long-running effort of American corporations to use Obamacare as a scapegoat for everything under the sun. Usually this has to do with raising copays for their employees or something like that, but the ingenuity of American capitalism knows no bounds. Why not blame a rain delay on Obamacare too?

For a more likely cause of penny pinching on the grounds crew, the Wall Street Journal has you covered.

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Did Obamacare Wreck a Baseball Game?

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If Congress Wants to Know Who’s Responsible for the Immigration Crisis, It Should Look in a Mirror

by NZXSunnysaq Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Why do we have an enormous backlog of immigration cases along our southern border? Well, as far back as 2006 the immigration backlog had already reached 169,000 cases, so the Bush administration asked for more funding for immigration judges. Congress ignored the request. Then, in 2008, we passed a law guaranteeing judicial proceedings for children who arrive from countries other than Canada or Mexico. That increased the backlog further, and when Barack Obama took office he tried to at least fill all the existing judicial vacancies. But as Stephanie Mencimer reports, that wasn’t nearly enough:

Immigration judges can expect to handle 1,500 cases at any given time. By comparison, Article I federal district judges handle about 440 cases, and they get several law clerks to help manage the load. Immigration judges have to share a single clerk with two or three other judges. The lack of staffing creates an irony that seems to be lost on the current Congress: Too few judges means that people with strong cases languish for years waiting for them to get resolved, while people with weak cases who should probably be sent home quickly get to stay in the United States a few years waiting for a decision.

….Today, there are 243 judges—just 13 more than in 2006 and 21 fewer than at the end of 2012—and more than 30 vacancies the government is trying to fill. All this despite the fact that the immigration court backlog has increased nearly 120 percent since 2006. And that was before the kids started coming.

Obama has tried to get funding for more judges as part of the annual budgeting process. No luck. He’s tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform that included funding for more judges. No luck. Now he’s trying to get emergency funding for the border crisis that would include money for more judges. So far, no luck.

There are, obviously, multiple causes of the current border crisis. As usual, though, Congress is one of them—and, in particular, obstructive congressional Republicans who aren’t really much interested in doing something that would fix an ongoing border crisis that provides them with useful political attack ads. If Congress needs someone to point the finger of blame at, all they have to do is look in a mirror.

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If Congress Wants to Know Who’s Responsible for the Immigration Crisis, It Should Look in a Mirror

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Nothing Left to Steal?

by JohnnieR41 Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Megan McArdle points out that cars are a lot harder to steal than they used to be:

Other forms of crime are also getting less lucrative. “Small-time marijuana dealer” is no longer a viable career option in several states. Robbery is also getting tougher. As credit card transactions have come to dominate cash, the potential return from mugging someone, or knocking over a gas station, has fallen dramatically. Even burglars are facing some challenges: Expensive televisions are now too big to carry unless you bring a dolly and a truck, home theater systems are often wired into the wall, and at least in my circles, women don’t wear as much fancy jewelry or mink as they used to. For a while, small electronics made up the cash gap for burglars, muggers, and purse snatchers, but cell phone manufacturers are putting in “kill switches” starting in 2015, which will torpedo that market.

Well, perhaps in years to come thieves will turn to technology to improve their productivity. I don’t know how, but then again, we rarely predict technological revolutions in advance, do we? Maybe new smartphone apps will allow thieves to target more lucrative mugging victims? Or geolocation apps will predict which homes are likely to contain the most easily fencible items? Or maybe sophisticated data mining operations will produce new and innovative opportunities for blackmail. Beats me. But somehow offense and defense always seem to keep up with each other, don’t they?

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Nothing Left to Steal?

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

by AdellRomeo Posted on July 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via James Hamilton, the Atlanta Fed is now making its GDP forecasts publicly available. As you can see, they’ve gotten steadily more pessimistic since April and are now predicting a growth rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter.

Now, there are two way to look at this. The glass-half-full view is: Whew! That huge GDP drop in Q1 really was a bit of a blip, not an omen of a coming recession. The economy isn’t setting records or anything, but it’s back on track.

The glass-half-empty view is: Yikes! If the dismal Q1 number had really been a blip, perhaps caused by bad weather, we’d expect to see makeup growth in Q2. But we’re seeing nothing of the sort. We lost a huge chunk of productive capacity in Q1 and apparently we’re not getting it back. From a lower starting level, we’re just going to continue along the same old sluggish growth path that we’ve had for the past few years. All told, GDP in the entire first half of 2014 hasn’t grown by a dime.

I am, by nature, a glass-half-empty kind of person, so feel free to write off my pessimism about this. Nonetheless, the GHE view sure seems like the right one to me. It’s just horrible news if it turns out that during a “recovery” we can experience a massive drop in GDP and then do nothing to make up for it over the next quarter. It’s even worse news that the unemployment rate is going down at the same time. I know that last month’s jobs report was relatively positive, but in the longer view, how can unemployment decrease while GDP is flat or slightly down? Not by truly decreasing, I think. It happens only because there’s a growing number of people who are permanently left behind by the economy and fall out of the official statistics.

But hey. This is just a forecast. Maybe the Atlanta Fed is wrong. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

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