All posts by Jack

Economics, Politics

Minimal Wage

Once again the discussion of minimum wage is coming to the forefront of political discussion. There is a lot of vocal support for a $15 an hour minimum wage. I think that is a few dollars more per hour than necessary for a national minimum wage.

A minimum wage should be able to provide the wage earner with a basic living wage. The national poverty level for a family of four is in the neighborhood of $24,000 a year. A person working full-time, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year will work 2,000 hours a year. Using these numbers, $12 an hour is a reasonable minimum wage – nationally.

Now, within some urban areas (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) the effective poverty level for a family of four is much greater than national level and it would be very appropriate to tie the minimum wage to HUD’s Extremely Low Income for a family of four for an area, or to the national poverty level for a family of four, whichever is greater. Such that, in San Francisco, the ELI for a family of 4 is $44,000 so a minimum wage for that area should be $22 an hour. In Seattle, the ELI is $32,100, which would lead to a $16.50 per hour minimum wage. In the Bronx, the ELI is $31,300, which will lead to a $15.65 per hour minimum wage.

We have the facts and figures derived from the various government departments that track this data, such as the Census Bureau, HUD, Social Security, the Fed, HHS, etc. Let’s use this data responsibly and keep on top of the growing economy and the wage gap. And the numbers can change every year as the economy grows and we don’t strand people at an old wage for many years while the politicians pontificate.

Economics, Politics

Interesting view on the growth of wages

I came across this link to SSA income data. I see that the average salary/wage is growing faster than the median salary/wage. So this shows that the majority of the workers continue to get more and more relatively poorer than the “average” worker.

In the upper left of the SSA page is a link to yearly breakdowns of the annual wages. Here is a link the 2017 numbers. It shows the breakdown of the number of earners in each income band, up to 205 people who earned more than $50,000,000. The total of those 205 people was $19,954,445,874.88 for a average of $97,338,760.37 each.

In 2016, only 143 people earned more than $50M with an average of $100.7M each.And in 2015, it was 202 people with an average of $91.4M each. Looks like a lot of volatility at the top.

An interesting page to fiddle with to see where the inequity grows.

General

Cottages Galore

Back in 1986 or ‘87, Elaine asked me to get her a Fairytale Castle; she even pointed me at David Winter, an English sculptor who made cast sculptures of many English countryside buildings and a few fantasy castles as well. I began my quest going to some of the local stores which carried these sort of knick-knacks. While they had many different David Winter Cottages, I couldn’t find the Castle. But, I liked what I saw and picked up a few of the cottages whilst looking for the Castle. I even went to England in 1987 and searched the High Streets for the Fairytale Castle, but to no avail. And I continued to pick up a few pieces that intrigued me, such as the Green Dragon Pub and the Hogs Head Beer House.

The following year I finally found the Fairytale Castle and it joined the small collection I had started. Then I joined the David Winter Guild and started getting pieces regularly, and the collection grew. This continued for another 20 years until David retired in 2010.

In the Hay Creek house we had display cabinets to showcase many cottages and, if I remembered, we would rotate the stored cottages with the displayed cottages. We could display a fair number of cottages, maybe 20-30 at a time. Many of the cottages were small 2x3x4 sculptures, but some of them were massive. If you have a castle with a dragon sleeping around it, it is a big piece.

Then we decided to downsize. I inventoried the cottages as we were packing up and found that I have 184 David Winter Cottages (and Castles). Aaaargh. I can’t keep them all. We don’t have the display cabinets anymore. We have a mantle over the fireplace that can hold a few. Even if I were to religiously rotate them every month or so, we don’t have the space to store all the cottages not on display. (We are not going to fall into the suburban trap of renting a storage space. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t belong.)

My plan is to keep a few of the castles and the Christmas Cottages (and maybe a pub or two) and get rid of the rest. I’m not sure if it worth the hassle of putting them up on ebay. I don’t think the cottages command much of a market today. Maybe I should try a consignment shop?

This week I will organize the collection and figure out where to next.

Geek Stuff, General

Try Something New

I used to be able to write a post on my web page – https://www.stardel.com/eg – and it would automatically cross-post to my Facebook page. Then Facebook took that functionality away. Now, I can only cross-post to a Facebook page I manage, and, evidently, I don’t manage my own home page. So, I set up a FB page I called – Jack Heneghan’s Page – (in a burst of creativity,) and now I can cross-post to that.

However, I don’t have a lot of people looking at my NEW page since no one knows about it. So, I will try to share the post on the NEW page to the OLD page and see what happens.

One of the reasons for doing this is that I stopped using exemplia gratia for posting bits and primarily looked at FB to catch up with other people. I didn’t really use FB to post items for myself, just to comment on other’s posts. I would like to get back to posting my own thoughts and to keeping them in a central place where they don’t get lost in a torrent of other posts.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it works.

General, Preparing for the worst

A concern

Here is an article that lays out one of my main concerns of the past decade. Back when the markets tanked, the Fed began buying up those bad collateral debt obligations in stages and ended up with 4 TRILLION Dollars of bad junk on its books. As the article points out, other Central Banks were doing the same and globally they hold almost 15 TRILLION Dollars worth of bad debt.

This propped up the stock markets artificially for the big boom period that certainly helped me towards retirement, but what happens when that hyper pumping-up stops? We are probably about to find in the next year or two. I can only hope my portfolio (and my retirement) survives what is coming, because I have no idea how to protect it.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-market-investors-its-time-to-hear-the-ugly-truth-2019-01-05

General

Happy New Year!!!!

2018 was a year of much change. We have sold one home and downsized into another. We have left the countryside and moved into town. Rags, our last horse, passed away at 33 (that’s old for a horse.) We had him for 25 years. We were homeless for a few months and wandered around the southwest, finally settling into a new-built home in Colorado Springs.

We are looking forward to 2019, hopefully a bit more stable than 2018. We are planning a trip to Ireland in August. I hope the Passport Office will reopen up in time for me to renew my passport.

I wish everyone a great New Year and may 2019 be better than the last.

General

Reading those Terms of Service

I have often been annoyed by Terms Of Service agreements you have to click on and agree to in order to install a piece of software.  It might be some software you just want to look at and once you try it you never look at it again.  Doesn’t matter, you don’t know if you sold your soul somewhere in some sub- sub- clause. At least I can use a throw-away email address when signing up for most applications.

But I think that all these End User License Agreements and Terms of Service agreements should be natural fodder for a peer-reviewed summaries of these agreements. And then I found ToS:DR, which seems to try this. I am still looking it over, but it seems to provide point by point elements of the agreements and whether those points are good, bad or neutral.  They are looking for the community to provide input on different services. I am going to make LibraryThing  the service I will experiment with.

The other part of this I would like to see are reviews of the phrases in the boilerplate template clauses for the Terms of service Agreements. What phrasing is considered user friendly, what is considered user hostile? Maybe taking each phrase and translating it into plain english.

AND WHY IS THE LIABILITY SECTION ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS?

General

Wright again

Jim Wright continues to write thoughtful monographs. This one is on the quest to find Judeo-Christian values, so often the subject of political demagoguery.

Schwartz defines ten basic human values based on the criteria above:

  • Self-Direction: independent thought and action–choosing, creating, exploring.
  • Stimulation: excitement, novelty, and challenge in life.
  • Hedonism: pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself.
  • Achievement: personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
  • Power: social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
  • Security: safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self.
  • Conformity: restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms.
  • Tradition: respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s culture or religion provides.
  • Benevolence: preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the ‘in-group’).
  • Universalism: understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2017/10/the-myth-of-judeo-christian-values.html

General

Razors

1 Comment

From Wikipedia:

Hanlon’s razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways including “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

I am familiar with Clarke’s Law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I heard this corollary today:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Which is attributed to several people, but the most common seems to be Grey’s Law.