Minimum Wage

My cousin recently asked me what I thought of this article talking about how the USA's minimum wage leaves many below the poverty line and needing assistance. I didn't think much of the article, actually. I'm not an economist and there are undoubtedly many subtle points to raising a minimum wage, but none of those were explored. The article never goes beyond gut-level reactions, slapping around a few ominous, but not so meaningful, stats and then a silly judgemental statement about McDonald's (and btw, how is this problem fundamentally related to McD's??). Let's explore the framing of the article:

1. New research shows more than half of low-ware workers at fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to survive - a rate double that of the overall workforce.
Why yes, people who make less money will get more assistance. Also, this isn't unique to the fast food industry. Other minimum- or low-wage jobs are equally affected. Why is this article only talking about fast food? Why not be more powerful and generalize to all such workers in the country? Is it because it's easier to make McDonald's look like the evil lord of just the fast food industry instead of all low hourly wage jobs? And while we're at it, if we make the highly plausible assumption that need for assistance is heavily correlated with lack of income, it's simply a matter of choosing what "low" wages are defined as to get the above result. It's basically meaningless, other than to say "there is a segment of the population that needs twice the assistance as the rest". Duh.
1a. According to the research, low wages in the fast food industry cost the tax payers $7B a year, more than the entire budget of the CDC!!
Math time: $7B divided into 300+M people, factoring out those are poor, let's say ... no more than $40 per person per year? So $40 of the $15,000+ I paid in taxes last year go to help the needy. I'm pretty ok with that. I'm happy to make that $80. $7B sounds like a tremendous number, but it's not really very much on a national budget scale. I'm frankly far more concerned about the several hundred billion a year that heart disease and diabetes (which is at least partially tied to the fast food industry) costs us in medical care, and that doesn't even include lost productivity, disability, etc. Again, what does the CDC have to do with anything here? This is just a sensationalistic comparison. Most people have heard of the CDC, so they assume it's something huge. I just ate an orange, which has more vitamin C than all 3 of the cars I've owned, combined!!
2. A study has found that McD's alone costs Americans 1.2B a year by paying insufficient wages.
Finally something concrete! I do wish they'd gone ahead and just presented a table of wage-vs-average-assistance-needed, but that'd be too nice of them. Let's keep this number in mind as data is brought up about the fast-food labor strikes and McD's profits.

Now we move into a transcript of hosts Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, along with guest Jack Temple, a policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project. We'll notice that Amy and Juan are already pretty well in agreement with Jack, so the entire conversation is really just an echo chamber. There are no hard questions (or really questions at all). I usually associate this kind of setup with a person attempting to leverage another organization to legitimize their position, or in some cases to have both sides co-legitimize each other.

Juan: [same as framing] and the top 10 fast food companies made $7.4B in profits last year.
Amy: While CEOs are raking in record profits, fast-food workers protested to be able to form a union and make $15 an hour. National minimum wage is $7.25.
This is a conflation. CEO wages are certainly higher than ever before, but the largest companies are also larger than ever and more global than ever. This is simply market response. If a company has revenue of $10B, a 1% better CEO is worth $100M and is easily worth $10M more per year. While lots of people complain about the ratio of CEO-to-average employee going through the roof, company sizes are also increasing. Each employee relies on the CEO and senior management for their job to persist, so some fraction of their earnings should be allocated there. More employees = more company = more the CEO's value is. Amy's statement also implies that McD's employees are making $7.25, but this may or may not be the case. Again, all definitions of "low wage" and "poverty level" and similar are missing.
Amy then quotes Shantel Walker, a fast-food employee: I've had numerous jobs, and each starts back at $7.25. It doesn't matter where you work. That's the irony: that it's not just fast food, but other industries as well.
Shantel calls out that this issue is not limited to fast food, yet our panel continues to focus on fast food only, and mostly McD's at that. Shantel's quote also implies an important truth: these are not skilled jobs. These jobs can always be filled by an employee with no experience. This is the crux of an issue I'll elaborate on later, but basically there's no reason to give them more money. They are easily replaceable.
Jack: my report is really important and it shows that no matter what, this industry is costing you money, and therefore significantly affecting the economic growth of the country.
Well Jack, that's a bold statement. The GDP of the USA is $16.6T, and assuming this assistance money could be magically eliminated, we'd save ourselves a burden of $7B. Again, I'm no economist, but this isn't even a tenth of a percent of the economy. I'm now going to be cross-checking all your claims more carefully.
Juan: Jack, counterarguments include that McD's and BK's restaurants are franchises and are therefore effectively small businesses and that the wages are low because these are entry-level jobs from which employees are expected to move on.
I believe what Juan is referencing is that small businesses are less likely to have cash to invest in a higher-skill workforce. Since McD's locations are actually operated semi-independently by a franchise owner, they are effectively a conglomerate of very small businesses. Also, it's less about people moving on to other jobs and more about ease of replacement. There's little incentive to invest more in an employee and keep them longer when their skill-set is easy to replace for cheap.
Jack: Facts refute both of those. for all the talk about small businesses in the industry, McD's made $5.5B profit last year ...
Well, that's entirely ignoring the fact that each McD's location is a franchise, but continue ...
Jack, cont: McD's corporate exercises a lot of control over locations. They determine just about everything, but suddenly they don't determine wages? They infer wages by the control the exercise.
Sort of ... there's definitely some truth to this. McD's corporate controls all aspects that would affect their brand. This includes the food, the machines ('process'), logos, etc. However, some franchises operate in great locations and others in less-great locations, which certainly affects the volume of business each location does. It's not like McD's corporate has an equal-outcome consequence on every restaurant location.
Jack, cont: Regarding entry-level workers, this industry actually employs much older people than we'd expect. 70 percent of workers are over the age of 20, 30 percent of those** are supporting children, which adds to the public support cost.
I don't like this statement for a few reasons:
1. "Entry-level" does not mean "high-school job". It means "job with no prior experience or training needed. He's confusing age with skill set. It's a reality of the world that plenty of people old enough to have gone to college haven't, and haven't gained any other skills either.
2. Even if "entry-level" was tied to age, his stat has a cutoff at age 20. This is still in the very early phases of career development and includes kids in college trying to make money on the side, etc. Why not a percent of people over 25? over 30? This makes me feel like he cherry-picked this stat because it sounds bad.
2a. "30 percent of those" is vague. Is that 30 percent of workers? or 30 percent of the 70 percent? It's just a sloppy phrasing, but it's not really clear what we're to do with these numbers anyways. It's just statistical pseudo-support.
3. "adds to the public cost": we already agreed that the public cost is $7B. That's a final number and discussing the composition of it with no other reference to the composition makes me feel like he's trying to artificially inflate the value in people's heads. I ran into something similar while house hunting. The seller's agent was adamant about the added value of the brand new elementary school nearby, but was already in the comps because the houses that sold a few blocks away already had that factored into the price as well, so it's really just a bullet-pointing of something that's already been covered. Why emphasize this if the bottom line is already set?
Amy: how much do these franchises make and how much do the CEOs make? How much do the workers make? Justify the disparity.
Despite my claim before, this is actually a solid question. Good job Amy.
Jack: the CEOs at the 7 largest publicly traded fast-food companies made $53M combined.
McD's CEO Don Thompson made $13.7M alone last year. The median hourly wage of a fast-food worker is $8.69. It's one of the lowest wages in the economy today for the occupation. So you see the stunning disparity between workers and CEOs.
So the top 7 companies make $7.4B in profits and pay their CEOs $53M to get there. This is less than 1% to get the result they want. Also, consider the risk to replace a CEO. This is a company's right: they need to determine how much someone running the company well and with vision should be valued. Really, who cares. McD's employs 440,000 people world-wide. Don Thompson's income is about $30 per employee. Is it worth $30 to make sure they continue to have a job? Is that more or less than union dues they'd be paying? I'd also bet that most of that compensation is in company stock which comes from the fact that (shock!) the company is doing well. The CEO makes about 1000x a low-wage worker. This seems like a big number, but really, why does this ratio matter so much to us? These ratios get flung around the media like they're a definitive statement of guilt, wrong-doing, corruption, greed or something. But, it's just global capitalism at work. If McD's tried to keep CEO pay at, say, $1M per year, maybe Don would still be the boss. Maybe not. Since every other company would be willing to pay more, McD's would be left with either an unknown or a known mediocre person to run the company. Is that preferable through the lens of the 440,000 jobs they are supporting?
Amy: the demographic of the workers?
Huh? Not sure what she's referencing with this question. I guess it's a prompt to talk about that aspect.
Jack: the median age of workers is nearly 29. Many are supporting children. We've seen a real shift away from industrial jobs that supported the middle class to service jobs today, which are defining the American economy. This is a problem because the wages are so low.
This is a reasonable sounding statement. I suppose the implication is that industrial jobs have shifted to service jobs? I imagine that we had lots of service jobs decades ago as well, so I don't really know what concrete conclusion to take away from this. I guess this funnels into the 99% chatter, that it's a symptom of the hollowing out of the middle class? At any rate it seems the issue is not inherently that service jobs make little money, but that there's a lack of blue-collar jobs that require some skill and specialization.

After some more of the same, there's finally a concrete statement that it's the growth of the service industry relative to the rest of the economy that's going to perpetuate our issues because they get paid so little. Let's get to the final conclusion.
Amy: Companies argue that costs associated with increasing wages will have to be passed onto the consumers.
Jack: This is a multi-billion dollar industry. There's no reason to suspect companies can't afford higher wages.
Let's do a little more math using McD's as the example. Suppose we trust that McD's causes $1.2B of public assistance. Suppose McD's decides to foot that bill. This would drop McD's earnings to $4.3B. Assuming the same P/E ratio, McD's market cap would drop from $109B to about $85B. It would remove $24B of value from the economy, which is a 20-fold impact. That's no good. Fast-food is highly competitive and highly commoditized, meaning returns on investment and operating margins are not great. Thus, any hit to the bottom line would be magnified in stock value. Just because a company has large revenue doesn't mean it's got money to burn. This is a gross mistake from a guy who's involved with employment and financial matters here.

Now that I've ranted about the format and exact content of the discussion, there was also some talk about the fast-food workers wanting $15 an hour. I'm not really sure what to think of that one. I know other countries believe in much higher minimum wages and it works for them. My gut reaction is that it would really just escalate all wages a bunch, and there'd be a "cost of work" wash across the economy. It would likely lead to a compression in wages across the board, but you can't just raise a burger-flipper's pay to $30k a year and expect a teacher to stay happy at that same income. It'd necessarily push other wages up because otherwise other industries would lose people to easier jobs. This is all hand-wavy and vague, but I don't think it's quite so simple. What I do know is this discussion has left me with nothing new to think about.

Social Change and Hyperbole

150 years ago, our President would have been owned by someone. 100 years ago, our First Lady couldn't vote. And 60 years ago, they would have had to ride in the back of the bus together. Today, they lead our country. Social change happens, and it's slow and hard. Mere decades before each of these events, these outcomes were unthinkable, frightening. And here we are today. Let us not think that other major social change would, as some say, "ruin the foundations of our country" or similar. To make such statements is clear hyperbole: ridiculous, not applicable and desperate.

It is our right to disagree, and to have our own opinions. It is good that we have disagreement: it drives change and improvement while keeping checks and balances in place. However, we are a democracy and we need to let the majority speak and then respect that outcome. Sometimes you get your way, sometimes you don't. If you don't like it, go be the dictator of a small country and see how well that works out for you. Or start small as the overbearing head of a household and see just how happy others under your roof are.**

** - Don't be the overbearing head of a household. Or small country.

Hacking a phone

Phones are rapidly moving to the forefront of our electronic connectedness (or really, they are already there), as opposed to being a sort of auxiliary device that can also do some things. The super-fast hacking of the iPhone's fingerprint scanner security feature got me thinking about some of the assumptions we make.

First, more ways to log in, perhaps unintuitively, makes a platform less secure. This is exactly analogous to having multiple doors into your house, all with different types of locks. A thief only has to figure out how to exploit one of those, and they are in.  The key here is that any one door gives full access, as opposed to multi-factor authentications (ex: voice+fingerprint+passcode) where the thief has to go through ALL of the doors to get in. But really, let's assume a good thief can break through any of these doors and therefore we have to have a backup plan.

A technique to help users mitigate the loss/hacking of their phone is remote-wipe. Since we're talking about Apple, we'll keep using them as the example (though the concept should apply equally for any phone maker). I was debating if a thief could do something like:
1. Steal phone, turn it off
2. Turn on the phone in their underground lair where there's no cell signal
3. Take as much time as they want to hack the fingerprint reader using a print left on the phone by the original owner (** - what are the odds, actually?)
4. Connect to a firewalled internal network that blocks attempts to communicate with Apple's services (and therefore presumably could avoid the remote-wipe instruction)
5. Go party with data on the phone (email, pics, texts, ...), syncable by the phone (email, ... ), pushable by the phone (bank account app, perhaps ... ).

Turns out the iPhone can be put into airplane mode in iOS7 without even unlocking the phone, so steps 1 and 2 converge to "put phone into airplane mode". In this particular vein, the fingerprint is only valid for 48 hours after the last successful login (seems a pretty long time ... ), so the thief would have 2 days to replicate the fingerprint. At any rate, the remote-wipe may be easier to block than desired. At that point a user would have to resort to changing all their passwords, but that still leaves a thief access to anything cached on the phone (which would be quite a bit of personal data ... ). Hmm. Perhaps security features should be left as simple as possible?


** - I don't know how clear a print needs to be for a thief to be able to reproduce it. Just looking at my phone, I think there was one "good enough" one after I pulled it out of my pocket. For the scanner feature to be useful, it seems like a user would have to use their thumb, which is also a finger they are most guaranteed to place all over the rest of the body/screen as well.

Cracking the code

In this case, the NSA cracking various encryptions ...
Let's assume the media has the details right (which can be a pretty big if) and take a looksey.

"U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden show." - USA Today.

They then go on to say that they actually mean individual keys. This is very different. There's no question that given enough effort, the NSA could reverse engineer a private key. Really, lots of people could ('people' here means those with access to serious computing power, though I wonder if you could successfully run cracking codes on Azure, EC2, etc?)

The article goes on to say that the NSA has maintained control over international encryption standards. I don't think that's actually true, that's NIST's job (and it's not 'control'). The NSA weighs in on the quality of new algorithms, etc, but they don't set the "rules" ... after all, people can use whatever they want. So we already have some bad info.

So far the NSA has done nothing that anyone else isn't trying to do. Then there are the allegations of back doors (either by hacking or pressure). Hacked back doors are, well, possible by anyone. China hacks stuff all the time. So does the USA. Nothing novel going on here.

The only allegation that's interesting is the possibility that backdoors are being added as a result of pressure from government agencies. This I like a lot less .... for obvious reasons.

Delicious places to eat in Tucson

Beyond Bread
BisonWitches
Rosa's
No Anchovies
Magpie's

Well, these are all very college-y (in that they all cost under $10). I have no idea about fine dining because it's really not my thing (even now that I make lots of money).

School is real life

I spent a big part of this week doing recruiting-related stuff around UofA. It was a really great experience to (re)connect with professors, see what's going on, and get a different perspective on the department and job hunt process. I've talked about some of the good and bad versions of applicants before, so I'll skip that here. Instead I'll focus on the realities that I basically refused when I was a student in their shoes.

I heard in multiple classes that difficult group members happen, that projects require testing, that I probably suck at writing. I didn't believe any of it. However, all these things translate directly. Let's take a look, one by one.

You can't write:
I never ever believed this one until I started working at IBM and one day read a bug report:
"when I put the RDP in, it flashes then gets stuck" it read. What? Huh? There's like 100 versions of this. I wandered over to check it out, and on the way over grumbled about how this person is not considering that I have no idea what they are looking at. And then I realized that I was guilty of the same. This was a mini epiphany, and I suddenly got much much much better at writing effectively. And yes, most people suck at this. It takes practice. Not only do you want to be effective, but also concise. There's a big difference between a colloquial ramble like this and a well-composed, tight piece of prose. Opt for the latter in formal situations.

Sloppy testing:
As devs we want to believe that our code will always be perfect. Tests prove this. Unit testing is growing in popularity. I don't believe it's the be-all-end-all, but it's certainly a good way to help organize. If you're having a hard time creating unit tests, you probably don't have good units. Having good units leads to clean code with clear boundaries. These have clear roles with clear expected behaviors. It's just good policy.

But my teammate dropped the ball, give me a break!
Yeah, this happens. And guess what? You're at fault too. But you can't be expected to make them do their work, right? Well, true, sorta. The key here is to develop the ability to manage a project. Establish the pieces you need. Figure out the dependencies. Make sure the deep dependencies get taken care of first. Look at the pipeline here. If a piece is critical, make sure it gets done. If your assigned person isn't delivering, prod them, take over, whatever, make it happen. Understand the downstream effects of any particular piece slipping. Clearly N-1 people can do less than N, but you can mitigate the damage of the missing person by making sure that critical pieces roll off them. You may still not love the outcome, but you should be able to avoid getting burned.

Awesome possum. Go rock'em.

Another fucking Chevy

This trip's rental car is the bare-bones Chevy Cruze. While it solves many of the shortcomings of the Chevy Equinox, there are different random issues instead. Let's explore!

For starters, the car is just as impotent in the acceleration department (barring stomping the gas and doing the whole hunting for a gear, etc, thing), its 138 peak hp engine not exactly getting all its power down to the wheels easily. This is again due to the crappy tranny configuration. Why is this so hard to adjust and make not suck?? Is Chevy still putting trannies from the 60s in their cars?

The B pillar is absolutely right smack dab in the middle of my vision when looking left. I can barely see oncoming traffic during a right turn, and I can't peek behind (at my 7-8 o'clock) while making the turn. All I see is a metal bar.

The A/C controls are goofy. There are two knobs, one for the temp and another for the fan speed. In the middle of each of those are buttons for the heated seats. Separately elsewhere is the button for turning on the actual A/C. Reaching the fan control requires snaking around the shifter doodad (whatever you call that in an automatic). Despite all these buttons, the car doesn't remember what volume the radio was set to and always starts off at the same very low volume when turned on.

The seats are terrible. The lumbar protrudes like one of those bad orthotic desks that make half your lower body fall asleep. I'm not relishing the 1.5 hour drive to Tucson tomorrow. Also when I left the car out in the sun for a couple hours, it started to smell like used snorkel gear. Yeah, that slightly rotting rubber smell.

The headlight does that annoying thing where it's always fully on, including for a good 30 seconds after turning the car off. Why must the car try to be smarter than me? Why can't the light just turn off? In related news, I couldn't even find a control for turning the light on/off. How do I turn the headlights on without turning the car on? Is this possible?

The trunk is a marvel of energy conservation. Unless I gently stop it at the top (when opening it), it will quickly bounce back and fall down upon my unsuspecting arms/head. The key on the other hand likes to get stuck halfway out (on a car with < 1000 miles on it).

There are so many controls and buttons in the car, each backlit, that the lower half of my field of vision on a dark night is filled with a glow. Quite a distracting glow. I haven't looked to see if the backlighting can be made less intense, but given the headlight control situation I'm gonna bet no. Seriously, it's like the Milky Way in my lap in here.

 

I guess I should say something good about the car too. It... goes? It.... turns? It.... stops? I can have it display the speed digitally right next to the analog dials for double confirmation? I guess I'll go with "good turning radius", though my bar's pretty low. I'm pretty sure my RSX is about the worst turning small car on the planet. However, it has zero of the issues that the Cruze and Equinox have, combined. Get it right, Chevy.