Arguments for and against the minimum wage

I follow a lot of libertarian blogs, which are of course against increases in the minimum wage (and usually against a minimum wage entirely). And then I also occasionally read articles in the New York Times on the minimum wage, and the comments on those articles. The New York Times and it's readership usually skews very liberal, so they're in favor of increases in the minimum wage. There's lots of  talk about inequality, how increasing the minimum wage will help the poor, etc.

The comments highlight various studies, some of them finding that increases in the minimum wage do NOT increase unemployment, and some finding that they do. Everybody, both the pro and the cons side, has an ax to grind, and provides only the research and data that supports their side.

I was trying to think of effective, non-confrontational ways of convincing people that the pro-minimum wage argument is fatally flawed, and that passing a law making it illegal for people to accept a job paying less than $15 an hour is not a good thing. (Notice how I framed the argument artfully to support my point of view there, i.e. "making it illegal for people to accept a job paying less than $15 an hour" vs. something like "forcing fat cat employers to pay poor people a living wage".)

It's challenging, and frankly I don't see how somebody with any background in economics can not understand that making something more expensive makes it less likely that people will purchase it. Labor is a product very similar to other products.

But here's a thought experiment for the minimum wage supporter, who doesn't believe that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Think back to those times when you were actually an employer. For me, this comes mostly from when we still needed babysitters for the kids. If I could have hired a trustworthy babysitter for about $5/hour, I would definitely hired babysitters far, far more often. But babysitters, especially reliable ones that I liked, usually charged far more than that. So, I didn't have them that often. I didn't purchase the labor that they were selling, because it was too expensive. Instead, I just did without the babysitters unless I really needed them.

The same thing applies when a minimum wage is set, or raised. Employers have options too. They'll invest in more technology instead of employees, or just not expand. One way or another, they'll do without the labor, if it's too expensive for them. Or they'll just go out of business.

Service trips to third world countries - useless or not?

I was in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport yesterday, and saw two large groups of teenagers wearing t-shirts that identified them as traveling with a church group on a service trip. One of the service trips was headed towards Costa Rica, and the other, Haiti.

My immediate reaction to group such as these is - how could they possibly do anything useful? They almost certainly don't speak the language, or have any skills that could come in handy. So how are they serving?  That's really the only part that bugs me - that they call it a service trip. Call it a homestay, language learning, something like that - that's fine. I think it's very good for pampered teens to see other parts of the world that aren't so wealthy.

But calling it "service" is false, because they're not doing useful work. I've heard of orphanages being painted, and repainted, and repainted again, all because groups such as these need service projects to work on, and the orphanage receives a substantial donation in exchange for hosting these "service" trips. Also, mostly on these types of service trips, the teens stay together in groups - easier for their chaperons to manage, but they interact much less with the locals.

Here's a couple links on these kinds of trips:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna
http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/

In the interest of full disclosure - I was on a trip somewhat similar to this many years ago, in Nicaragua. It was in the 1980's, I was in college, and this was a "solidarity" type group, against the US-supported Contra rebels. I wouldn't have considered myself a socialist at that time, but I was far more liberal than I am now, and didn't have nearly as much skepticism (cynicism?) about government in general. The trip was 6 weeks, and it was the first time I'd been in a third world country. It was incredibly interesting, I had a lot of memorable experiences, and met people that I never would have been exposed to without this program.

For part of the trip, we were meant to be helping out at a Habitat for Humanity project. That was the service component of the trip. They were organizing and funding a project to build low cost cinder block homes in the area we were headed to, and all of us in the group (about 6) "helped". The helping part was truly ridiculous. There was a group of locals who knew what they were doing, mixing cement. They had an interesting trick to make the shoveling easier. One guy would actually be holding the shovel, and another would yank at a string tied to the shovel, right where the wood handle meets the metal, to make it easier to lift. They had to be very much in the right rhythm to make it work. Perhaps they just didn't have enough shovels.

Anyway, us volunteers had never mixed cement, and also had very little experience with shovels. We were entertaining to watch, I'm sure, but pretty close to useless.

When "green" doesn't mean "frugal"

A friend who works at Google was commenting on all the extensive remodeling that they've been doing in the past few years - tearing buildings down and rebuilding, or doing extensive reconstruction, always ostensibly to make it "greener".  He was grousing about how very not-green it was to be constantly sending massive amounts of building materials to the dump.

That struck me as a good example of what I'd been thinking for a while - that a lot of what's marketed as being "green", is actually a holier-than-thou version of conspicuous consumption. For instance - some people would only buy the most eco-friendly plastic food container, heavily marketed as being made from all post-consumer waste. But they would never consider reusing, say, a plastic sour cream container for their leftovers. Or more likely, they wouldn't even save leftovers.

Another example - some parents wouldn't blink an eye over their children throwing out much of a meal, instead of saving it for later. But they would insist on buying all organic foods because they believe it's better for the earth.

What does being green actually mean? I just looked it up online. The big online dictionaries don't appear to recognize what appears to be the most commonly used meaning nowadays, that of being eco-conscious. The definitions just refer to the actual color aspect of being green. Maybe because it's too difficult to define. I think most people would say that going green means using fewer resources, and recycling more. But using fewer resources - are you using fewer resources to save money, or are you using fewer resources to...what? What if the resources are like the blackberries that grow wild in a field behind our house? If we used fewer of those resources...is that a good thing?

Okay...I'm not going to win any awards here for persuasive writing. But what I'm trying, inelegantly, to say, is that when being "green" is not at all related to frugality, then it can be a faddish thing. Like people buying a Prius when you could get a much cheaper car that isn't necessarily electric, but uses fewer resources (less of your own money, in any case!). It's just another form of conspicuous consumption.

Summer "point" program for the kids

Over the years, as the kids have been growing up, I've tried a couple "programs". For instance, a marble jar, where the kids get marbles for doing certain activities that they're supposed to, and have to use those marbles for activities that they want to do (for instance, watching TV or playing video games). I know some families where these kind of programs worked well, for years. But for us (maybe more for me), the amount of monitoring and bureaucracy that was required was too much for me, and I usually gave up within a few days.

I'm trying again, though. This one is a little different. Our latest "program" is one whereby the kids earn points for activities that I deem worthwhile. Then they can use those points to redeem Magic the Gathering cards, which they're really interested in now. Otherwise, without points, they're not allowed to buy them.

Here's a sampling of the activities and their point values:

Make a great stop motion video and upload to youtube 5
Juggling with clubs 10 catches 4
Juggling 10 catches for Peter 4
Do a long bike ride 3
Do a long hike  2
Finish CodeAcademy program for Python 5
Sew something for teddy 2
Learn how to dive 2
Learn to tie 5 knots from memory 2
Organize and promote family game night 1
Cook dinner for family 1
Make cookies without help 1

Kenny's gotten all the way to 25 points, which he wants to get some kind of Magic the Gathering "expansion pack". Peter's not quite there, but he's doing pretty well.

Is this a success? I'd give a qualified "yes" to that question. It motivated them to try some new things, and didn't require a lot of oversight.

The different types of dysfunctionality in organizations

At a small company I worked at many years ago, their database had been designed by someone who had no inkling about database design. In the main database, there was a Company table.  The primary key was the email address of their main contact. If you're not a database professional - this is a really rotten design, and will cause lots of problems. And this was only one of many serious database - and other - problems they had. Overall, the organization was pretty dysfunctional, and the site was always failing. But this was "small potatoes dysfunctionality", because they didn't have resources to waste.

At another organization I worked at more recently, there was an entirely different level of dysfunctionality. Millions of dollars were spent on projects that everyone knew would eventually be cancelled, multiple people were doing a job that could have been done easily by one, and there entire armies of consultants and contractors spinning their wheels, producing nothing. It was a weird place, and I may write more about it sometime. This was big time dysfunctionality.

Of course, there were many differences between these two organizations. But the one thing that struck me most was that the second organization had few resource constraints - i.e., they had plenty of money. And THIS was a big cause of the extremely high level of dysfunctionality. If you have no constraints, all kinds of weird things happen. And people start exploiting the lack of constraints and unclear goals for their own purposes. That's why there were armies of consultants and contractors - because the vendor agencies, the companies that brought in the consultants and contractors, had very clear goals and motivations. But those were only to place as many of their employees at the organization as possible. That's why there were so many people doing so little work.

This situation reminds me of Parkinson's law - "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". Just as work expands to fill the time available for it's completion, it also expands to fill the resources - i.e. budget - available for it's completion.

Another android app with MIT App Inventor - this time, gambling

When I was a kid, we had a little toy top with 6 sides. Each side had an outcome like Take One, Take Two, Give One, Give Two, Everyone Gives, and Take All. We'd all get some coins, sit down, and spin the top to see if we'd get lucky. It was a very innocent form of gambling. I looked it up online, and it's called the Put and Take, or in German (ours was a German toy) Nimm-Gib. Also very similar, but 4-sided, is the jewish dreidel.

Anyway, I remembered it fondly, and decided to make that app my next project. It was fairly simple to put together (although what would it have been like without the internet to help you through rough spots?), except for one bug that I ran into that required a good night's sleep before I was able to resolve it.

This is the kids playing the game. It's a very simple app with only one button that shows the options bouncing around the screen, which gradually disappear until only one is left. The kids would chant, "Take all, take all, take all" when it was their turn, and "Give two, give two, give two" when it was somebody else's turn. We played first for dimes (Kenny won everything!) and then for nickels (it went on a long time, I had to fold, Peter had the most coins left).

The kids were very enthusiastic about it, and it was lots of fun for me to write. But I'm not sure how many more of these little apps I'll be doing with the App Inventor. The graphical interface, while very intuitive and easy to learn, is less useful when you're doing more elaborate projects, and there are no real debugging tools.

The link to install (along with install instructions) is at the bottom of this page.

Why "eating local" is not necessarily a good thing

I was shopping at the Fred Meyers grocery last night, and saw something new in the produce section. For much of the produce, they had a little sign saying where it was from. For instance, there was a sign for the cabbage that we bought, stating that it was grown in Puyallup, Washington, about 50 miles away. I assume that they only put these signs up when the food came from somewhere nearby. I've seen these kinds of signs at high-end places like Whole Foods (also known as "Whole Paycheck"), but haven't noticed them so far in Fred Meyers, which is more an everyday grocery.

Also, we had a celebration dinner at the Herb Farm recently, a high-end very fancy restaurant in nearby Woodinville. They made a big fuss about everything that was local - apparently they were even able to find shrimp that were from within 100 miles - and also told us that they were planning a meal in which absolutely everything would be sourced from within 100 miles. Instead of lemon, they'd have to use lemon scented herbs, they'd have to find a special local source for salt, alternatives for pepper, etc.

These things, among others, have made me realize that "eating local", or at least attempting to, has become the accepted morally superior choice. I have no problem with people eating local, or raising their own food, going to farmers markets, or wanting to visit farms, etc. That's a perfectly valid choice. 

I do have a problem, though, when choosing to eat local is portrayed as a morally superior choice. The assumption is that if you don't really care where it came from, if price and quality and convenience are what's important to you, and not how far away the food was raised - then you are deficient in morality. This has definitely happened with eating local - it's become what morally conscious people aim for. 

Also, when the government starts promoting and subsidizing locally sourced foods, forcing schools, prisons, etc, to buy a certain percentage of their produce locally - that's when it really gets bad. The current secretary of agriculture - Tom Vilsack, has said, "In a perfect world, everything that was sold, everything that was purchased and consumed would be local, so the economy would receive the benefit of that". Huh? The guy is completely ignorant of basic economics.

Here's a couple reasons why I think that's baloney.

- It's very expensive to raise foods away from where they naturally grow best. Regions naturally specialize in the foods that grow well there. For instance, potatoes grow very well in Idaho, but poorly in Alabama - it would take twice as much land to grow the same amount of potatoes. We could grow absolutely everything, including tropical fruits, in every region, but it would take much more energy and land, potentially growing things in greenhouses, making the food much more costly. We lose the whole comparative advantage of people (and regions) doing what they're best at.

- Transportation costs are a small portion of total costs for food - usually less than 5%. The inefficiencies you cause by producing things locally far outweighs reduced transport costs. Also, distance shouldn't be the only metric - efficiency should. A farmer driving an old pickup to bring some boxes of vegetables to a farmers market could have a vastly higher transport cost and carbon cost, per unit, compared to a tanker that brought many tons from overseas.- If you're serious

- By pushing "eating locally", you're depriving farmers overseas - usually much poorer than farmers locally - of the income provided by trading with us.

I can totally understand the desire to visit and buy food from a local farm or farmers market, and be more aware of the basics of food production. It's fun, and interesting. But asserting that it's a morally superior choice, instead of a different way to shop, and/or conspicuous consumption is a flawed path.

There's a lot of background information in The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, a really well-written rebuttal to the whole local foods movement.

Homemade KIND bars - my own recipe, far cheaper and healthier - Part I

I had lots of fun yesterday creating my own version of the KIND nut bars that you can buy at Starbucks. I buy them occasionally when I need a snack, but not very often, because they're crazy expensive - $2 for a tiny 40 gram bar, which comes out to $22.68 a pound - yikes! 

To develop my recipe, I cannibalized some of the recipes that can be found online (for instance, Homemade KIND Bars), but I modified them to make the process a little easier. 

Are these bars nutritionally better than just a handful of nuts and raisins? Not really. Actually, if you're trying to eat less sugar, they're probably a little bit worse. But there's the fun and convenience factor of having a bar instead of a handful of nuts, and also making something so much cheaper than the store bought version. Nutritionally, mine have less sugar than the chocolate dipped version, which most of them are. 

Here's my recipe. This is for about 6 bars, somewhat larger than the original.

Ingredients:

¼ cup sugar
⅛ cup corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt (or more, depending on whether nuts are not salted)
½ teaspoon vanilla

½ cup roasted peanuts
½ cup roasted almonds
½ cup roasted sunflower seeds
½ cup dried cranberries

Instructions:

Microwave the first 4 ingredients for 30 seconds, to make it easier to stir the sugar and corn syrup together
Stir, then add the last 4 ingredients
Microwave for 30 seconds, stir
Microwave for 30 seconds, stir
Stir, then quickly empty to a cookie sheet covered with tin foil.
Spread out the mixture and flatten it out, until it looks like this:

Let the mixture cool somewhat, then cut it into bars and put it into snack-sized baggies. I store them in the freezer. The nuts stick together well with the sugar syrup.

And voila! I estimate the cost on this bar to be about 25 cents. This is based on costs at my favorite grocery store, Winco. They have the best and cheapest bulk section around - for instance, roasted peanuts for about $1.60 a pound. 

Note that you can use any type of dried fruit, nut or seed. Since taking these pictures, I've made this recipe again, but this time using parched wheat instead of sunflower seeds, to add a toasted flavor. 

The next time I make the recipe, I'll cook the sugar syrup a little more before adding the nut mixture - I want to see what happens when the sugar gets to a higher temperature. And I'm planning on tripling the size of the recipe, which means I'll need to increase the cook times. 

I think I'll also try seeing how little sugar syrup I can get away with. All I really need is enough to keep the nut mixture from falling apart. Less sugar would be better.

One more note - storing nuts in the freezer is an absolute MUST if you buy in bulk. Otherwise they can go rancid in a surprisingly short time. I've never had nuts go rancid in the freezer.

The original KIND bars use brown rice syrup and honey to bind the nuts together. They're just as nutritionally empty as sugar, so I'll just stick with sugar, which is cheaper and easier to find. 

Here's a picture of my first attempt. It's basically a clump of sugar syrup with a few nuts adhering to the outside. It's also why I switched to mixing the sugar mix with the nut mix before I finish - it's a lot easier to stir.