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I should stop listening to the news

2020-05-02T23:25:57Z

There are lots of people who have bee clobbered by Covid. It is all kinds of suck for so many people it's hard to fathom. I feel for most everyone I hear about.

However, there are a few exceptions. There are people who bought up houses and apartments and instead of leasing them to local renters put them on Airbnb because they could make signifcantly more money that way. So they made more money doing short term rentals while reducing housing supply for people seeking regular housing. Now they are facing multiple mortgages and no income. If you're facing $20,000/month in mortgage payments because your Airbnb rentals have disappeared, I don't have a lot of sympathy for you right now.

Oh, and if you bought a car just to put it on Turo because you thought you could make gobs of money and now you've got two car payments to make, when you make investments you have to face the risks of those investments.

If you are having trouble paying your rent because your job dried up, if you are having trouble paying the mortgage on your appartment building because your tenants can't pay their rent, or if you're having trouble making the payment on your daily driver car, you have my sympathy. I hope things right themselves for you soon.

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three card monty

2015-02-20T01:20:19Z

So Walmart is getting all kinds of press because they've announced they will give 40% of their workers a raise.

By Feb 2016.

The average full time worker will be getting a 1.17% raise. For the last calendar year, the inflation rate in the US has been .8%. When you figure in the inflation rate in 2016, by the time those workers actual get their raises they won't even be keeping up with inflation. Thank you, oh so much.

The average part time worker will fair much better getting a 5.5% raise. They may actually see their wages go up in comparison to their cost of living. Of course, those part time workers at $10/hr won't come anywhere near making it to poverty line, even if they managed to work 40 hours per week, which being part time they never will.

Let's not pretend this is a great day for workers.

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for what its worth

2014-09-29T22:47:32Z

Picked up a study the effect of online feedback from O'Reilly.com today (that's O'Reilly Books, Tim O'Reilly's place, not Bill O'Reilly).

The subset is news sites, so the behavior may be significantly skewed by tribalism that may not be as bad in other communities.

I do find it interesting that negative feedback has an effect (although perhaps not the desired effect), but positive feedback doesn't seem to change behavior much at all. My off the hip explanation is that people who post to news sites and get a negative response start frothing at the mouth and spewing pure vitriol after the 1st negative feedback. But it certainly goes with my rule: "Don't argue with people on the Internet."

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truth is stranger than Jasper Fforde

2012-09-29T13:21:43Z

The other day I made a joke about cheese smuggling (which Jasper Fforde uses as a side story in the Thursday Next books).

Then on the way home the next day I heard about this. Now it is a little disappointing that they were smuggling mozz. It could have at least been unpasteurized Stilton. But then again, the source was America, they're lucky it wasn't Velveeta.

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