A trailing indicator is any economic indicator which trails an event.
Almost a month ago I noted wages are a trailing indicator of the health of the economy because wages won’t go up until business are (a) comfortable they can afford workers, (b) need workers where there is a shortage of workers, and (c) stop being stupid.
And stupid often takes a long time to figure out.
Employee Compensation Rising Sharply
But eventually it gets figured out.
UGA Dean attacked on Twitter for having GOP friend
The dean of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia recently issued an apology to those he had “offended” with a tweet congratulating a childhood friend on becoming the state’s Republican candidate for governor.
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Rather than embracing Davis’ call for civility, liberals quickly denounced him for having something nice to say about a Republican, declaring that Kemp is a “racist” who “spews bigoted and dangerous rhetoric,” and insinuating that Davis must therefore be no different.
“You’re a straight white man. Of course he was nice and kind to you. Racists are generally nice to their own kind,” one user replied. “Why don’t you say what you really mean. Politics be damned. You’d never vote for a black woman and would much rather vote for the white racist.”
Of course I’m Native American–but I look white enough. So fair warning: they’re going to come after YOU next for associating with someone like me.
NBC’s New Anti-NRA Attack Line: They’re Infiltrated By the Russians!
It was only a matter of time before the liberal media’s derangement got so out of control that they would start accusing the entire conservative movement of working for Russian interests, and it finally happened. During Sunday’s Meet the Press, NBC moderator Chuck Todd used the recent indictment of Russian national, Marina Butina to suggest that not only was the National Rifle Association infiltrated by Russians but “all levels of the conservative movement” were as well.
If you don’t know who the Birchers are, here’s a good summary:
Its main activity in the 1960s, said Rick Perlstein, “comprised monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace”. After an early rise in membership and influence, efforts by those such as conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review led the JBS to be identified as a fringe element of the conservative movement, mostly in fear of the radicalization of the American right.
So. There it is. What was once tragedy in the Republican Party is now farce in the Democratic Party.
Sarah Silverman Turns on PC Culture After It Comes for Her
Sarah Silverman was all for PC comedy restrictions before she was against them.
The far-left standup made her name from bawdy bits, all told with her oh-so-innocent attitude. How could such a nice woman say such awful things?
So it seemed logical the Queen of Not So Nice Jokes would decry the creeping terror that is PC groupthink. If squeaky-clean Jerry Seinfeld took a stand against it, surely Silverman would do the same. As a comedian, the “new” rules clearly mean less freedom for her fellow stand-ups.
See that joke? It’s now off limits. Have a nice day!
Only, Silverman appeared comfortable with the current state of affairs as recently as two years ago. Here’s the Hulu talker sharing her views on millennials enacting PC rules with Vanity Fair in 2016: “I think it’s a sign of being old if you’re put off by that … you have to listen to the college-aged because they lead the revolution.”
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Now, Silverman is watching as fellow lefties like director James Gunn see their gigs vanish due to PC-unfriendly jokes. And she’s apparently scared.
Aside from my comments the other day–that yes, this is fucking stupid, yes, this fucking sucks, but Conservatives have been at the receiving end of this sort of bullshit for decades (how many Hollywood stars lost gigs because they outed themselves as Republican?), so what’s good for the goose is good for the gander–I think there is another dimension to this.
That is, apparently it’s fun to be a “social justice warrior.” Sharing in the public outrage of a few, turning on those you hate by dredging up shit from their past, charging ahead of the crowd with torches and pitchforks on places like Twitter and Facebook, being part of the “woke in-crowd”–that can be incredibly fun.
And it puts you on the “right side” of history.
As Sarah Silverman notes:
“You have to listen to the college-aged, because they lead the revolution. They’re pretty much always on the right side of history.”
The problem, as Sarah Silverman has learned watching James Gunn lose his job at Disney directing “The Guardians of the Galaxy”–the same Disney that gave us Songs of the South (and you really need to click the link to appreciate the irony here)–is that being one of the folks who lead “torches-and-pitchforks” crowd, who is about as far left as one can get, supporting all the right causes and speaking up for all the right political positions–does not immunize you from the Politically Correct crowd when they decide to turn on you.
Because the Politically Correct Social Justice Warriors are a zero-tolerance group, and they are not above mining your internet history to find the wrong comment, take it out of context, and attack you with a vengeance.
And Sarah Silverman’s particular brand of comedy is just ripe full of stuff just waiting to light on fire.
That Sarah Silverman was all for the torches-and-pitchforks crowd before she was against it strikes me as a demonstration of how incredibly un-self-aware she was. I mean, this is a woman who once donned blackface for the Sarah Silverman Show.
You know how I (and others) have been saying the Left ain’t going to like it when the rules they’ve been imposing on the Right are turned around and used against them?
Hey @disney we didn't create Social Justice for it to be used as a weapon against us.
James Gunn #RehireJamesGunn
— Dana Tristen (@DanaTristen) July 21, 2018
Yes, I think the whole thing is fucking stupid. But guess what? Many on the right have known this is fucking stupid going back to the start of the whole “Social Justice” fiasco–as it was clear to those on the right the rules were not being used fairly.
Now they are.
To those on the Left now being squashed under the same roller that has been rolling over the Right for the last decade?
Welcome to the world you helped to build.
Saltgrass COO, waiter say racism story made up
So the story goes that a waiter working at the Saltgrass steakhouse restaurant in Odessa, Texas, received a “hate note” on a receipt showing that the waiter was not tipped because:
“We don’t tip terrorist”
and pointing to the last name of the server.
As a result of the waiter posting the photo of the receipt on Facebook he raised around $1,000 in donations out of sympathy, and the customer who supposedly left the note was banned from the restaurant for life.
And it was all a lie.
The Odessa waiter whose story about being called a terrorist by a customer spurred national attention last week now admits it was all a hoax.
The waiter, Khalil Cavil, 20, admitted he wrote the racist note himself in a Monday interview with the Odessa American, where he apologized to a reporter “because I did lie to you.”
“I did write it,” Cavil said, refusing to explain why. “I don’t have an explanation. I made a mistake. There is no excuse for what I did.”
Cavil’s call followed a press release from Saltgrass Steak House revealing the hoax. Cavil had lied about receiving the note calling him a terrorist while working at the restaurant on July 14.
Terry Turney, COO of Saltgrass, issued this: “After further investigation, we have learned that our employee fabricated the entire story. The customer has been contacted and invited back to our restaurant to dine on us.
Okay, two notes.
First, if I were the customer in question I would have told Mr. Turney to go fuck himself.
Because banning a customer without an investigation–and I suspect the truth fell out when the charged VISA card showed a tip being added, a process that takes about, um, like five seconds to verify–is nearly as unconscionable as the original hoax.
We have become a world where lies travel around the world at the speed of light, while the truth is often not only just ignored–but kicked in the teeth because it doesn’t match our emotional preconceptions. Worse: we’ve stopped being critical–at the cost of the emotional and social well-being of those around us. Trump supposedly said “kill all Muslims?” Yep, that gets tweeted around the world, and no-one gives two fucks if that was even true because it’s “truthy”; that is, it fits in our preconceived prejudices.
Did Obama really have an affair with Vera Baker? Sure, what the hell; because it sounds salacious. Was Vince Foster murdered by the Clintons? Hey, why not–it sounds pretty “truthy” to me. Does Trump hate immigrants? Absolutely! And nevermind his wife is an immigrant from Yugoslavia.
Some stranger supposedly refuses to tip, calling the waiter a “terrorist?” Yep, that goes around the world, hundreds are raised, a customer banned–before anyone bothers to even look at the fucking receipts.
We no longer pause and ask ourselves “was it really true?” And even if it’s not true, it’s “truthy”–there must be someone out there who wants to call this waiter a terrorist. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes late at night I can sense them, somewhere, in the distance. And that’s good enough to crucify this particular customer, right?
Second, and a more practical note, when you pay by credit card, you get three slips of paper.
You get the credit card receipt you leave your tip on, and you sign.
You get a copy of the credit card receipt.
And you get the itemized bill.
On the copy for the merchant, calculate your receipt, carry the sum to the bottom line, and sign.
Copy the tip amount and the total to the other receipt, and take it along with the itemized bill with you.
That’s how these fuckwads are getting away with these hoaxes. And this is not the first time someone has pulled this hoax. A waitress in Virginia tried this stunt a year before, claiming a family didn’t leave a tip but instead left a racist rant. In 2013 another waitress apparently pulled a similar stunt–claiming instead of an $18 tip, she claimed a couple left a homophobic rant. (In that case, the couple could prove the waitress was lying by showing their copy of the credit card receipt along with the line item on their credit card bill. The restaurant they went to could have proved the lie, but apparently decided not to bother, making them complicit in the lie.)
It’s sad that you have to protect yourself against idiots like this.
But you have to. Not because everyone is terrible; the vast majority of people are fantastic.
But because we have absolutely no God-damned sense of skepticism anymore, we have to protect ourselves. And taking the second credit card copy and the itemized bill is fast and easy insurance against this sort of outrage.
Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent
Law professors and lawyers instinctively shy away from considering the problem of law’s violence. Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill. They are suitably astonished, and often annoyed. But I point out that even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.
This is by no means an argument against having laws.
It is an argument for a degree of humility as we choose which of the many things we may not like to make illegal. Behind every exercise of law stands the sheriff – or the SWAT team – or if necessary the National Guard. Is this an exaggeration? Ask the family of Eric Garner, who died as a result of a decision to crack down on the sale of untaxed cigarettes. That’s the crime for which he was being arrested. Yes, yes, the police were the proximate cause of his death, but the crackdown was a political decree.
It is unfortunate the number of people who shy away from the problem that enforcing the law is a violent act. I mean, simply ask any minority community.
The rather dry definition of “Capitalism” offered by the Merriam Webster Dictionary is:
“an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market”
Let’s take this apart, shall we?
First we have “private”–as in you and me, rather than Public, as in “The State” or the government.
We have “capital goods”–these are the Marxian “means of production” and while we often associate them with large factories, they also refer to anything which helps us produce something. As a software developer my “means of production”–my “capital goods” for which I deduct from my taxes–is a desktop computer. A carpenter would have his tools and his truck. The “means of production” in today’s day and age doesn’t necessarily mean what they did in Marx’s time of thousands of acres of land under aristocratic control.
And “determined by private decision”–this is economic freedom. This is your right to go down to the Home Depot, buy some tools, and make things for sale.
So when I see things like this:
Ocasio-Cortez: Capitalism “will not always exist in the world”
I think this is a crazy-ass person who really deserves to have her career end in the wastebin of history–rather than someone who the Democratic Party should be supporting.
Because by “ending capitalism” I see someone who hates the private control of the means of production–that is, she opposes you buying tools from Home Depot to make things–and someone who thinks other people better than you should be making your decisions for you.
That always ends in disaster and poverty–a handful of connected people become the new wealthy aristocratic elite, the rest of the country dives into abject poverty. Like Venezuela.
I Have The Cover Story In Regulation Magazine — How Labor Regulation Harms Unskilled Workers
When I grew up, public policy discussion meant projecting the benefits of a policy and balancing them against the costs and unintended consequences. In this context, I am merely attempting to air some of the costs of these regulations for unskilled workers that are not often discussed. Nowadays, however, public policy is judged solely on its intentions. If a law is intended to help worker (whether or not it will every reasonably achieve its objectives), then it is good, and anyone who opposed this law has bad intentions. This is what you see in public policy debates all the time — not arguments about the logic of a law itself but arguments that the opposition are bad people with bad intentions.
I saw this in spades on Facebook, and I got tired of the same old God-damend bullshit, day in, day out–even by people otherwise intelligent enough to know better.
It’s why I left Facebook and decided to get my sanity back. Because too many otherwise very good people forgot how to talk about politics and policy: they talk about intentions and presume if you oppose the policy you oppose the stated intentions even if the policy can never achieved its intended results.
Obamacare is an excellent example of how intentions and results fail to intersect:
I will retell a story about Obamacare or the PPACA. Most of my employees are over 60 and qualify for Medicare. As such, no private insurer will write a policy for them — why should they? Well, along comes Obamacare, and it says that my business has to pay a $2000-$3000 penalty for every employee who is not offered health insurance, and Medicare does not count! I was in a position of paying nearly a million dollars in fines (many times my annual profits) for not providing insurance coverage to my over-60 employees that was impossible to obtain — we were facing bankruptcy and the loss of everything I own. The only way out we had was that this penalty only applied to full-time workers, so we were forced to reduce everyone’s hours to make them all part-time. It is a real flaw in the PPACA that caused real harm to our workers. Do I hate workers and hope they all get sick and die just because I point out this flaw with the PPACA and its unintended consequence?
Now if we had real honest-to-God functional policy debates in this country, instead of angry assholes chasing policy wonks all over Washington D.C. because they dane to associate with the “Orange Monster” now in the White House, we could have caught bugs like this in Obamacare before the law was passed rather than being told that we had to pass the law to find out what was in it, a statement which illustrates the hardened hearts and closed minds surrounding its passage.
And we could have caught flaws in the law, such as the one that caused a lot of seniors who otherwise qualify for Medicare getting their hours cut so that businesses don’t face massive fines for providing seniors insurance they already have.
So long as our discussions revolve around emotions and hatred and discussing intentions and slamming those who question policy as being against its intentions, we will continue to get bad law and bad policy and badly crafted regulations that fail to work. And we will continue to hurt seniors and workers and people who are in the private market, because we’ve come to accept “intentions” as the only metric for a law, forgetting that often “intentions” are a fig leaf to all sorts of insider bullshit and sloppy crap.
A “leading indicator” in the economy is something which generally precedes an event. An inverted yield curve, for example, generally precedes a recession–though it’s not always true.
And a “trailing indicator” in the economy is something that generally trails an event.
Wages are a trailing indicator, and that makes sense, since for wages to go up, first we need a labor shortage. Second, we need a strong economy. And third–and more importantly–we need corporations and hiring managers to pull their heads out of their asses and realize there is a labor shortage that requires raising wages, something most corporations are loathe to do.
Wages are a trailing indicator, for the simple fact that it takes time for corporate managers to pull their heads out of their asses.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 