Month: May 2015

The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have

The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have

With the move to $15 or higher minimum wage, you can bet there will much more “shadow work” that will be moved to consumers or lost to automation. Shadow work is all the unpaid jobs we do on behalf of businesses and organizations: We are pumping our own gas, scanning our own groceries, booking our travel and busing our tables at Starbucks. Shadow work is a new concept, so as yet, no one has compiled economic data on how many jobs we, the consumers, have taken over from (erstwhile) employees. Yet it is surely a force shrinking the job market, and the unemployment it creates is structural.

This is not blaming our current POTUS. It is simply a natural progression of companies trying to reduce costs and increase productivity. As technology improves, it is even easier to allow consumers or robots do the work of the manual worker. If you don’t make your money with your mind but instead make it with back-breaking work or by “smiling” to the consumer, your job is severely at risk especially if you want to be paid more money simply because you can run a cash register and fetch a paper-wrapped sandwich from a food slot.

More reading: The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have – Craig Lambert – POLITICO Magazine

The hotel bar is showing local sports

The hotel bar is showing local sports

I travel a great deal for my job. It is not unusual for me to be in a hotel 1-3 days a week. I don’t enjoy the travel, but it is part of my life and my employement so I tolerate the effort and inconvenience.

With that travel schedule, I am frequently having a late dinner in the hotel bar. Invariably, I am accompanied  by salespeople and business travelers from all over the US. We are sitting in the hotel bar, having a drink, and trying to find something decent on the menu for dinner. We don’t really want to sit in our underwear in our room with room service.

In almost all cases, the hotel bar television is playing a game.  That game is a NBA basketball game, a NHL hockey game, or a MLB baseball game. The kicker is that 90% of the time, the game is the local team. It is rarely the best game for the evening, but rather the local team regardless of the sport.

The problem with this is that no one in the hotel bar is from that city. If we were from that city, we wouldn’t be at the hotel, and we definitely would not be at the high-priced and poorly stocked hotel bar. Why in the world would we want to watch the local team?

My advice to the management of the hotels and their included hotel bar across the US, turn your TV to the best game that night. Most of the patrons are too bored to encourage you to change the channel, but we all wish that you would. We can survive if our favorite team is not on the TV, because we know that there are others in the hotel bar you need to accomodate. We just don’t want to watch the local team because we simply are not local.

If the bartender wants to watch the local team, he should ask off of work for that evening!

The Honor of Being Mugged by Climate Censors

The Honor of Being Mugged by Climate Censors

I believe in global warming, Bjorn Lomborg writes, but also in responsible policies to address it. That can get you in trouble.

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Copenhagen Consensus research shows that policy makers considering climate change have practical solutions. Cutting fossil-fuel subsidies is a great idea. Each year $550 billion is wasted, mostly by developing nations, on subsidies that mainly help the rich. A dramatic increase in spending on green-energy R&D is needed, as innovation will drive down the price of green energy to the point that it can outcompete fossil fuels. A well-crafted carbon tax would help too.

But our analyses also show that Kyoto-style approaches—poorly designed EU climate policies, or the pledge to hold warming to two degrees Celsius—are costly and ineffective. There are much better ways we could spend money to help the planet.

That conclusion draws the ire of some climate-change activists. When the collaboration between Copenhagen Consensus and the University of Western Australia was announced, the Australian Climate Council, led by paleontologist Tim Flannery, called it “an insult to the scientific community.” Making up facts, the Climate Council warned supporters that I think “we shouldn’t take any steps to mitigate climate change.” This set the tone for the ensuing attacks.

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Philanthropists, donors and policy makers must prioritize development goals. What Copenhagen Consensus does is ensure that such parties understand the price tags and potential outcomes for each option.

This work has shown that some aid projects do phenomenally well: For instance, providing contraception to the 215 million women across the globe who lack access to it would reduce maternal mortality and boost growth, producing $120 in social benefits for each dollar spent.

Other policies have lower multipliers. Getting sanitation to the poorest half of the world, for example, would produce only $3 of benefits for each dollar spent. This is worthy, but for a government with a limited development budget, it probably isn’t the first place to spend money.

We should focus resources where they will do the most good—not where they will make us feel the most good. The United Nations is setting 169 global development targets for the next 15 years. These are laudable aims, but together they’re a laundry list: reduce arms trafficking; finance sustainable forest management; achieve universal access to drinking water; halve deaths and injuries from traffic accidents; increase market access for “small-scale artisanal fishers.”

Source: The Honor of Being Mugged by Climate Censors