June 2012
48 posts
“Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.”
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Why Roberts Did It - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online
This is the take that makes the most sense to me. Reigning in the Commerce Clause is a masterful stroke - the implications of that interpretation will resonate for a century. Also happy to see the attacks on the legitimacy of the Court have subsided. The slack-jawed myopia of those who put their pet issues ahead of the survival of the institution is astoundingly worrisome.
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Unfortunately, Times got it backwards with respect to ratios and does not understand the concept of revenues, costs and profits. The ratio of wages to sales is irrelevant.
Every business, including NYTimes, will pay no more than the value added by any single employee. This is the upper bound, the number gets pushed down due to supply and other externalities. In case of Apple it appears some would even pay for the privilege of wearing the blue shirt.
Wages, Revenue and Profit – Something NYTimes Should Understand | Iterative Path
There are great tech and business reporters at the Times, but the paper’s editorial bias might make you forget that.
“Indeed, officials in some cities and provinces are also overstating economic output, corporate revenue, corporate profits and tax receipts, the corporate executives and economists said. The officials do so by urging businesses to keep separate sets of books, showing improving business results and tax payments that do not exist.”
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Chinese Data Said to Be Manipulated, Understating Slowdown - NYTimes.com
Totally shocking that the Chinese bureaucracy might be hiding something.
“The thing now is to wear blank t shirts but carry the pictures in your pocket.”
—Magnificent Ruin
It is known.
“But wait, it gets worse. The original goal of Gilani’s study was to evaluate accelerators based on the number of exits achieved by their graduates. That aim proved to be “delusional,” he says. “There were not enough exits to evaluate. The only two accelerators that had any meaningful exits were Y Combinator and TechStars.”
—Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere
Play
“Creative destruction sounds nice in textbooks, but in the real world it often means telling a good friend to go home, stop getting paid, and find a new job.”
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Agreed, on all five points that Chris makes.
For context: when I was making my bones as a cook, I had to run a garde manger station for a little while. It’s the lowest rank on the line - “salad station” or “cold plates” or “garmy army” are the usual nicknames for where the composed salads and uncooked platings come from. It is uniformly stocked with the lowest of the low: jumped up dishwashers, cooking school externs, and stages. Everyone gets a turn. Which means that people get fired from the station. Nightly. I had that job for three months and I hated it. I once went two weeks without a consistent staff - that means I was asked by my chef to fire the entire station each night that I worked, and retrain a new crop the next day. For two weeks. It was grueling, pointless, maddening work.
All of that will never, ever compare to how terrible I’ve felt each of the exactly two times I’ve had to fire someone at a startup. It can be a horrible business, but my experience has shown me that Chris’ first point is quite true: the good ones bounce up.
I should know.
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A who’s who of the foreign-policy Twitterverse in 2012.
