Blogs

Every Northcote (Melbourne, AU) local has heard of the cocktail bar, Joe’s Shoe Store. But what patrons don’t know is how this bar, and its sister-venue Uncle Joe’s, treat their staff like dirt. They pay below-award wages, ripping us off by as much $11 an hour on Sundays and by more $25 an hour on public holidays.

As a gentle reminder, the IPCC report explicitly refuses to endorse calls for 100% renewable energy, and instead calls for 100% net zero emissions energy, which includes renewables, non-renewable clean energy sources like nuclear, and dirty energy sources like natural gas and coal with CCS.

Here are the relevant passages:

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions needs our support today.

Workers in China are being arrested because they want to form their own trade unions. We need your help today to tell the Chinese government that this is unacceptable.

http://www.labourstart.org/go/jasic

In the seven days since the Christchurch terror attack, in New Zealand:

• All semi automatic weapons have been banned
• Non-Muslims have begun visiting mosques
• Non-Muslim women have worn hijabs in solidarity with Muslims
• The call to prayer has been broadcast on national media.

In Australia:

Another batch of candidates have declared, so there's another batch of logos to review! As always, these reviews are offered in a spirit of good fun, and do not reflect my views of the candidates themselves. In fact, I don't have any views on the candidates themselves, because I am officially neutral.

In Intermediate Public Economics by Hindriks and Myles (2004) there is a comparison chart of the market concentration in US manufacturing (1987) using the 4-firm concentration ratio and the Herfindahl index (p227). I am thinking of a deviation from perfect competition that the 4-firm concentration ratio can illustration. In perfect competition, the proportion of a market that a firm would control would be equal to the 1/n, where n = the number of firms in the market. Thus in Laundry Manufacturing, there are 11 firms and the 4-firm concentration is 0.93, which looks pretty bad.

Single-Payer isn’t the only possible healthcare reform. My preferred solution would be something like this: (1) use tax incentives to encourage doctor’s offices to switch to a direct primary care model, which would greatly reduce cost [i.e.

I'm starting to really like John Rawls. His idea of "property-owning democracy" (republican distributism) as the only just alternative to socialism is quite interesting.

This is an excellent work. A series of 4 short articles written by Noel Skelton in 1923/1924.

This shows a living conservatism that evolved with the times, making improvements upon standard traditional conservatism while retaining its traditional values. First and foremost, Skelter embraced universal suffrage and democracy, making him a partisan of modern liberal democracy. Traditional conservatives did not tend to be too fond of democracy, remaining either neutral or skeptical of democracy. Skelter fully embraced republicanism as a conservative.

Today's headlines demonstrate that liberals and social democrats can also be economically illiterate idiots. Two states just passed laws to double their minimum wage. Doubling the minimum wage overnight is going to cause a shock to the system and cause tons of people to be displaced. Also, we might expect to see the absurdity of two-way migration, as jobs leave as companies move to states where they can pay lower wages and workers migrate to seek higher wages in these states (but can't find jobs after moving).