Yesterday I spent the day working with my new client and I got a much better idea of what they actually wanted me to do. There’s a difference between the pretext under which they’re retaining my services and the reason they need me. The pretext is that I have skills they don’t have. The reason is that they need somebody to organize a major project they’ve undertaken. The way I’m putting the pieces together the VP of Sales has retained me and another chap to work as a team. The other chap will be his alter ego in working customer relations and I’ll be a sort of project manager/mouthpiece.

I was impressed by several things in my first day. I’m having to cope with a variety of nuisance issues—commuting (about twenty minutes), parking (paid), getting lunch (much easier when much of what you do is out of your home), etc. I was surprised by how bumbling everything was. An organization of this size really should be much smoother.

No one has business cards. That’s surprising to me. Nearly every company I’ve ever dealt with from Fortune 500 giants to mom-and-pop shops has had business cards. Clearly, they do not view what they’re doing as a matter of relationships.

And it’s a millennial world. They really are not self-starters and have very little idea of how to organize anything. It will be an adventure.

Swiss voters have rejected a $25/hour minimum by 3 to 1:

BERLIN — Swiss voters resoundingly rejected on Sunday a proposed minimum wage that would have been the world’s highest, a move widely seen as reflecting an aversion to state intervention in the liberal economic policies that are the bedrock of Switzerland’s prosperity.

Trade unions had sought a minimum hourly wage of 22 Swiss francs, or $24.65, in what they said was an effort to ensure fair salaries for workers in the lowest-paid sectors, such as retailing and personal services. Switzerland has no national minimum wage.

As the article notes, the Swiss generally believe that wages are best negotiated between workers or their unions and employers. That’s what is meant by “liberal” in the context of the article.

The out-sized minimum wage would mostly have applied to unskilled foreign or rural workers and I’m a bit surprised by the result. I saw the measure as being mostly anti-foreign. The Swiss have rejected it which I would see as a favorable sign.

The way this article is being pitched, as scientists having discovered a way of transforming light into matter, is misleading. The method for converting two photons into an electron and a positron was proposed eighty years ago. The problem is and always has been measuring the results.

I rarely read anything at Breitbart.com and I don’t know that I’ve ever linked to anything there before but this article on the phony shortage in science, technology, engineering, and math workers is so on the money I thought I’d pass it on:

Four prominent scholars on Friday questioned why the high-tech industry gets a free pass to perpetuate the myth that there is a shortage of American workers in jobs related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Unlike industry lobbyists and politicians who have repeated that claim in an attempt to secure more high-tech visas that would lower the wages of American workers, the scholars presented firm evidence to debunk the notion that the high-tecn industry is suffering from a lack of qualified American workers.

On a Friday conference call that was organized by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has been relentless in standing up for American workers and their interests during the amnesty debate, Hal Salzman, a Rutgers University public policy professor, said current wages in the high-tech and information technology (IT) industries do not reflect a labor shortage.

If there were actually a shortage of such workers you’d expect wages for them would be rising, new grads would find it easy to find jobs, post-docs in those fields would be short, and there would be little or no unemployment among workers in those areas. Since none of those is the case, why do large tech employers keep pushing for more H-1B visas?

The answer, obviously, is that it’s to their benefit to push their workers’ wages down and their chosen strategy is a continuous stream of foreign workers. They routinely pay these workers less than the prevailing wage, have a hook on them because of the terms of their visas, and, since they’re frequently young and far from home, they don’t have lives or commitments outside the company and will put up with more abuse than native workers might.

I have no objection to companies getting the technology workers they need but lower pay, indentured servitude, and abuse are not legitimate reasons to import workers when there are already suitable workers available. It’s time to put the burden of proof on the companies rather than on the workers.

There’s an estimate here of what proportion of the White House’s electricity consumption its newly-installed solar panels will produce. It’s not much.

However, as the article points out practical results aren’t the objective of the move:

‘‘Solar panels at the White House are a really important message that solar is here, we are doing it, we can do a lot more,’’ Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a released to promote the panels.

I doubt that we’re supposed to look too closely at the move:

“If the average American knew how much this cost the taxpayer, they’d realize this is not cost-effective at all,” according to the blog Climate Change Dispatch (CCD), which first pointed out that the solar arrays produced little power.

“Which is specifically why the White House refuses to release the numbers,” CCD adds. “Obama seeks to use his personal example to spur American families and businesses to do more to reduce reliance on foreign energy and cut emissions blamed for global warming.”

I think that’s the biggest problem with symbolic moves like this. They’re not particularly good symbols. If we were to emulate the president’s action we’d install solar panels to offset 2% of our electrical usage, page a lot for them, and never see much in the way of return on our investment.

My dad used to say that the single most beneficial constitutional amendment would be a prohibition against using air conditioning in Washington, DC. I’d bet that if the White House were to turn off its air conditioners, it would result in a lot more than 2% savings and would require no investment in solar panels. Economic and green, too.

Illinois remains, arguably, in a recession. The growth in the gross state product remains slow, its employment rate continues to slide, and its unemployment rate remains among the highest in the country. Only Nevada and Rhode Island are worse off and Illinois is enormously more populous and more productive than either of those states. Jeff Carter muses over why unemployment is so high in Illinois:

Illinois has the worst business climate of almost all 50 states.  Sometimes Illinois even goes out of its way to shoot itself in the foot.  This is what they did last year.

Illinois came a giant step closer to approving the nation’s strictest regulations for high-volume oil and gas drilling on Friday, as lawmakers approved a measure they hoped would create thousands of jobs in economically depressed areas of southern Illinois.

The Senate passed the legislation 52-3, one day after it was overwhelmingly approved in the other chamber. Gov. Pat Quinn promised to sign it, calling the legislation a “shot in the arm for many communities.”

It’s not like Illinois has a thriving energy ecosystem. What they did last year was make sure no one even thought about fracking.  The politicians had all but killed the coal industry already.  

Mr. Carter barely scratches the surfaces of Illinois’s problems. Illinois’s minimum wage is higher than the federal minimum wage and it’s higher than the minimum wage of any adjoining state. The housing bubble was much less frothy here than in other states with high unemployment—we’ve got a bust without a preceding boom. It has the lowest state contribution to public education, the worst public pension problem, and the worst credit rating of any state in the Union.

Illinois is less populist than any of the adjoining states, particularly the highly populist Missouri. We have no provision for binding referenda and the initiative afforded to Illinois’s citizens is all but impotent. State officials cannot be recalled. In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horses had already bolted the state constitution was recently amended to allow the governor to be recalled.

Illinois certainly has no provision like Missouri’s which requires that any raising of state revenue be approved by a majority of Missouri voters.

Only Louisiana has more civil corruption than Illinois—four of Illinois’s last nine governors have been imprisoned for corruption in office.

The power of incumbents in Illinois is prodigious. It’s quite difficult for third party candidates to get on the ballot.

On many grounds Illinois has the worst Congressional delegation of any state. They simply don’t “bring home the bacon”. I think it’s because so many of them are regular Democrats or regular Republicans by which I mean they vote the party line regardless of what the party line might be.

A higher proportion of Illinois’s gross state product goes to Washington than any other major state and Illinois receives a lower proportion of federal taxes back in the form of federal spending than any other major state. It’s far worse off from both of those perspectives than any of its adjoining states. This despite Illinois’s senior senator being Dick Durbin, as Senate Majority Whip arguably the second most powerful individual in the Senate.

I honestly don’t know how to solve Illinois’s problems. To do so in short order would require the equivalent of bankruptcy protection, a state constitutional convention, and a major reordering of Illinois politics.

Barring a cataclysm of that magnitude Illinois’s problems will take years, decades to resolve and I don’t think we have the luxury of that kind of time.

The Sunday morning talking heads shows are full of speculations about why Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of The New York Times, arguably the most prestigious job in journalism, was summarily fired. Some are saying it was because she had the temerity to complain that she wasn’t being paid as much as her male predecessor. Her boss, Pinch Sulzberger, says that she didn’t play well with others.

I think the answer is no one knows. Mr. Sulzberger hasn’t really cleared anything up with his statements.

I can only offer a few general observations. First, in a monarchy there is only one capital crime: lèse-majesté, slighting of majesty. Ms. Abramson obviously didn’t cultivate her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger to the degree necessary to hold on to her job. That is what top managers do. They cultivate relationships with their subordinates to get the results of which those subordinates are capable. They cultivate relationships with their superiors to maintain freedom of action.

So far today every female journalist has complained about pay. Maybe it’s my sexism talking but in Ms. Abramson’s particular case I find that pathetic. Top managers are paid whatever they’re paid because they’re able to negotiate their compensation as part of the terms of their employment. It’s not the same situation as the cubicle-dwelling Dilberts of the corporate world who are paid according to a salary schedule. Among them female Dilberts complaining that they’re not paid as much as male Dilberts is perfectly legitimate.

Over the course of the last thirty years or so there have been several inflection points that I thought had the potential of rendering our healthcare system so expensive that major reform would be inevitable. For example, I thought the AIDS crisis, as it appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, had that potential but that’s a bullet we’ve dodged.

We’ve reached another of those crossroads:

Federal Medicare officials are embracing medical guidelines for the treatment of hepatitis C that could result in tens of thousands of older Americans getting access to expensive new drugs that can cure the deadly infection.

This policy change would pay for treatment with a combination of new, expensive drugs for patients who haven’t responded to older treatment regimens and are approaching or have cirrhosis of the liver.

The shift has come about because of an Arizona man named Walter Bianco who was twice denied Medicare coverage for two new drugs that together cost about $150,000.

The potential total cost of that change of policy could result in an increase in spending of billions or tens of billions by the Medicare system which, in turn, would hasten the insolvency of the Medicare trust fund, presently anticipated in 2026 (we’ll get an update on that from the trustees soon). That wouldn’t necessarily provoke a fiscal crisis since the federal government is a monetary sovereign but it would provoke a political crisis and I honestly have no idea of its outcome.

And then there’s the Medicaid system.

On a pretty routine basis these days you’ll hear someone or another say that the only reason we don’t have X is money when the even greater problems are technical. In some cases the things that are being proposed may even be impossible or at least not possible for the foreseeable future. Let’s develop a little collaborative list of such things. I’ll start.

• New antibiotics
• Artificial intelligence
• Better batteries, i.e. smaller, hold more charge, hold charge longer
• Human travel to other solar systems

For the purposes of this list let’s stick to things that are hard from a scientific or technical standpoint not things that are hard from an economic or political standpoint.

This post was inspired by this exchange:

starting about 5:20 in. I think that developing a new antibiotic from a standing start in just ten years is much more difficult than they’re making it sound. I think we’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit and from here on out it will be increasingly difficult to develop new antibiotics that work. Maybe in geometric time.