Interesting Links for 21-06-2013

[andrewducker]

• Offensive, iconoclastic internet trolls will NOT be prosecuted, says DPP
  (tags: freespeech law uk epicwin )
• The Gov.uk website's design principles
  (tags: uk web government design )
• Naked rambler Stephen Gough jailed for flouting Asbo
  (tags: law uk nudity )
• Violent men won't change until they accept they are the problem
  (tags: violence )
• On “Geek”

Comments

[gwendally]

One of my favorite wedding gifts was a lovely basket filled with gourmet items. Wine and cheese and chocolates and pasta sauce and handmade pasta, some delicious tea... We were married 24 years ago and it came up favorably in conversation last week, "remember those hazelnut cookies?"

[gwendally]

I still have the picnic basket too.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's the items which have clearly been carefully thought about that stick with you.

And not ensuring that your wedding turns a _profit_. I was rather aghast.

Minimum wage

[gwendally]

Services are not necessarily worth $45/hour to the purchaser.

What the employee gets is roughly 1/3 of what the customer gets charged. The other 2/3 go to cover the overhead (facilities, tool) and management costs for indirect billers.

I am struggling with this now. I have a bookkeeper that I want to keep year 'round, and she currently makes 13.50 an hour. I would like to give her a raise. But I am getting pushback from clients - they just decide to do the service themselves when I charge $45 an hour.

The same thing happened with my yard service. They are really good citizens and pay their workers on the table a living wage. But they charge $600 to trim my extensive hedges. I would prefer to have ugly hedges for this amount of money. (I would prefer to have them do it for, say, $300, though.)

Re: Minimum wage

[andrewducker]

I'm actually in agreement there.

Which is why my ideal welfare system is a Citizen's Income. You hand everyone £x, where x is enough to not starve to death/be homeless. And then you tax everyone on everything they make after that. Which means that people can work for peanuts if it's worth it for them to do so, we get rid of a big tranche of bureaucracy, and it disturbs the Natural Economic Order the smallest amount possible.

Re: Minimum wage

[gwendally]

I've really thought a lot about this concept and it's worth its own post. In fact, I've blogged about it a few times now. I agree that it's where we're headed, but there are some pretty significant problems when you give people a low basic guaranteed income. I won't bother you with this in your blog, but I may go blog more about it myself. (Or you could follow my "economics" tags to see where I've talked about it before. They'll be under flock.)

Re: Minimum wage

[del_c]

I don't think you're identifying a problem with the Bloomberg article, so much as restating it in other terms. The situation you describe, with customers cancelling their order if you pay your workers, is how the death spiral they're describing happens.

If paying more is bad, paying less should be good, but it's a race to the bottom. Eventually you're sitting there wondering why no-one is ordering, when it's because they're not paid enough to be able to afford it. (pitching your service to a privileged minority class doesn't fix the problem; it's turtles all the way down)

You can see the death spiral happen in real time, it's called a recession. You can also see people thinking you can fix the recession if you give the oiks less money, it's called austerity.

Wedding Etiquette

[danieldwilliam]

I’m on the “don’t have a party you can’t afford wing” of the wedding etiquette party. If you are dependent on guests handing over cash to cover the cost of the wedding and you haven’t explicitly asked them too pay up then you can’t afford the wedding

Re: Wedding Etiquette

[naath]

Hum, so

Re: Wedding Etiquette

[danieldwilliam]

Good points all.

Re: Wedding Etiquette

[gwendally]

I'm on the side of "don't ask for gifts". I didn't register, and I had zero expectations for gifts when I married. Every one was a pleasant surprise.

Lord Farage

[danieldwilliam]

I’m not convinced that Cameron is delaying because of UKIP.

The real difficulty, as the ERS worked out, is that if you pro-rate the House of Lords according to the 2010 General Election you need to increase the numbers to about 5,000.

Lib Dems, currently have 90 Peers, some 11.8% of the Lords. Won 29% of the popular vote. So would need more than double the number of Lords they have. The kicker is what happens to the Tories, current Peers 213, or 28%. Won 36% of the popular vote. So need another hundred peers or so to go pro-rata, which in turn makes the now 200 Lib Dem peers tool low a percentage. The add in about 50 UKIPs, a dozen or so each of Greens, SNP, Plaid, BNP. Time to go back and pro-rate the Lib Dems again.

By the time you finish you’ve about 5,000 Lords.

Re: Lord Farage

[naath]

Kick some of the existing Lords out?

[danieldwilliam]

Well yeah

But

Who?

On what basis?

Who decides?

If you're going to kick them out to make the numbers reflect elections you might as well bring in actual elections for the second chamber.

Re: Lord Farage

[makyo]

Also, appointing peers proportional to each party's showing in general elections completely misses out the non-party-political crossbench peers, who in my view are the ones most worth keeping.

[momentsmusicaux]

> rename the late August Bank Holiday “Margaret Thatcher Day”.

I really hope they don't ever do that.

It would prove quite expensive to have to leave the country in protest each year on that day.

[ggreig]

And it could be mistaken for celebrating it. All bad, really.

[makyo]

There are some alternative suggestions here. I think my favourites are probably John Stonehouse Day (a trip to the beach followed by a long-term absence from work) and David Davis Day (resign your job "for freedom" mid-afternoon, return to work the next morning as if nothing happened).