Tag: Premium

by Chris Bodenner

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A reader writes:

I was going to save this topic for my own blog but this thread at the Dish has compelled me to write in. Other countries have already solved this “waiting for the cheque” problem years ago and they did it with a very low-tech solution.

In the past five months I’ve traveled to Australia once and the UK twice. One thing I noticed about some of the restaurants / pubs I visited was that they make you pay at the bar. Each food / drink purchase is a discrete transaction. You go to the bar where you give and pay for your order. You then take your drinks right away and if you ordered food they give you a marker and when it’s ready they bring your meal to your table. You repeat the process if you want more.

What I like about this approach is that it scales very well. The bar is optimized for taking orders and the customers transport their own drinks. One or two guys drop off the food and collect the empty glasses. Compare this with back home where servers in most restaurants and pubs will keep track of drink and food orders throughout the evening and give individual cheques when one or all of the patrons are ready to leave. The North American system only works well if it’s a small group where everyone is sitting in a fixed location for the whole evening and everyone has a car to get them home.

I’m the organizer of a social group that meets every Wednesday for a cinq-à-sept (five-to-seven), which is French Canadian for “happy hour” (note to all you Dishheads who think you’ve just improved your foreign language skills: be careful. In France it means something completely different.) On any given week between 30 and 60 people will show up. I’ve organized over a hundred of these evenings at a dozen different pubs / restaurants and I can say without hesitation that a system like they have in the UK / Australia would greatly improve our Pub Night events.

The North American system doesn’t just waste 20 minutes at the end of your evening; it’s the source of a bunch of other problems too. Orders for large groups take much longer and sometimes people forget to pay (intentionally or not). Sometimes customers don’t have enough money (this can’t happen if you have to pay before you order). It’s also hard on the servers who have to keep track of everything. And it breaks the rhythm of the evening if you want to move locations. You can’t just get up and leave; you have to wait for everyone to pay and this can take a long time depending on the size of the group.

Tabbedout looks promising but it only speeds things up if everyone in your party is using it which is unlikely to happen if you’re more than four people. What I would like to see is more restaurants adopt the UK / Australian model.

Another broadens the discussion:

When someone suggests that there’s an app for that, I wish the blog post or article would say how many people have smart phones, how many people have cell phones that aren’t smart phones, and how many people have land lines.

An app won’t help my father-in-law, who doesn’t have a cell phone. He eats out pretty regularly. An app won’t help my mother, because she only has a regular cell phone, not a smart phone. OK, they’re in their 80s. An app wouldn’t have helped one of my kids until recently, because of their phone contract. Thankfully, the contract expired. I’m in my early 60s. I would like to convert my cell phone to a smart phone, but if I do that, the monthly cost will have to come out of my restaurant budget. If I had to use an app to get efficient service, I couldn’t afford to eat out.

I spend too darn much on technology. There’s television, broadband and land line phone bundled into a big package with a big bill, plus a cell phone bill every month for just one person. Being a single person is expensive; I’m a widow, but I am a lot more sympathetic to the comments of single friends these days. I could get rid of the land line phone, but that would save almost nothing. I can’t do without the broadband because I work from home some of the time. I don’t watch much television and don’t get HBO, so I don’t feel I’m being extravagant even though I only spend a few hours a week in front of the set.

If I only had to pay for a phone, I’d have a smart phone. But I need other services, too. They cost money and they don’t seem to be included in consumer price indexes. When I was growing up, television was free and in our geographically difficult area, a good signal was hard to get. My husband grew up in a region with good signals and access to more than one metro area, and he heard a much wider selection of music on the radio and saw more television than I did as a kid – when I got a transistor radio in high school, there was only one station that really came in clearly. Now I have to pay to have things come in clearly, and I also have to pay to have Internet access. I’m dreading the day when a smart phone becomes a necessity, because then my monthly budget will be more expensive even though my income isn’t increasing.

Technology is making our lives very different, but it is a heck of a lot more expensive than writers from the national media acknowledge. Let’s take a sort of Suze Orman moment. Not saving for retirement? How much would you have in that retirement account if you relied on an antenna for television and never got cable? Kids need a college fund? How much could you have saved by not buying computers or paying for broadband? (Yeah, that brings up the issue of how the kids could get into college without access to computers and the Internet, so why aren’t those costs considered part of the market basket of essential expenses?) You know a senior citizen who needs more money for medications or a poor family that needs more cash for medical care? What would Suze say – “Ditch those cell phones and save, people”? Maybe the 47 percent have just had a hard time keeping up with the additional cost of supporting Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, among others, along with the cell phone and cable companies.

While I know it is possible to do without television, I think the time has come to agree that Internet access and basic cell phone service are, well, basic requirements. But a smart phone to pay a restaurant bill quickly is not a basic requirement. Find another way to serve all the credit card customers, not just the ones with pricey phone plans.

I wish I wasn’t turning into a curmudgeon, but money is a dimension often left out of discussions of technological solutions. Figure out the cost of the shiny new app and the equipment it runs on before recommending it to all of us.

by Doug Allen

Kate Crawford warns against believing “that massive data sets and predictive analytics always reflect objective truth”:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

For example, consider the Twitter data generated by Hurricane Sandy, more than 20 million tweets between October 27 and November 1. … The greatest number of tweets about Sandy came from Manhattan. This makes sense given the city’s high level of smartphone ownership and Twitter use, but it creates the illusion that Manhattan was the hub of the disaster. Very few messages originated from more severely affected locations, such as Breezy Point, Coney Island and Rockaway. As extended power blackouts drained batteries and limited cellular access, even fewer tweets came from the worst hit areas. In fact, there was much more going on outside the privileged, urban experience of Sandy that Twitter data failed to convey, especially in aggregate. We can think of this as a “signal problem”: Data are assumed to accurately reflect the social world, but there are significant gaps, with little or no signal coming from particular communities.

I would only add that these problems are not unique to big data, though they are more likely to be ignored with a larger dataset. In any data analysis, it is important to think about not only the data that you have, but also the data that you don’t have.

by Chas Danner

PPP recently took the conspiracy-temperature of 1,247 registered voters.  An unimpressed Joshua Keating sums up the poll’s more sensational results:

Among the survey’s big findings are that 51 percent of Americans believe JFK was killed by a conspiracy, 21 percent believe a UFO crashed at Roswell, 13 percent believe Barack Obama is the antichrist, 7 percent believe the moon landing was faked, and 4 percent believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power.

He admits that while there are certainly some true believers out there who buy into theories like a global-warming hoax or Saddam Hussein being involved in the 9/11 attacks – he thinks the results are most likely skewed by the suggestible:

The day after April Fool’s Day is a good time to reflect on the fact that many of us are more suggestible than we’d like to admit. We’ve all had friends who have unquestioningly shared fake news stories on Facebook (There’s a whole blog devoted to them) or relatives who’ve forwarded us dubious conspiracy e-mails. The questions asked on the survey are detail-heavy and quite specific. For instance: “Do you believe Paul McCartney actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a lookalike so The Beatles could continue, or not?” We might hope that most people would say, no, of course not. If they had even heard of the theory, they would probably know that it was a running joke propagated by the Beatles themselves. But a significant number of people probably just heard all those facts and dates and though, “Huh, well I guess so.”

by Doug Allen

A reader who teaches student-athletes disagrees with Jon Green on the athlete work ethic:

I teach classes at a MAJOR sports university and have students who are going into the NFL draft. Every one of my student athletes is among my most conscientious, polite, and hardworking students. In fact, if I took my student-athletes of any sport and put them up against the regular student body, I would choose to teach the athletes every day of the week. Sure, they have a support system that keeps them in school, makes them go to class, and offers tutoring, but, um, good? I have problems with the exploitation of student athletes, but I have never had any problems with their in-class conduct. In fact, quite the opposite. I think that a few bad student-athletes get the press and tarnishes all of their reputation, but do you really believe that athletes who are monitored constantly are worse people and/or students than your average frat house? In my experience, the athletes are WAY better.

Another reader lists some of the support she received as a student-athlete:

Every medical expense I ever needed during college, for any reason, was covered by the athletic department. This included birth control, routine eye appointments, contact lenses. For those who had any major injury, surgery was completely paid for. To help with rehab, there were daily visits with personal trainers who tailored programs to your specific injury.

When I became depressed my senior year, the athletic director immediately sent me to a therapist.  I’ll never forget the day she told me, “we will pay for every visit you need, and we will do everything we can to get you better.” They even paid for anti-depressants, and this continued even after my eligibility was up. Did I mention I was a non-revenue-producing women’s soccer player, it was not a sports-related injury, and the grand total of my care over four years must have cost unimaginable sums of money?

While this is by no means every athlete’s experience, I’m guessing most large (football) schools provide their students with similarly extensive care, especially to high-profile athletes in revenue sports. And for those of you getting ready to pick a college, you might want to consider not only where you want to get your degree if you’re severely injured and can’t play again, but also where you’re able to get the best resources to get you better again.

Another distinguishes between the big-money sports and others:

Both football and basketball have high-paying professional leagues that apply exclusionary age rules to their labor pool and rely heavily on college sports for player development.  So an NBA-caliber college freshman – or an NFL-caliber freshman or sophomore – isn’t being treated to a free education enriched by some athletic competition; he’s being screwed out of a chance to get paid in the draft before risking injury in an NCAA season.

Not every NCAA athlete is getting screwed.  Hell, not every football or basketball player is getting screwed.  It’s great that you enjoyed playing sports in college, and it’s great that lots of other people also have their experience enriched by playing on a team. But please, please don’t be so dense as to let that obscure the fact that there are hundreds of kids who play so well at popular sports that their labor would be worth hundreds of thousands or millions on an open market, who are playing college sports for free because there is no open market to sell it on. That’s the trick the NCAA wants to pull, and it isn’t helpful to be credulously repeating it.

It seems to me that this reader has more of a problem with the draft eligibility rules that prevent these athletes from going straight from high school to the pros than with the funding of college athletes. As to the point that “there is no open market to sell it on,” that’s simply untrue for basketball. Current Milwaukee Bucks star Brandon Jennings opted [NYT] to play professional basketball in Italy out of high school rather than attending the University of Arizona, and the NBA Development League (pdf) allows all players over 18.

Another reader questions the relevance of my own experience:

With all due respect to your Ultimate Frisbee career (just a guess, but amirite?), you’re conflating two very different things. No one is suggesting that schools do away with sports that don’t make money, or paying athletes that compete in those sports. We are talking about allowing some of the money generated by a huge enterprise to go to those who make it possible. No one wants to take your experience on a club team away from you, but neither is anyone demanding that you should have been paid for it. This is about relatively simple economics, and I’m not sure that your point has any relevance to the actual discussion.

This reader is right, I played Ultimate in college. But I was not trying to argue that I should have been paid for my experience (I definitely should not have), I was simply pointing out that the opportunity to play a sport at the college level could be considered a reward in and of itself, and that is something to take into account when discussing whether or not student-athletes are being “exploited.” I was willing to pay out-of-pocket for this chance, and this is why you see students trying to walk on to teams even if there isn’t a scholarship available for them: because playing on a team at a competitive level can be fun and rewarding.

I’m not so sure that this is a case of “relatively simple economics,” either. Most of the discussion of student-athletes assume that the benefits flow only one way: scholarship athletes in big-money sports get nothing (except for scholarships, medical care, tutoring, the opportunity to showcase their skills…) while the schools reap all of the rewards. But I think the relationship is more symbiotic than that. College sports teams get the benefits of a built-in fan base. Across all 338 teams in NCAA Division 1 basketball, attendance at each home game averaged over 5,000 fans during 2012 (with schools like Louisville as high as 21,000 per game), while the 16 teams in the NBA’s D-League averaged about 2,800 fans per game in the 2010-2011 season despite an arguably higher level of play. Fans flock to see their favorite programs play, not necessarily the star players.

As I said before, I would like to see more long-term thinking from colleges to help ensure that sports-related injuries like Ware’s don’t force the athlete to leave school for financial reasons. But paying athletes? I’m just not there yet.

by Patrick Appel

Matthew O’Brien spells out why the Euro is doomed:

The euro is the gold standard minus the shiny rocks. Both force countries to give up their ability to fight recessions in return for fixed exchange rates and open capital flows. But giving up the ability to fight recessions just makes it easier for recessions to turn into depressions. And that puts all of the pressure on wages to adjust down when a shock hits — the most painful and destructive way of doing things.

Avent runs with the comparison:

The gold standard was a powerful idea which delivered unquantifiable benefits and unquantifiable costs. The powerful fear of the unknown kept the gold standard intact even as the costs of Depression mounted. But once the dominoes began falling, they fell quickly. Even America, with enormous gold reserves and therefore, seemingly, a strong interest in maintaining the standard, only remained on gold for two more years after the system began to unravel in 1931. The threat that disaster might befall any euro member to drop out may continue to keep economies in line. But America represents a wild card that wasn’t present in 1931: a very large and very rich economy not on the prevailing standard and not suffering for it. The gap between the euro zone and America is the counterfactual, the but-for path, that helps illustrate just how damaging the single currency has been. Leave the euro area and you may not immediately spring back to that alternate path, leaders around the periphery may think, but at least you’ll stop sinking, and you can sell your wares to the world’s healthy economies at a steep discount relative to your neighbours.

by Patrick Appel

It was recently announced that a key aspect of the ACA, as it applies to small businesses, will be delayed for a year in most states. Suderman explains:

[E]xchanges in the majority of states won’t be offering health plan choice to small business owners. For all practical purposes, then, the law’s exchanges will offer nothing to small business owners and employees. As health policy professor (and ObamaCare supporter) Timothy Jost noted in Health Affairs when the delay was first proposed, the choice option was the “primary benefit” offered by the law’s small business exchange system. Without that option, he wrote, it’s “unclear what advantage” those exchanges would actually offer to small employers over currently available insurance options. The Chamber of Commerce seems to agree. As USA Today notes, it issued a statement saying that because of the delay, small business insurance purchased in the health exchange, “will be of little or no value to employers, or by extension, their employees.”

Joe Klein blames the administration:

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all—the federal government’s own health benefits plan (FEHBP) operates markets that exist in all 50 states. So does Medicare Advantage. But now, the Obama Administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being—for a year, at least. No doubt, small business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration’s belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

Casey Mulligan looks at other ways Obamacare could impact businesses.

by Patrick Appel

Dana Goldstein analyzes the Atlanta public school cheating scandal:

The extent of the top-down malfeasance under Beverly Hall may be unprecedented, but as I report in this Slate piece, there is reason to believe that policies tying adult incentives to children’s test scores have resulted in a nationwide uptick in cheating. An investigation by the Atlanta Journal Constitution found 196 school districts across the country with suspicious test score gains similar to the ones demonstrated in Atlanta, which statisticians said had only a one in 1 billion likelihood of being legitimate. A 2011 study by USA Today of test scores from just six states found 1,610 instances in which gains were as likely to be authentic as you are likely to buy a winning Powerball ticket. Absent independent, local investigations of suspected wrongdoing—which are rarely conducted—we simply cannot know the full extent of the cheating, which makes it difficult to assess whether the United States ought to continue down the road of tying teacher and administrator pay and job security to kids’ standardized test scores.

Chait yawns:

Edward Glaeser proposes a solution:

Teacher cheating isn’t an excuse to give up on standardized tests. It is a reason to administer them properly. Just imagine if college admissions tests were given by individual teachers rather than by the College Board. Teachers would have a huge incentive to help their favored students; the College Board, therefore, administers tests at well-monitored sites. If the U.S. is going to use standardized tests to evaluate teachers or schools, it should pay the extra price of using an external agency, such as the College Board.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I just read the post about low-level snitches getting the book thrown at them when they don’t have enough information to provide the government, and I’m reminded of the story of Ciro Mancuso, the father of Olympic gold medalist alpine skier Julia Mancuso, who created and ran a multi-million dollar drug empire in Nevada from the ’60s to the ’90s. When caught and charged with no less than 49 felonies, he negotiated a sweet deal with the government in which he obtained not only a significantly shortened prison sentence but also immunity from prosecution for his family. Amazingly, he was also allowed to keep over $4.6 million in assets.

It is infuriating to contrast this with the fate of John Horner or others from communities where there is also a strong “anti-snitch” culture. This whole sad state of affairs reminds me of Randy Wagstaff’s story from The Wire. 

Randy is a Baltimore teen tries to get out of school trouble by desperately offering the vice-principal details about a murder he’d heard about. The show depicts Randy subsequently getting picked up by the police (who have their own ulterior motives for scaring the drug kingpin who ordered the murder), then carelessly discarded by said police when they realize Randy doesn’t actually have information useful to them. He’s then ostracized (and worse) by his own community when they figure out that Randy’s been talking. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

by Patrick Appel

Julia Shaw recommends getting married early:

Sometimes people delay marriage because they are searching for the perfect soul mate. But that view has it backward. Your spouse becomes your soul mate after you’ve made those vows to each other in front of God and the people who matter to you. You don’t marry someone because he’s your soul mate; he becomes your soul mate because you married him.

Amanda Marcotte counters:

Most people grasp the relationship between young marriage and divorce intuitively, but statistics shore up the case. As the average age of first marriage goes up, the divorce rate goes down. State-by-state statistics show similar correlations between lower average age of marriage and higher divorce rates.

TNC injects some humility into the debate:

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my sense is that any long-term relationship, any long happy marriage, has had points when its primary advocates could see the end. And not a theoretical end, an actual end; a path untaken, but very much possible. Where I differ with Shaw isn’t in the advantages she sees in marrying young, but in the certainty and determinism.