Keypunch stations? As in a mechanical punch? Sheesh. Kid, in my day we punched them by hand and we liked it that way. How are you supposed to have pride in it if you don't punch it yourself?
I also happen to think Ron Paul got a whole LOT of things right.
From my vantage point he only had a few things right, but none for the right reason. He was right to oppose the war in Iraq, but he did it only because he did not want to pay for it - he couldn't have cared less about the human cost if someone else was willing to foot the bill.
Rand is really not that close a follower of Ron's beliefs....
His cult here on slashdot isn't well versed on the differences between father and son, and tripped all over each other to praise the son's campaign.
I think you're selling a lot of people short if you think most Libertarians will just vote Trump out of the belief that "blocking Hillary" is more important than any of their other principles.
While there are plenty of actual libertarians scattered around the country, the most vocal ones here on slashdot - and in plenty of other places - are just Paullowers who will happily line up behind the GOP endorsement. For an example, take a look at how much the slashdot "libertarian" base was just peachy with the GWB presidency and happily voted for his re-election.
But I predict you'll see at least a doubling of the usual number of votes for the L.P. in this election.
Only time will tell, but I would be surprised if more "libertarians" don't opt for their sense of the "lesser of two evils" approach and vote Trump instead as they can't stand Clinton.
Which means that your claim of the overwhelming majority is crap.
No, it means that your claim of "the overwhelming majority is crap".
So you can't handle reading, writing, or arithmetic. And your demeanor is oh so pleasant... You must be a real hit at your school.
He may not have expected her to be as incompetent as she turned out to be.
That is the closest you have come to a non-partisan claim of Clinton's "incompetence". Care to tell us why you think she was "incompetent" as SoS? What did she do that showed her to be unfit for the job?
having her in his administration and control was preferable to the alternatives.
You're diving into a rabbit hole, there. If Clinton and Obama were as partisan as you seem to be trying to imply, then leaving her in the US Senate - rather than hiring her as SoS - would not have been a bad move for the POTUS. There was even a chance (albeit a very small one) that she could have lost re-election while he was POTUS which would have caused her to fade away that much more quickly.
So you are incompetent at grammar, then? The phrase "incompetent crook" - which you used specifically - is understood to mean a crook who is not competent at being a crook.
The error there is in your limited understanding of English, not my grammar.
You can move the goalposts all you want, kid, but that doesn't change the meaning of what you have written. In your own words you said she was an incompetent crook; now you are pretending she was something else. Didn't your parents teach you that there is no post-submit comment edit function here on slashdot before they signed you up?
I'm sorry that your entire "argument" is fact-free and falls on its face when confronted with simple logic, I feel bad that you made such a total ass of yourself here. But the first thing you should do when you realize you are digging a deep hole that you want to get out of is to stop digging. Put down the shovel, and ask for help, kid.
The term "independent" refers to party registration.
Which means that your claim of the overwhelming majority is crap. Even the states with the highest rates of "independent" voters still have that as a small part of their total voting population. Even more so, as the difference in the count between D and R is so razor thin, your statement of "R+I" is no more valid than to say the same of "D+I".
In other words you failed at basic math. You were upvoted because you are preaching to the choir here, who also can't be bothered to handle simple math when it challenges their worldview.
If she is an incompetent crook then how has she made it this far?
She is incompetent at government, not at lying.
So you are incompetent at grammar, then? The phrase "incompetent crook" - which you used specifically - is understood to mean a crook who is not competent at being a crook.
Nevertheless, if she is incompetent as government - as you are now claiming after moving the goalposts - how did she make it this far? If she was that awful at her job she never should have made it as far as she did.
And without Bill Clinton to back her up, she would be a non-entity.
For the start of her career - as US Senator from NY State - sure. But what use would it be for President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama to select an incompetent person for SoS? He has not tried hard to mirror the Clinton Administration in his own.
So did you foe me because you can't stand reality?
No, I "foed" you because you are a partisan idiot.
You established well that you suck at writing. Apparently you aren't very good at reading, either.
the idea that we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve as manager/manipulator of our currency. I don't think there's almost anyone on the Republican ticket who is really ready to fight that battle.
You must be new here. Slashdot conservatives seldom pass at a chance to sing the praises (or worship at the altar) of Ron Paul and his holy son Rand. Sure neither has managed to win the GOP endorsement for president but no other candidate has ever attracted such rabid support here as the two of them.
The overwhelming majority of Americans is either Republican or independent.
That depends on how you define "Independent". Frankly, considering the split is so very very even between the D's and the R's in this country, if you are setting the threshold for "independent" such as to establish an "overwhelming majority" just by combining the independents with republicans, then you could say the exact same thing by substituting democrats in the place of republicans in that statement.
In other words, your statement doesn't mean squat.
Clinton is a lying, incompetent crook
If she is an incompetent crook then how has she made it this far? We have plenty of incompetent crook politicians in jail from all levels of government. There is plenty wrong with Clinton, but I wouldn't say competence is part of it.
So did you foe me because you can't stand reality? You seem to be on something of an anti-truth rant here.
The overwhelming majority of American "Libertarians" are just Republicans with a couple gripes. Their underlying sense of duty to the GOP will come through and they will vote for Trump as they are trained to see nothing worse for the world than anyone named Clinton. They know that they cannot block a Clinton presidency by voting for a third party.
People tell me that I am the last human on earth who is not signed up. I tell them I have enough things wasting my time without it. Sure, I don't know where my high school classmates are shitting this afternoon, or which starbucks beverage is the favorite amongst my cousin's colleageus, but I am fully certain that I can live without that information. In the outside chance that anything of any value is posted there, plenty of people I know in the real world can tell me about it.
Does a zygote or a blastula count as a living human being? I'd say, sure it is. It's obviously not a camel.
Anyone who has seen a zygote or blastula and claimed to be able to identify the species it came from is lying. You can't by any kind of non-destructive physical examination distinguish between any two animal (and even some non-animal) zygotes or blastula. Sure, it is not a mature camel but you can't tell me if it is a camel, a human, a fruitfly, a worm, or any other critter you can think of.
I know the RAZR was far more popular but I thought the design of the RIZR was superior. With the RIZR I could always see all of the display, and the keypad slid out from underneath when I needed it. The biggest downside of it was that for some odd reason Motorola decided that the keys on the RIZR should literally be stickers, which would at times slip right off.
Also, 39% of kids get a social media account at 11.4 years, and 11% get a social media account when they were younger than 10.
We are letting the personal information of children be sold for profit. This is a more certain sign of the decay of society than most that I can think of. It doesn't matter how harmless some people may think this is, the bigger problem is that most people don't think of that problem at all. They sign little Johnnie up for a facebook account so that he can see Grandma's wall, and pretty soon Johnnie's personal events are being sold to every company you can think of.
Religion is just a popular cult, cult an unpopular religion. What's your point? They all have their rituals. You could argue that the current "atheists" (I use that because they have bastardized the meaning of the word itself) have their own rituals as well.
I know some Muslim women - including some from Iran - at my work. They choose to wear the Hijab here in the states, even though the US is their home. I've asked some of them about it and they've been open about their thoughts on the matter. One thing that surprised me to learn is that in Iran there is no hard set rule of "you must wear the hijab if you are at least X years old" or anything of the sort - aside from a loose guideline of 18. The Iranian I speak with most often (I share an office with her) decided to start wearing a Hijab around age 12.
More to the point though, those that wear it see it as an important part of their faith - being humble in front of Allah. Some Christians wear a cross, some Jews wear a Yarmulke, some Muslims wear a Hijab. I've also noticed that a lot of Hijabs are being worn a bit further back on the top of the head, allowing the women to show some of their hair on purpose.
Iran is certainly an alien place to Americans but the Hijab is not necessarily a terrible thing.
While I wish no harm upon Bill Gates - in spite of being vehemently anti-Microsoft myself - I don't see what Al-Qaeda could expect to accomplish by killing him. He stepped down how many years ago from the top of Microsoft? This seems about as logical as watching too many reruns of ER and then deciding to kill George Clooney to harm our health care system.
So if the restaurant is so damned expensive then who is eating there? Brisbane is nice and all but they're not the top tourist destination on the continent. There is not a large population of wealthy people in Australia, either, without which it would be hard for these terribly expensive restaurants to stay open.
I'm curious to know what you mean by
people who clean tables
The fast food places I eat at - including Wendy's - don't have people who are employed only for this purpose, or even primarily for this purpose. Table cleaning is something that they do as "busywork" when customer traffic is low. If you're at a place where there are people who are primarily cleaning tables you are likely not at a fast food place.
It is also worth recalling that tipping is not universally expected in Australia as it is in the states. Hence they do need to pay their workers a respectable wage as they can't count on customers to supplement it the way they do here.
Allow me to point you to Australia that has a very high min wage... far fewer people eat out there, far fewer fast food places exist, and far more people cook because it is SO expensive to eat out.
Australia also has vastly lower population density, so comparing the US to Australia for something that scales with population doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The largest city in Australia has about the population of Los Angeles but at about 1/8th the population density. A fast food restaurant serving a neighborhood of 300 people won't last long anywhere.
Furthermore, the cost of food down there also reflects the cost of getting food there. There is certainly arable land but you can't just start trying to grow or raise whatever you like and expect to be able to do it at a sustainable level. Some things just simply have to be imported. While it isn't as dramatic as Hawaii it is not trivial either.
We saw the same thing with Subway and Papa John's CEOs telling us how the Affordable Care Act was going to bring the sky crashing down on their empires, yet both are doing just fine.
Subway is not, actually...
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet earth Subway overtook McDonald's some time ago as the fast food chain with the largest number of locations world wide. They are continuing to open new locations - in the US and around the world - at a much faster clip than McDonald's as well. Even with most of their locations franchises, how would they be able to keep opening so many new restaurants if they were not doing well? They would have a hard time convincing franchisees to put down the capital to open a new location if they were doing poorly.
How much of the cost of the product is actually labor? This one is a big - and difficult - one to answer.
No it isn't... labor is generally just as expensive, if not more expensive than the cost of the food...
You're only looking at part of the equation. Sure, you can say you pay an employee $X per hour and that they can make Y sandwiches per hour. You can say that the raw materials in each sandwich is $B. What you can't as easily predict though is how much you will pay to keep the lights on, or how much it will cost to maintain the equipment in the restaurant. You can't predict how much your parking lot will cost you or when your landlord (if you are in a shopping mall and don't own your property) will raise your rent. They also cannot always predict what the franchise fee will be any given year. These restaurants have only one source of income - the food they sell. They have to cover all their costs through that.
A lot of corporate types like to live in the fantasy where doubling a worker's salary means everything they make or do is now twice as expensive, but we know that is not the case.
No one believes that who runs a food business
And how often do CEOs actually come from within the industry? There is always pressure from the board to bring in outside executives, which leads to blowhards like this guy.
but it will cause overhead to rise about 16%, give or take, for most such places.
16% isn't that much for fast food, really. A $2 sandwich goes up by about $.30, that really isn't that much. People don't flinch at that kind of price fluctuation on gasoline any more, why would they change their habits on food over it?
Now what about the by far most dominant social network bundling a particular political platform for its users?
I don't disagree with the assertion that they are the top "social networking" site on the web today. However as a news source I don't see them as being anywhere near dominant. I certainly haven't heard of Fox News, CNN, or any print newspapers declaring "we can't compete with facebook for news, so we're going to shut our operation down".
But if you find it unnerving when companies hire lobbyists to write laws in their favor, you should probably find it even more unnerving that FB may be surreptitiously packaging the specific issues and views on which people vote.
I don't dispute that corporate America is running Washington a little more with every passing day. IMHO the "Affordable Care Act" was the largest corporate handout from any government in the history of government. However if facebook is out to get some favorable legislation passed, why would they cater to the democrats - or even to just one side? The insurance industry showed so artfully that they can own both sides if they feel the need. Plenty of other industries have shown how easy it is to buy out the conservatives as well. Not that the democrats are beacons of morality or anything, but this seems like a rather high-risk/low-reward way to go about getting it done.
The best argument I've seen so far for people getting upset with this matter is actually the "false advertising" claim. Apparently facebook was claiming that the "trending" stories bit was all automatic and algorithm-driven. If that was their claim but there was actually heavy human interference then it may warrant some further investigation.
This sounds like nothing but another CEO running his mouth on his new favorite matter - and showing in the process how uninformed he actually is. We saw the same thing with Subway and Papa John's CEOs telling us how the Affordable Care Act was going to bring the sky crashing down on their empires, yet both are doing just fine.
To tell us how much a raise in minimum wage will impact the actual cost of doing business - and the cost of the product - they need to open up about two things in particular that they skilfully danced around in this article:
How much are they actually paying their employees currently? They mentioned that they already had to raise their wages to get better workers. How much of a raise is $15 over the current rate?
How much of the cost of the product is actually labor? This one is a big - and difficult - one to answer. A lot of corporate types like to live in the fantasy where doubling a worker's salary means everything they make or do is now twice as expensive, but we know that is not the case. For a fast food place, you need to consider the cost of the materials going in to the product, the cost of paying for and maintaining the building (with its utilities, parking lot, and everything else), etc. The human cost of their product is likely 10-20% at most.
Sure, the wage increase has a cost. What we don't know - and I would argue the people interviewed in this story don't know either - is how large is that cost. Will it actually be offset by replacing more workers with kiosks and robots, or is this just a ploy from the top?
Facebook is a private website. They are free to post whatever they like. Why would it matter if stories of a particular political alignment are less likely than others to show up? There is no shortage of other places where you can get news, either...
I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
I would approve of vigilant justice in this situation against the facilities and personnel.
There is a reason why the place has security cameras all over the place, and bullet proof glass in front of their cashier. They also kept the cars they knew owners would most likely want back kept in a locked garage (which - you guessed it - was also monitored by security cameras).
I tried, but they wouldn't help either. Said owner of spot was my landlord when I lived in a large apartment complex. The towing company was not strictly a contractor to them but rather a sub-contractor as it was the "security" company who was a contractor to the landlord and the towing company was - in theory - a subcontractor to the security company. Even though the documentation showed the towing company was there - inside the secured-access garage - first, the landlord wouldn't touch the matter.
Besides, going after my landlord could have had negative consequences that I was not at the time prepared to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
Keypunch stations? As in a mechanical punch? Sheesh. Kid, in my day we punched them by hand and we liked it that way. How are you supposed to have pride in it if you don't punch it yourself?
Hey guys, look! An HTML Wizard is amongst us!
Meh, I don't think HTTP will ever replace Gopher. No sense ever learning HTML; it'll be Gopher and Fortran forever.
I also happen to think Ron Paul got a whole LOT of things right.
From my vantage point he only had a few things right, but none for the right reason. He was right to oppose the war in Iraq, but he did it only because he did not want to pay for it - he couldn't have cared less about the human cost if someone else was willing to foot the bill.
Rand is really not that close a follower of Ron's beliefs....
His cult here on slashdot isn't well versed on the differences between father and son, and tripped all over each other to praise the son's campaign.
I think you're selling a lot of people short if you think most Libertarians will just vote Trump out of the belief that "blocking Hillary" is more important than any of their other principles.
While there are plenty of actual libertarians scattered around the country, the most vocal ones here on slashdot - and in plenty of other places - are just Paullowers who will happily line up behind the GOP endorsement. For an example, take a look at how much the slashdot "libertarian" base was just peachy with the GWB presidency and happily voted for his re-election.
But I predict you'll see at least a doubling of the usual number of votes for the L.P. in this election.
Only time will tell, but I would be surprised if more "libertarians" don't opt for their sense of the "lesser of two evils" approach and vote Trump instead as they can't stand Clinton.
Which means that your claim of the overwhelming majority is crap.
No, it means that your claim of "the overwhelming majority is crap".
So you can't handle reading, writing, or arithmetic. And your demeanor is oh so pleasant... You must be a real hit at your school.
He may not have expected her to be as incompetent as she turned out to be.
That is the closest you have come to a non-partisan claim of Clinton's "incompetence". Care to tell us why you think she was "incompetent" as SoS? What did she do that showed her to be unfit for the job?
having her in his administration and control was preferable to the alternatives.
You're diving into a rabbit hole, there. If Clinton and Obama were as partisan as you seem to be trying to imply, then leaving her in the US Senate - rather than hiring her as SoS - would not have been a bad move for the POTUS. There was even a chance (albeit a very small one) that she could have lost re-election while he was POTUS which would have caused her to fade away that much more quickly.
So you are incompetent at grammar, then? The phrase "incompetent crook" - which you used specifically - is understood to mean a crook who is not competent at being a crook.
The error there is in your limited understanding of English, not my grammar.
You can move the goalposts all you want, kid, but that doesn't change the meaning of what you have written. In your own words you said she was an incompetent crook; now you are pretending she was something else. Didn't your parents teach you that there is no post-submit comment edit function here on slashdot before they signed you up?
I'm sorry that your entire "argument" is fact-free and falls on its face when confronted with simple logic, I feel bad that you made such a total ass of yourself here. But the first thing you should do when you realize you are digging a deep hole that you want to get out of is to stop digging. Put down the shovel, and ask for help, kid.
That depends on how you define "Independent".
The term "independent" refers to party registration.
Which means that your claim of the overwhelming majority is crap. Even the states with the highest rates of "independent" voters still have that as a small part of their total voting population. Even more so, as the difference in the count between D and R is so razor thin, your statement of "R+I" is no more valid than to say the same of "D+I".
In other words you failed at basic math. You were upvoted because you are preaching to the choir here, who also can't be bothered to handle simple math when it challenges their worldview.
If she is an incompetent crook then how has she made it this far?
She is incompetent at government, not at lying.
So you are incompetent at grammar, then? The phrase "incompetent crook" - which you used specifically - is understood to mean a crook who is not competent at being a crook.
Nevertheless, if she is incompetent as government - as you are now claiming after moving the goalposts - how did she make it this far? If she was that awful at her job she never should have made it as far as she did.
And without Bill Clinton to back her up, she would be a non-entity.
For the start of her career - as US Senator from NY State - sure. But what use would it be for President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama to select an incompetent person for SoS? He has not tried hard to mirror the Clinton Administration in his own.
So did you foe me because you can't stand reality?
No, I "foed" you because you are a partisan idiot.
You established well that you suck at writing. Apparently you aren't very good at reading, either.
the idea that we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve as manager/manipulator of our currency. I don't think there's almost anyone on the Republican ticket who is really ready to fight that battle.
You must be new here. Slashdot conservatives seldom pass at a chance to sing the praises (or worship at the altar) of Ron Paul and his holy son Rand. Sure neither has managed to win the GOP endorsement for president but no other candidate has ever attracted such rabid support here as the two of them.
The overwhelming majority of Americans is either Republican or independent.
That depends on how you define "Independent". Frankly, considering the split is so very very even between the D's and the R's in this country, if you are setting the threshold for "independent" such as to establish an "overwhelming majority" just by combining the independents with republicans, then you could say the exact same thing by substituting democrats in the place of republicans in that statement.
In other words, your statement doesn't mean squat.
Clinton is a lying, incompetent crook
If she is an incompetent crook then how has she made it this far? We have plenty of incompetent crook politicians in jail from all levels of government. There is plenty wrong with Clinton, but I wouldn't say competence is part of it.
So did you foe me because you can't stand reality? You seem to be on something of an anti-truth rant here.
The overwhelming majority of American "Libertarians" are just Republicans with a couple gripes. Their underlying sense of duty to the GOP will come through and they will vote for Trump as they are trained to see nothing worse for the world than anyone named Clinton. They know that they cannot block a Clinton presidency by voting for a third party.
People tell me that I am the last human on earth who is not signed up. I tell them I have enough things wasting my time without it. Sure, I don't know where my high school classmates are shitting this afternoon, or which starbucks beverage is the favorite amongst my cousin's colleageus, but I am fully certain that I can live without that information. In the outside chance that anything of any value is posted there, plenty of people I know in the real world can tell me about it.
I have a real world to experience, thank you.
Does a zygote or a blastula count as a living human being? I'd say, sure it is. It's obviously not a camel.
Anyone who has seen a zygote or blastula and claimed to be able to identify the species it came from is lying. You can't by any kind of non-destructive physical examination distinguish between any two animal (and even some non-animal) zygotes or blastula. Sure, it is not a mature camel but you can't tell me if it is a camel, a human, a fruitfly, a worm, or any other critter you can think of.
I know the RAZR was far more popular but I thought the design of the RIZR was superior. With the RIZR I could always see all of the display, and the keypad slid out from underneath when I needed it. The biggest downside of it was that for some odd reason Motorola decided that the keys on the RIZR should literally be stickers, which would at times slip right off.
Also, 39% of kids get a social media account at 11.4 years, and 11% get a social media account when they were younger than 10.
We are letting the personal information of children be sold for profit. This is a more certain sign of the decay of society than most that I can think of. It doesn't matter how harmless some people may think this is, the bigger problem is that most people don't think of that problem at all. They sign little Johnnie up for a facebook account so that he can see Grandma's wall, and pretty soon Johnnie's personal events are being sold to every company you can think of.
I am rather fond of that show, but it's been off the air for over 7 years now. Why would someone waste their time writing a review of it?
Religion is just a popular cult, cult an unpopular religion. What's your point? They all have their rituals. You could argue that the current "atheists" (I use that because they have bastardized the meaning of the word itself) have their own rituals as well.
I know some Muslim women - including some from Iran - at my work. They choose to wear the Hijab here in the states, even though the US is their home. I've asked some of them about it and they've been open about their thoughts on the matter. One thing that surprised me to learn is that in Iran there is no hard set rule of "you must wear the hijab if you are at least X years old" or anything of the sort - aside from a loose guideline of 18. The Iranian I speak with most often (I share an office with her) decided to start wearing a Hijab around age 12.
More to the point though, those that wear it see it as an important part of their faith - being humble in front of Allah. Some Christians wear a cross, some Jews wear a Yarmulke, some Muslims wear a Hijab. I've also noticed that a lot of Hijabs are being worn a bit further back on the top of the head, allowing the women to show some of their hair on purpose.
Iran is certainly an alien place to Americans but the Hijab is not necessarily a terrible thing.
XBox Reboot
But I would expect that person still has it.
While I wish no harm upon Bill Gates - in spite of being vehemently anti-Microsoft myself - I don't see what Al-Qaeda could expect to accomplish by killing him. He stepped down how many years ago from the top of Microsoft? This seems about as logical as watching too many reruns of ER and then deciding to kill George Clooney to harm our health care system.
I'm curious to know what you mean by
people who clean tables
The fast food places I eat at - including Wendy's - don't have people who are employed only for this purpose, or even primarily for this purpose. Table cleaning is something that they do as "busywork" when customer traffic is low. If you're at a place where there are people who are primarily cleaning tables you are likely not at a fast food place.
It is also worth recalling that tipping is not universally expected in Australia as it is in the states. Hence they do need to pay their workers a respectable wage as they can't count on customers to supplement it the way they do here.
Allow me to point you to Australia that has a very high min wage... far fewer people eat out there, far fewer fast food places exist, and far more people cook because it is SO expensive to eat out.
Australia also has vastly lower population density, so comparing the US to Australia for something that scales with population doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The largest city in Australia has about the population of Los Angeles but at about 1/8th the population density. A fast food restaurant serving a neighborhood of 300 people won't last long anywhere.
Furthermore, the cost of food down there also reflects the cost of getting food there. There is certainly arable land but you can't just start trying to grow or raise whatever you like and expect to be able to do it at a sustainable level. Some things just simply have to be imported. While it isn't as dramatic as Hawaii it is not trivial either.
We saw the same thing with Subway and Papa John's CEOs telling us how the Affordable Care Act was going to bring the sky crashing down on their empires, yet both are doing just fine.
Subway is not, actually...
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet earth Subway overtook McDonald's some time ago as the fast food chain with the largest number of locations world wide. They are continuing to open new locations - in the US and around the world - at a much faster clip than McDonald's as well. Even with most of their locations franchises, how would they be able to keep opening so many new restaurants if they were not doing well? They would have a hard time convincing franchisees to put down the capital to open a new location if they were doing poorly.
How much of the cost of the product is actually labor? This one is a big - and difficult - one to answer.
No it isn't... labor is generally just as expensive, if not more expensive than the cost of the food...
You're only looking at part of the equation. Sure, you can say you pay an employee $X per hour and that they can make Y sandwiches per hour. You can say that the raw materials in each sandwich is $B. What you can't as easily predict though is how much you will pay to keep the lights on, or how much it will cost to maintain the equipment in the restaurant. You can't predict how much your parking lot will cost you or when your landlord (if you are in a shopping mall and don't own your property) will raise your rent. They also cannot always predict what the franchise fee will be any given year. These restaurants have only one source of income - the food they sell. They have to cover all their costs through that.
A lot of corporate types like to live in the fantasy where doubling a worker's salary means everything they make or do is now twice as expensive, but we know that is not the case.
No one believes that who runs a food business
And how often do CEOs actually come from within the industry? There is always pressure from the board to bring in outside executives, which leads to blowhards like this guy.
but it will cause overhead to rise about 16%, give or take, for most such places.
16% isn't that much for fast food, really. A $2 sandwich goes up by about $.30, that really isn't that much. People don't flinch at that kind of price fluctuation on gasoline any more, why would they change their habits on food over it?
Now what about the by far most dominant social network bundling a particular political platform for its users?
I don't disagree with the assertion that they are the top "social networking" site on the web today. However as a news source I don't see them as being anywhere near dominant. I certainly haven't heard of Fox News, CNN, or any print newspapers declaring "we can't compete with facebook for news, so we're going to shut our operation down".
But if you find it unnerving when companies hire lobbyists to write laws in their favor, you should probably find it even more unnerving that FB may be surreptitiously packaging the specific issues and views on which people vote.
I don't dispute that corporate America is running Washington a little more with every passing day. IMHO the "Affordable Care Act" was the largest corporate handout from any government in the history of government. However if facebook is out to get some favorable legislation passed, why would they cater to the democrats - or even to just one side? The insurance industry showed so artfully that they can own both sides if they feel the need. Plenty of other industries have shown how easy it is to buy out the conservatives as well. Not that the democrats are beacons of morality or anything, but this seems like a rather high-risk/low-reward way to go about getting it done.
The best argument I've seen so far for people getting upset with this matter is actually the "false advertising" claim. Apparently facebook was claiming that the "trending" stories bit was all automatic and algorithm-driven. If that was their claim but there was actually heavy human interference then it may warrant some further investigation.
To tell us how much a raise in minimum wage will impact the actual cost of doing business - and the cost of the product - they need to open up about two things in particular that they skilfully danced around in this article:
Sure, the wage increase has a cost. What we don't know - and I would argue the people interviewed in this story don't know either - is how large is that cost. Will it actually be offset by replacing more workers with kiosks and robots, or is this just a ploy from the top?
Facebook is a private website. They are free to post whatever they like. Why would it matter if stories of a particular political alignment are less likely than others to show up? There is no shortage of other places where you can get news, either...
I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
I would approve of vigilant justice in this situation against the facilities and personnel.
There is a reason why the place has security cameras all over the place, and bullet proof glass in front of their cashier. They also kept the cars they knew owners would most likely want back kept in a locked garage (which - you guessed it - was also monitored by security cameras).
I tried, but they wouldn't help either. Said owner of spot was my landlord when I lived in a large apartment complex. The towing company was not strictly a contractor to them but rather a sub-contractor as it was the "security" company who was a contractor to the landlord and the towing company was - in theory - a subcontractor to the security company. Even though the documentation showed the towing company was there - inside the secured-access garage - first, the landlord wouldn't touch the matter.
Besides, going after my landlord could have had negative consequences that I was not at the time prepared to deal with.