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September 1, 2009

The Working Poor In America

Tim says,

... get stolen from, retaliated against, hurt at work and convinced not to complain, and paid less than the minimum wage, not just sometimes, but most of the time:

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week...

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay...

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans... [W]omen were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

Excuse me; I need to go punch something. And then maybe throw up. Then punch something else.

Comments (5) | Permasnark | Posted: 8:03 PM

August 4, 2009

How We Spend Our Days

Matt says,

Now I don't remember who pointed me to this; it's been abandoned in a tab all day. Best NYT infographic I've seen in many a day: a visualization of how Americans spend their time, hour by hour.

Update: Just looked at my RSS reader, and now I remember who pointed me to this ... everybody in the world. Geez.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:50 PM
Saheli's thoughts: I wants my pants to have an API. Coder Girls (all): [Sighs] I sudde... >>

The Starbucks API

Lots of people seem to think Starbucks' new "stealth stores" are creepy

A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

Two other stores in Starbucks' native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name to make it sound more like a neighborhood hangout, less like Big Coffee, a Starbucks official told The Seattle Times on Thursday.

…but imagine that this was playing out differently:

What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API—a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you're leveraging Starbucks' insanely optimized supply chain. You can use as much or as little as you want.

The NYT cites the Huffington Post

You can imagine where this un-branding campaign could lead. A little neighborhood burger place run by McDonald's? A little neighborhood hardware store owned by Home Depot? A little neighborhood five-and-dime operated by Wal-Mart?

…and I find myself thinking, uh, yeah, wouldn't that be cool? Swap out "run" and "owned," and put in "powered" and "supported." Wal-Mart's back-end is as innovative and important as its front-end. Why not offer it up to indie retailers?

I know it's a stretch, but consider the analogy: Amazon's web services have been absolutely transformative in the startup world. You can store files and spin up servers without buying, or committing to, anything. It's easy to try things and cheap to fail. The notion of plug-in infrastructures just as flexible for other businesses—real-world businesses—run by other goliaths isn't unsettling. It's exciting.

And yes, I realize that's not what Starbucks is doing here. But it's what they should be doing!

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 4, 2009 at 11:16 | Comments (22) | Permasnark
File under: Snarkonomics

August 1, 2009

Link Love and the Viral Spike

Robin says,

Worlds collide! Both Current's Sarah Haskins and Snarkmarket's guest-blogger Matt Penniman are mentioned approvingly in this BBC Web Monitor post. (Via Tim.)

The BBC also points to an op-ed by Bill Wasik in the NYT, which I am drafting into service in our Snarkmarket Forum on Free (Related Topics Division). It's about the new "big break"—the viral spike!—which is made possible, after all, by the friction-less power of free.

Well, that and the internet.

Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 7:37 PM

July 30, 2009

Robin's thoughts: Chris Anderson says the boundary between $0.01 and free is so magical b/c of the change in purcha... >>

It Feels A Little Like Free

I had a stray thought the other day, related to Chris Anderson's observation that what's really radical about the idea of "free" isn't its economic reality but economic psychology. Free things freak us out; either we think they're worthless or scammy or we love them so much that sometimes they actually make us economically stupid. (I once stood in line for an hour for a free burrito when I was paying a babysitter $10/hour at the same time. Say what you will about whatever I was "buying" with my money, I wasn't maximizing my utility.)

Anyways, here's the idea:

If what matters about "free" is the psychology, then the solution is to make paying something feel like paying nothing.

Think about it! When the idea of free really works, it makes us forget that it ever even cost anything at all. Reading web pages is free - once you count the money you pay for internet access. Between my phone and my house, I pay more for internet access per month than I do books - and I read a lot. Add on to that all of the ways my free behavior is paid for with information from or attention paid by me, and a ruthless calculus would determine that the internet is expensive as hell.

Almost all free things are cross-subsidized in some ways. But if the cross-subsidy is obvious - "Free phone with a two-year plan worth at least..." - then free fails. If your website suddenly has a glaring and obnoxious banner ad, then it doesn't matter if it is as free today as it was yesterday. It doesn't feel free anymore.

On the other hand, you can actually make getting something you've paid for feel like something free. Casinos are terrific at this. Everything's free, and you still spend money everywhere. Sometimes, governments are good at this too - although they sometimes create benefits that are so invisible that we don't even think about them at all, except when they fail. (Free can't work too well! Or people will still feel cheated!)

A classic example might be buying something - let's say, groceries - with a credit card. I used to pay for all of my groceries with cash or check, so I always had to be aware of exactly how much I was spending and whether I either physically had enough money on me or at least had enough in the account (and enough to still pay rent, etc.). Then I got a credit card that gave me rewards at gas stations and grocery stores - the money is like invisible bullets. I don't worry about each individual trip, I just pay the lot at the end of the month. This ramped up until I looked at a breakdown of my finances, and realized I was paying twice as much for food each month as I was a few years before. It felt more like free.

Digital media is catching on. I hardly ever used to buy anything in iTunes, because it was a total hassle. The terms of service had always changed, I had to log-in, add something to my cart, and then check-out. It was worse than going to a record-store! And a lot worse than Amazon, where I had one-click, free shipping... Anyways, I recently disabled all of the nag screens, and suddenly, I'm buying stuff on iTunes left and right. People talk about this with their Kindles, too - the fact that you can browse for, buy, and begin reading books so smoothly reduces the friction of every purchase, so you read one after another. It all goes through Amazon and you get billed at the end of the month. You know you bought something... but you kind of didn't. To quote Flanders, "it feels like you're wearing nothing at all."

Software sort of works like this too. It's easy to buy applications for the iPhone or iPod touch, because you do it all right through Apple - it syncs to your iPod and you're ready to go. It's much harder, psychologically, to go to a developer's website, fill out all of your information, decide whether or not to use PayPal or your credit card, download the application, open it up, enter your serial (which went to your old email address), register the software again, etc... At every moment, it screams, "you're paying something! You're paying something! Are you sure there isn't free software that could do the same thing?"

The real trouble, however, is advertising. If you have an ad-supported application or website, it's going to feel the most free and probably be the most popular if the ads are so discreet as to be practically invisible - you don't even realize that someone paid for you to see what you're seeing. But advertising HAS to be attention-grabbing if it's going to work.

Newspapers actually came up with a genius solution to this problem years ago - the classified ad. It's an advertisement that feels like a service. In most cases, when you were reading classifieds, you actually PAID to see them (although each ad - for the reader - was free). Now, of course, classifieds are (almost) actually free (to place and read). But you still see things like job advertisements, etc., which play out to readers more like services than ads. And because they feel like services, they feel like free.

So here's the (provisional) lesson. There is no such thing as a free lunch. But some lunches feel freer than others.

Tim-sig.gif
Posted July 30, 2009 at 7:22 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Snarkonomics

July 13, 2009

Ferguson/Fallows on China

Robin says,

This 75-minute dialogue between Niall Ferguson and James Fallows, about China and its relationship with the U.S., is nuanced, detailed, and thought-provoking.

(My view here is colored by the facts that a) James Fallows has been my favorite journalist since I started reading his Atlantic articles back in college and b) I want to somehow, somehow, learn to speak like Niall Ferguson. Scottish accent and all? I think so.)

Anyway, Ferguson and Fallows really argue here—in the way two smart people argue over dinner, not in the way that people argue ("argue") on cable news. It's always surprisingly thrilling to see people actually think on camera.

To set it up, the point they don't dispute is that, right now, the world's most important entity is "Chimerica"—the blended economies of China and America. At this point, even after the economic shocks of 2008 and 2009, they are still inseperable, and incoherent without each other.

Ferguson and Fallows disagree on what happens next. Ferguson says Chimerica is doomed, and get ready for a painful disruption. Fallows, fresh off of three years living in China, is more optimistic—he thinks the relationship is flexible, durable, and many-faceted.

I saw Niall Ferguson debate Peter Schwartz here in San Francisco, and all I gotta say is: I wouldn't want to face off with this guy across a stage. He is erudite, to be sure; but he also carries and deploys his erudition in a particularly cutting way—like an Oxford don James Bond.

Anyway, I emerged from the 75 minutes mostly on the side of Fallows—but I always appreciate Ferguson's gloomy, ultra-realist point of view. Also, Fallows follows up here.

Comments (11) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:10 PM
Tim's thoughts: This post is rife with typos! Yuck. I just wanna read Jakob Burckhardt's book on the Rena... >>

Giving Things Away Is A New Liberal Art

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they've been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I'm kind of more interested in that too -- at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly's formulation of what we did is worth repeating: "The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible." We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don't think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there's a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the "ransom" model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions' football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn't sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn't even show you another football game, you'd just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:


It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries