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Open Thread March 29 2024 CA Fast Food Workers get a boost in hourly wage

Bill Haskell | March 29, 2024 1:24 pm

Immigration

US Economics

Starting April 1, fast-food workers in California will be paid at least $20 an hour, thanks to legislation passed last fall that raised the industry-wide minimum wage. Why? “the difference between the prices consumers pay and the cost of production—have increased sharply over the past decade of growth for the industry.” Roosevelt Institute

Open Thread March 24 2024 Shorter Work Week – Is It All It Promises to Be? – Angry Bear

21 Comments

Fred C. Dobbs says:

March 30, 2024 at 7:24 am

There are a LOT of robots working the grills at various CA burger outlets, apparently.

Fully Robotic Kitchen Slings Burgers And Fries At New SoCal Restaurant
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  March 30, 2024 at 7:36 am
  
  It seems McDonalds does not use robots to make burgers, but does have ‘smart’ order-taking terminals. I don’t know about In-Out which is all over CA. (I haven’t been in a McDonalds for many years – dietary issues, and In-Out is not a presence in MA.)
  
  In-Out “has expanded outside Southern California into the rest of California, as well as into Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, and Idaho, and is planning expansions into New Mexico and Tennessee.” (Wikipedia)
Fred C. Dobbs says:

April 1, 2024 at 8:38 am

First in a series on the risky ways humans are starting to manipulate nature to fight climate change. Once science fiction, today these ideas are becoming reality.

Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?

NY Times – March 31

On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.

Just a few years ago, technologies like these, that attempt to re-engineer the natural environment, were on the scientific fringe. They were too expensive, too impractical, too sci-fi. But with the dangers from climate change worsening, and the world failing to meet its goals of slashing greenhouse gas emissions, they are quickly moving to the mainstream among both scientists and investors, despite questions about their effectiveness and safety.

Researchers are studying ways to block some of the sun’s radiation. They are testing whether adding iron to the ocean could carry carbon dioxide to the sea floor. … And with massive facilities like the one in Iceland, they are seeking to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.

As the scale and urgency of the climate crisis has crystallized, “people have woken up and are looking to see if there’s any miraculous, deus ex machina that can help,” said Al Gore, the former vice president.

Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have pumped huge volumes of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere in pursuit of industry and advancement. It amounted to a remaking of the planet’s delicately balanced atmosphere that today has transformed the world, intensifying heat, worsening droughts and storms and threatening human progress. …
- Joel Eissenberg says:
  
  April 1, 2024 at 8:44 am
  
  @Fred,
  
  Yes. Carbon capture and geoengineering are the only strategies that hold the potential to avert climate catastrophe by mid-century. While green energy and conservation are important, the half-life of the CO2 *already* in the atmosphere is 120 years. It cannot dissipate naturally at a sufficient rate to prevent disaster.
  - Fred C. Dobbs says:
    
    April 1, 2024 at 8:52 am
    
    Hmmm. Maybe we could get more trees planted , like in the Amazon basin, to consume more CO2, get the O2-CO2 cycle back in balance, if not building lots more CO2 caputure facilities, in Iceland where geothermal electricity is plentiful, as long as they shut down much bitcoin-mining which consumes much of those kilowatts.)
  - Fred C. Dobbs says:
    
    April 1, 2024 at 8:57 am
    
    Indeed, the NYT piece mentions orbital solar-parsol construction, but I chose to omit that reference, as it is so silly, really. But, who knows, it just might work!
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  April 1, 2024 at 8:46 am
  
  … Global temperatures are now expected to rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. That has given new weight to what some people call geoengineering, though that term has become so contentious its proponents now prefer the term “climate interventions.” The hope is that taking steps like these might buy some time at a moment when energy consumption is on the rise, and the world isn’t quitting fossil fuels fast enough.
  
  Many of the projects are controversial. A plant similar to the one in Iceland, but far larger, is being built in Texas by Occidental Petroleum, the giant oil company. Occidental intends to use some of the carbon dioxide it captures to extract even more oil, the burning of which is one of the main causes of the climate crisis in the first place. …
  
  (Hey, that is, like, totally sick, is it not? But what’s an oil company to do but drill for more oil. I know, maybe build a solar farm!)
  - Fred C. Dobbs says:
    
    April 1, 2024 at 9:02 am
    
    Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet
    
    WSJ – Feb 14
    
    Three geoengineering projects seek to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean. Critics warn of unintended consequences.
    
    … This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs.
    
    The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions. …
    - Fred C. Dobbs says:
      
      April 1, 2024 at 9:04 am
      
      In Israel, a startup called Stardust Solutions has begun testing a system to disperse a cloud of tiny reflective particles about 60,000 feet in altitude, reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool the atmosphere in a concept known as solar radiation management, or SRM. Yanai Yedvab, Stardust chief executive and a former deputy chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, wouldn’t disclose the composition of the proprietary particles. …
      
      In Massachusetts, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution plan to pour 6,000 gallons of a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a component of lye, into the ocean 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard this summer. They hope the chemical base will act like a big tablet of Tums, lowering the acidity of a patch of surface water and absorbing 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it safely in the ocean. …
      - Fred C. Dobbs says:
        
        April 3, 2024 at 9:25 am
        
        Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun.
        
        NY Times – April 2
        
        A method to reflect sunlight into space is being tested in California. “All my colleagues hope that we never use these things,” one researcher said.
        
        A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.
        
        A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.
        
        It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.
        
        If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans. ,,,
      - Fred C. Dobbs says:
        
        April 3, 2024 at 9:27 am
        
        … “Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it’s driving the field to look at more alternatives,” said Robert Wood, the lead scientist for the team from the University of Washington that is running the marine cloud brightening project. “Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme.”
        
        Brightening clouds is one of several ideas to push solar energy back into space — sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering, or climate intervention. Compared with other options, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, marine cloud brightening would be localized and use relatively benign sea salt aerosols as opposed to other chemicals. …
      - Fred C. Dobbs says:
        
        April 3, 2024 at 9:29 am
        
        … In 1990, a British physicist named John Latham published a letter in the journal Nature, under the heading “Control of Global Warming?,” in which he introduced the idea that injecting tiny particles into clouds could offset rising temperatures.
        
        Dr. Latham later attributed his idea to a hike with his son in Wales, where they paused to look at clouds over the Irish Sea.
        
        “He asked why clouds were shiny at the top but dark at the bottom,” Dr. Latham told the BBC in 2007. “I explained how they were mirrors for incoming sunlight.”
        
        Dr. Latham had a proposal that may have seemed bizarre: create a fleet of 1,000 unmanned, sail-powered vessels to traverse the world’s oceans and continuously spray tiny droplets of seawater into the air to deflect solar heat away from Earth.
        
        The idea is built on a scientific concept called the Twomey effect: Large numbers of small droplets reflect more sunlight than small numbers of large droplets. Injecting vast quantities of minuscule aerosols, in turn forming many small droplets, could change the composition of clouds. …
Fred C. Dobbs says:

April 1, 2024 at 2:17 pm

The Nobel Prize-Winning Professor Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries

NY Times – April 1

Our all-American belief that money really does buy happiness is roughly correct for about 85 percent of us. We know this thanks to the latest and perhaps final work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who insisted on the value of working with those with whom we disagree.

Professor Kahneman, who died last week at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision-making, and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. …
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  April 1, 2024 at 2:24 pm
  
  Professor Kahneman( Nobel, Economics, 2002), who died last week at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision-making, and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. He should also be remembered for a living and working philosophy that has never been more relevant: his enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This enthusiasm was deeply personal. He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).
  
  … He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).
  
  … Back to that finding, published last year, that for a strong majority of us, more is better when it comes to money. In 2010, Professor Kahneman and the Princeton economist Angus Deaton (also a Nobel Prize winner) published a highly influential essay that found that on average higher-income groups show higher levels of happiness — but only to a point. Beyond a threshold at or below $90,000, Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton found, there is no further progress in average happiness as income increases. …
  - Fred C. Dobbs says:
    
    April 1, 2024 at 2:25 pm
    
    What we learned from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
    
    … Despite never taking a course in economics, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics in 2002 “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty”. …
  - Fred C. Dobbs says:
    
    April 1, 2024 at 2:34 pm
    
    NYT: Eleven years later, Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found exactly the opposite: People with higher income reported higher levels of average happiness. Period. The more money people have, the happier they are likely to be.
    
    What gives? You could imagine some furious exchange in which Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton made sharp objections to Dr. Killingsworth’s paper, to which Dr. Killingsworth answered equally sharply, leaving readers confused and exhausted. …
    
    Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win, but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.
    
    In that spirit, Professor Kahneman, well into his 80s, asked Dr. Killingsworth to collaborate, with the help of a friendly arbiter, Professor Barbara Mellers, an influential and widely admired psychologist. Their task was to look closely at Dr. Killingsworth’s data to see whether he had analyzed it properly, and also to understand what, if anything, had been missed by Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton.
    
    Their central conclusion was simple. Dr. Killingsworth missed a threshold effect in his data that affected only one group: the least happy 15 percent. For these largely unhappy people, average happiness does grow with rising income, up to a level of around $100,000; but it stops growing after that. For a majority of us, by contrast, average happiness keeps growing with increases in income. …
    - Fred C. Dobbs says:
      
      April 1, 2024 at 2:36 pm
      
      (The article goes on to include this…)
      
      … the United States Constitution should be seen as an effort to create the conditions for adversarial collaboration. Before the founding, it was often thought that republics could work only if people were relatively homogeneous — if they were broadly in agreement with one another. Objecting to the proposed Constitution, the pseudonymous antifederalist Brutus emphasized this point: “In a republic, the manners, sentiments and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be a constant clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.”
      
      Those who favored the Constitution thought that Brutus had it exactly backward. In their view, the constant clashing of opinions was something not to fear but to welcome, at least if people collaborate — if they act as if they are engaged in a common endeavor. Sounding a lot like Professor Kahneman, Alexander Hamilton put it this way: “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties” in the legislative department of the government “often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.” …
      - Joel Eissenberg says:
        
        April 1, 2024 at 2:40 pm
        
        @Fred,
        
        Nice story, with a nice moral. The question is, how do you have a rational discussion with people who spend most of their bandwidth attacking others, puffing up themselves and calling everyone and everything they disagree with “stupid?”
      - Fred C. Dobbs says:
        
        April 1, 2024 at 3:24 pm
        
        Is this what it means to be “collegial”?
        
        I think so.
      - Joel Eissenberg says:
        
        April 1, 2024 at 3:28 pm
        
        @Fred,
        
        Being collegial means putting comity ahead of your own ego.
      - Fred C. Dobbs says:
        
        April 1, 2024 at 3:29 pm
        
        Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90
        
        NY Times – March 27
        
        Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90.
        
        His death was confirmed by his partner, Barbara Tversky. She declined to say where he died.
        
        Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. (Ms. Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Stanford, had been married to Professor Tversky, who died in 1996. She and Professor Kahneman became partners several years ago.)
        
        As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results. …