Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reduces income inequality among her staff

She has has set a living wage minimum of $52,000 per year for her staff and a $15 per hour minimum for her interns.

Claudia Pagon Marchena, like so many Hill staffers, moonlighted at a Washington, D.C., eatery to pay her rent until she took a job with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She celebrated her last day at her coffee shop job that same week.

That’s because Ocasio-Cortez, who has called on fellow lawmakers to pay their staffs a “living wage,” is making an example out of her own office. The New York Democrat has introduced an unusual policy that no one on her staff will make less than $52,000 a year — an almost unheard of amount for many of the 20-somethings whose long hours make House and Senate offices run.
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The economics of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal plan proposed jointly by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey has been attacked not only by Donald Trump and Republicans but by incrementalist Democrats who never seem to realize that one must stake out bold positions initially if one is to shift the debate away from the status quo. As I said in a comment to my post on senator Diane Feinstein’s dismissive attitude to the children who urged her to sign on to the GND, in negotiations, you have to start out with the maximal position and then bargain down from there. That is how you push the envelope. It is because of this kind of relentless pushing by Bernie Sanders that the ideas of higher minimum wages, Medicare for all, and affordable college tuition, derided just four years ago as being unrealistic, are now embraced by nearly all Democratic presidential candidates.
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More on the toilet paper puzzle

I have been thinking about yesterday’s post with the surprising statistic that in the US, three rolls of toilet paper per person per week are used. That seemed improbably high and so I conducted a quick survey asking people to estimate how much they think they used per week. The sample was small (just my wife, actually) and she estimated half a roll. She was shocked when I told her that it was six times as much.
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Blondie defends manual labor

I sometimes hear white-collar workers speak disparagingly about manual workers whom they see relaxing. They seem to think that such people should be working non-stop even though they are doing extremely difficult and tiring jobs, often in terrible conditions, while their critics push paper around in air-conditioned workplaces where a lot of time is spent in idleness. I, for example, have never really done a hard day’s work in my life and am aware that I am very fortunate and am grateful for being so lucky.

I was glad to see that the creators of the Blondie comic strip were taking a stand for manual labor against this unfair criticism.

The world of cricket is topsy-turvy

It’s been awhile since I had a post about cricket. There have been some unusual happenings recently and the good news is that it does not involve cheating or other bad behavior by players but instead is about the game itself. It used to be that national Test cricket teams had periods of dominance of a few years when a good crop of players matured together and then went into a slump as those players retired and new ones entered who had yet to find their feet. But now teams lurch from looking dominant in one series to looking awful in the very next one and then bouncing back again, all within a period of months.
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Hasan Minhaj on drug pricing extortion

I only got around to watching last Sunday’s show Patriot Act yesterday and it was another excellent one. This time he took on the high drug prices that people in the US pay, much higher than in other countries, that often results in people not being able to afford drugs to live. Rather than give a generalized critique, he used as a case study the price of insulin (a drug that so many people need to just stay alive) to show how three big drug companies Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, that market drugs under a multiplicity of names, have formed essentially a drug cartel that keep raising prices together and also exploit patent laws (they own the majority of them) to prevent cheaper drugs entering the market.
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Unbelievable!

A group of young children in California went with a petition to ask their senator Diane Feinstein to sign on to the Green New Deal. Her condescension and arrogance towards the children and their parents was infuriating to watch. See for yourself.

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Not your typical Lincoln image

We are used to envisaging Abraham Lincoln as an older, bearded man, formally attired, the way he is presented in the memorial to him in Washington, DC. Pretty much all official representations of Lincoln adopt that basic look. Hence I was startled to come across this image of an 8-foot tall statue of a young Abraham Lincoln situated in a Los Angeles federal courthouse where he looks like he was posing for a Ralph Lauren ad, though the statue was commissioned eighty years ago.

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Oscar nominees for Best Picture

This Sunday will be the Academy Awards show that I never watch because not only do I hate awards shows in general but apart from everything else, the awards are often given to those films that have the biggest backing by their producers who spend a vast amount of energy and money promoting their films and undermining the competition. Marlow Stern and Kevin Fallon look back on the history of such vicious campaigns that were often successful in achieving their goals. They say that disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein was one of the worst culprits.
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