Cuomo's Fast Food Minimum Wage Regulations Are As Half-Assed As His APPR Teacher Evaluation System

Whether you're in favor of or opposed to Cuomo's imposing a minimum wage of $15 an hour on the fast food industry, the haphazard way in which it is going to be applied should raise concern.

Jimmy Vielkind wrote about this last night on Capital NY, noting that national chains will have the wage regulations imposed on them while local chains will not:

ALBANY—Mr. Subb won't have to pay its workers $15 an hour, but Subway will. In Buffalo, the local favorite Mighty Taco will be exempt from the higher minimum wage. Not so, though, for Taco Bell patrons.

When the state Department of Labor posted Friday the formal report of the wage board it convened to study an increase for fast food workers, it came complete with an appendix of 137 restaurant chains it believes meet the criteria of its proposed order for a $15 hourly rate.

Cognizant of the impact the higher wages could have on mom-and-pop restaurants—the across-the-board minimum wage in New York will rise to $9 an hour by year's end—the three members of the wage board narrowed their recommendation to national chains, which they defined as having 30 or more locations. That captures the obvious, like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Starbucks.

The resulting list seems to favor smaller, regional chains like Mr. Subb (formerly Mike's Neba), which counts 18 locations in Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady and Saratoga counties.

It gets worse.

Convenience stores like Stewart's and 7-Eleven are not on the list, but the national fast food restaurants that share space in those convenience stores are.

So you'll have some employees in a 7-Eleven subject to the rule while others won't be.

And then there's just inexplicable stuff like this:

Old Country Buffet is covered, but Golden Corral is not. Upstate, Bruegger's Bagels makes the cut, but Long Island's Bagel Boss does not. (Manhattan Bagels is subject to the wage orders.)

For hot dogs, Ted's Hot Dogs in Buffalo will escape the new mandate, as will Troy-based Hot Dog Charlie's. Nathan's Famous, of Coney Island fame, is subject to the new requirements.

Cuomo's new fast food minimum wage recommendations seem to be as messy and nonsensical as Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system that has 50% of an art teacher's rating based upon state test scores in math or evaluates some teachers on test scores of students they don't actually, you know, teach.

The list of businesses subject to the new rules has not been finalized yet, but just looking at the nature of the preliminary list, you can see it's another example of Cuomo's genius at work.

Bloomberg Employees Despise Mike Bloomberg

I love it:

Mike Bloomberg is facing a near revolt from frustrated employees at his financial news and data giant — his biggest challenge yet since returning as the boss of the company he founded almost 34 years ago.

...

Tensions spilled into full view on Thursday when a scathing 3,222-word e-mail from a senior reporter in Bloomberg’s Washington bureau laid bare the crisis in the newsroom.

Dawn Kopecki described a “climate of fear” at the company’s news operations, where tone-deaf editors pit reporters against one another, stifle reporting on major issues and cause staffers to trip over unnecessary hurdles placed in their way by a bloated management.

“I’ve personally been at Bloomberg News for seven years now, three of which have been in DC, and I’ve never seen morale lower,” Kopecki wrote in the e-mail to the two senior editors of the news operation.

Genius at work, sowing discord, doing everything his way because he knows best.

That's the Mike Bloomberg I know and love.

So great to have him doing his destructive act to his own company.

More here.

Seeds For Next Crash Sprout

From the NY Times:

FRANKFURT — An organization representing the world’s main central banks warned Sunday that dangerous new asset bubbles were forming even before the global economy had finished recovering from the last round of financial excess.

Investors, desperate to earn returns even as official interest rates are at or near record lows, have been driving up the prices of stocks and other assets with little regard for risk, the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, said in its annual report published Sunday.

Recovery from the financial crisis that began in 2007 could take several more years, Jaime Caruana, the general manager of the B.I.S., said at the organization’s annual meeting in Basel on Sunday. The recovery could be especially slow in Europe, he said, because debt levels remain high. “During the boom, resources were misallocated on a huge scale,” Mr. Caruana said, according to a text of his speech, “and it will take time to move them to new and more productive uses.”

The B.I.S. acts as a clearinghouse for transactions among national central banks and also as a setting where central bankers can discuss monetary policy and other issues like financial stability or bank regulation.

Its board includes Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the United States Federal Reserve; Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank; and the heads of central banks from Japan, China, India and many other countries.

The organization often uses its annual reports to send a message to political leaders, commercial bankers and investors, and reflects a widespread view among central bankers that they are bearing more than their share of the burden of fixing the global economy.

The language in the 2014 edition was unusually direct, as was its warning that the world could be hurtling toward a new crisis."There is a disappointing element of déjà vu in all this,” Claudio Borio, head of the monetary and economic department at the B.I.S., said in an interview ahead of Sunday’s release of the report, which he described “as a call to action.”

...

The B.I.S. also had harsh words for corporations, which it said were not taking advantage of booming stock markets to step up investment. That is one reason that gains in productivity — the foundation of sustained economic growth — have slowed in most advanced economies, according to the report. “Despite the euphoria in financial markets, investment remains weak,” it said. “Instead of adding to productive capacity, large firms prefer to buy back shares or engage in mergers and acquisitions.”

The overall message from the central bankers was that the world has forgotten the lessons of recent years."The temptation to postpone adjustment can prove irresistible, especially when times are good and financial booms sprinkle the fairy dust of illusory riches,” the B.I.S. said. “The consequence is a growth model that relies too much on debt, both private and public, and which over time sows the seeds of its own demise."

How exciting - the geniuses who brought us the last crash are working on bringing us the next one.

NYSED: Teacher Evaluations Not Confusing

Nope - they're complex!

SCHOOLBOOK: Why are we hearing complaints about children in kindergarten through second grade being given extra assessments that are taking time away from class?

SCHWARTZ: That would depend upon the strategy that was locally collectively bargained. There may be some districts in which they decided that they were going to give a pretest. But that was something that they decided, and we have offered other alternatives for districts that want to take a different direction.

SCHOOLBOOK: What would those alternatives be? You're saying children don't have to take an extra assessment?

SCHWARTZ: No, what I was saying is that in some cases you can use information that is already in hand as the pre-test. In some cases you can use a group measure for the students. In that case, the teachers essentially are using one assessment that may be covering a variety of other teachers in other subjects. So in that case, there are no additional assessments that would need to be used because there's an agreement by that collective bargaining unit that all of the teachers will collectively be assessed based upon a particular assessment.

SCHOOLBOOK: It sounds very confusing.

SCHWARTZ: It is not confusing, it is complex. And it is new. And so when things are new they are unfamiliar and as we all continue to learn about this system, it will become something that will become much clearer to everyone. The confusion will hopefully disappear.

When tests connected to teacher evaluations cannot be explained in a very few simple steps, there is a problem.

The geniuses at SED have very simple problem, which is, the system they created is so "complex" that people find it "confusing" and if the geniuses at SED cannot make the "complex" issue a little less "confusing," that complex system is going to go the way of the Edsel.

Also, as a commenter notes on the NYC story:

Schoolbook, this may be true for the state. But what about for NYC? The local measures for teacher evaluations require tests. Period. Please add it to your story. 

So the solution to make the "complex" problems around testing and evaluations that people are finding "confusing" cannot be solved by the genius solution stated by the genius SED employee because the genius SED Commissioner imposed a system that requires tests - and lots of 'em.

Obama Goes To P-Tech To Find Somebody To Fix Obamacare "Glitches"

Okay, some irony here.

Self-described genius Mike Bloomberg spent $2 billion on a 911 system redo that is so faulty it freezes up sometimes as often as four times a day and just may have contributed to the death of a four year.

Another self-described genius, Barack Obama, has a signature medical program that forces anyone without medical insurance to buy it, except for one big problem - the website doesn't work at all.

These two geniuses came to the vaunted "P-Tech" school in Brooklyn yesterday to brag about all the high techery going on at the school and all I kept thinking in my non-genius brain was, if this school is turning out high tech genius, maybe you geniuses can hire a few of the P-Tech geniuses to fix your faulty 911 system and Obamacare mess.