Feeling poorer lately?

[Robert Taylor]

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1...Ib6aGm4,00.html

Does anyone remember "stagflation" from the 70's?

[Sufferin' Prius Envy]

Well, as they say, statistics lie . . . or can be interpreted any way you need to substantiate your own perception.

The article seems to beat around the edges without actually saying so (" . . . or Wal-Mart is cunning . . . but there are so many willing low-skill workers that their wages don't rise.") . . . but I wonder how much the millions of illegal aliens in the US workforce brings down the average hourly wage? God knows they increase the productivity, but I bet they have a wicked effect on the statistical average wage!

Just think "Wal-Mart and their night clean-up crew of illegal aliens." How much less did Wal-Mart pay them than they would have paid the displaced US citizen?

[Robert Taylor]

Well, as they say, statistics lie . . . or can be interpreted any way you need to substantiate your own perception.

The article seems to beat around the edges without actually saying so (\" . . . or Wal-Mart is cunning . . . but there are so many willing low-skill workers that their wages don't rise.\") . . . but I wonder how much the millions of illegal aliens in the US workforce brings down the average hourly wage? God knows they increase the productivity, but I bet they have a wicked effect on the statistical average wage!

Just think "Wal-Mart and their night clean-up crew of illegal aliens." How much less did Wal-Mart pay them than they would have paid the displaced US citizen?

What was sort of unique about the 90/91 downturn was it featured incredible numbers of white collar layoffs. This time around the same thing happened, but demand has not picked up for white collar non-health care related workers much.

Serious questions:

1. Can your present job be accomplished by someone employed in another country?
2. If no, can your customers answer no?

Stagflation is going on right now, that is the cost of consumer goods is rising much faster than earnings. Fuel cost increases are jacking up the costs of all goods. A discount store gallon jug of whole milk was 2.10 10 years ago. Now its 3.10. Everything has gone up.

[Robert Taylor]

Oh, a bit more about Wal-Mart. The nearby Wal-Mart store has taken out 1/3 of the cashier stations in favor of self checkout. I love self checkout, there is no wait and I am on my merry way with no wait in line for a human to do some simple tasks.

For the eight or so self checkout stations there is one monitor who is training customers in their proper use.

So the day can now be seen where the cashier is GONE, long gone, like gas station attendants they are on the road to extinction. Just how many jobs is that? Just in the Wal-Mart stores? And with that cost reduction comes a competitive advantage that other retailers will have to match, so guess what? Companies that cannot follow this example are going to go under, and that means those union workers in Kroger.

Next will be the stocking robots? Can the entire store be computerized for total customer self help? Security people. The last to go.

[KCPrius]

For the eight or so self checkout stations there is one monitor who is training customers in their proper use.

Actually, that one person does a bit more than that. Case in point - I am trying to quit smoking, so I bought some of that nicotine gum. Scan that, and you reach a standstill until someone comes over and enters a code verifying that you are over 18.

[Sufferin' Prius Envy]

I am trying to quit smoking, so I bought some of that nicotine gum.

Congrats on the quitting smoking campaign.

Years ago a friend also quit smoking. She quit while she was in Nursing School. She said seeing all the gross pictures of cancers, lung diseases, and associated surgeries put her over the top on her way to being a non-smoking zealot.

If you ever feel the urge, maybe a few well timed views of grossness will help bring you back from the edge. Maybe Doc Evan can steer you to a few particularly gross web images.

[KCPrius]

Congrats on the quitting smoking campaign.

Years ago a friend also quit smoking. She quit while she was in Nursing School. She said seeing all the gross pictures of cancers, lung diseases, and associated surgeries put her over the top on her way to being a non-smoking zealot.

If you ever feel the urge, maybe a few well timed views of grossness will help bring you back from the edge. Maybe Doc Evan can steer you to a few particularly gross web images.

Thanks. Actually, this is my second time to quit. First time was about 20 years ago, then some very rough times hit and I started again. But what burns me up is that 20 years ago, you could go into a convenience store, and for $1.00 buy a 5 pack of "fake" cigaretts...little plastic tubes that looked just like a cigarette, but held a small container of nicotine in the front. You didn't light it...just drew on it like inhaling a cigarette. You got the "nicotine fix" and not the damaging tar and smoke. I smoked almost 3 packs of cigarettes a day back then, and on little 5 pack lasted me for a day. They worked, too. But....it was considered a "drug delivery system" and was pulled off the market.

Today, it's over $50 at Costco for the gum...more than that for the patch, and the "inhaler", which looks (and works) remarkably like that $1.00 pack of fake cigarettes, costs in excess of $80. And to think that 20 years ago, the technology existed to offer that for a buck. If this country wants people to quit, make the stop smoking aids cost less than the damn cigarettes.

[Sufferin' Prius Envy]

If this country wants people to quit, make the stop smoking aids cost less than the damn cigarettes.

If taxes are being paid on purchase of those aids, that should be removed too. The benefit to society of more smokers quitting is greater than that tax would ever produce.

[jayman]

Does anyone remember "stagflation" from the 70's?

Yep

[jayman]

Well, as they say, statistics lie . . . or can be interpreted any way you need to substantiate your own perception.

Patrick:

Politicians lie all the time, and the numbers they quote also lie. Anybody who places blind faith in a politician is a fool. A person who worships a politicean is an Evil fool.

I think I've mentioned in other posts that the field of statistics is fraught with hidden dangers that the average person has no comprehension of.

My favorite: the "random sample" of people when they gauge consumer sentiment. Explain to me why over 20 years when you compare wages to the price of a new car, a new home, etc, something is seriously out of whack when they claim we have "low"inflation? What "market basket of goods" are they measuring??

Whenever somebody has the urge to spout an official-sounding statistic at me, I always counter with: What are the results of ANOVA, F & T, Weibull, Chi Squared, R Squared, DFFITS ... and they run away screaming.

The thing is, we never ever see the "raw" data. Usually the raw data is considered confidential or classified so we'll *never* see it. All raw data is trimmed or "studentized" to make it fit to a particular curve. This is done by using cumbersome math formulas to strip outliers and "fit" the results to the "expected" result.

Much like how, for the same reason, Carbon 14 dating of something is a complete crock of s*** .

So unless you can personally inspect the raw data, compare it to the studentized results, and determine if autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity (Autoregression) exists, and more importantly how to correct (Eg: a consistent covariant matrix), then you certainly cannot trust the neatly polished and presented "facts" you are given.

I should explain that homoscedasticity is when variance in Y remains relatively the same regardless of the values taken by X. Heteroscedasticity is when the variance changes, eg the variance in Y increases as the values taken by X increase.

As far as robots stocking shelves, that is already being implemented. Once you slap a bar code on something, it's trivial to use a scanning laser to identify and sort. Like how baggage is sorted at places like PIT and DIA.

Jay