Reverie

We haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. -Lewis Thomas, physician and author

The Chick-fil-A  stores are closed on Sundays due to the founder’s religious beliefs. That turns out to be good business as well.
According to trade publication QSR, in 2016 the average Chick-fil-A brought in 73% more revenue in six days than the average McDonald’s did in seven days. Nor is it just McDonald’s. Chick-fil-A sales were triple the average Wendy’s sales, again with one less day per week to do it.Against vigorous competition, Chick-fil-A easily wins the revenue fight with one hand tied behind its back, so to speak.
One reason: Chick-fil-A seems to treat its staff well—not so much with higher wages, but opportunities for education and advancement.
But there’s something else, too:  Chick-fil-A workers know they’ll always have Sundays off. Does that give Chick-fil-A lower turnover and better-trained workers? 
There is a lot of assumptions here. Maybe people just like chicken more than hamburgers. Or maybe people like the "discrimination towards cows" ad campaign that some people so strangely protest.
But there is something going on.


An interesting suggestion (Bordeaux): "Democratic institutions are heavily concentrated in countries that also have strong protections for private property rights, openness to foreign commerce, and other features broadly consistent with capitalism. That’s why the observation that any two democracies are quite unlikely to go to war against each other might reflect the consequences of capitalism more than democracy."


Inflation-adjusted savings as a percentage of disposable income have been dropping since the 1970s. They bounced in the last recession but fell again after it ended. Now savings are near an all-time 2% low.
 

Omnishambles:

Chiefly British Informal. a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences. An interesting origin and evolution.

The first element of omnishambles, omni- “all,” is familiar in English in omnibus, omnipotent, omnivorous, and omniscient, derived from the Latin adjective omnis “all.” Shambles has a gorier history. In the 9th century the Old English noun scomol (spelled variously) simply meant “stool, footstool,” derived from Latin scamellum, scamillum “low stool.” By the 10th century the noun also meant “a counter or table for conducting business”; by the 14th century the word acquired the sense “table or counter for selling meat.” During the 16th century shambles came to mean “slaughterhouse; place of wholesale carnage.” Shambles in the sense “a mess, a ruin, scene of disorder” was originally an Americanism, first occurring in print in 1926.

The Edward Curtis collection of books has been republished in two distinct editions, a Limited and a Reference Edition. The Limited includes all twenty original volumes, 1,511 photographs and illustrations, 5,023 pages of text, and extensive transcriptions of Native languages and music. 75 were printed and 6 are available, at $33,500.00 each.
(An original recently sold for $2.88 million dollars at auction.)


"When the modern political community was being shaped at the end of the eighteenth century, its founders thought that the consequences of republican or representative institutions in government would be the reduction of political power in individual lives.
Nothing seems to have mattered more to such minds as Montesquieu, Turgot, and Burke in Europe and to Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the United States than the expansion of freedom in the day-to-day existence of human beings, irrespective of class, occupation, or belief.  Hence the elaborate, carefully contrived provisions of constitution or law whereby formal government would be checked, limited, and given root in the smallest possible assemblies of the people.  The kind of arbitrary power Burke so detested and referred to almost constantly in his attacks upon the British government in its relation to the American colonists and the people of India and Ireland, and upon the French government during the revolution, was foremost in the minds of all the architects of the political community, and they thought it could be eliminated, or reduced to insignificance, by ample use of legislative and judicial machinery."--Nisbet

With the Fed expected to hike interest rates four times this year, plus reduction of their $4.4 trillion balance sheet, rates are rising. In less than 12 months, short-year Treasury yields have more than doubled.

Used car prices for electric cars are up a lot.

 

Is it my imagination or does Stormy Daniels have her own news channel?

 

Protectionism is a scythe that slices through core conservative principles, including opposition to government industrial policy, and to government picking winners and losers, and to crony capitalism elevated to an ethic (“A few Americans first”). Big, bossy government does not get bigger or bossier than when it embraces protectionism — government dictating what goods Americans can choose, and in what quantities, and at what prices.--Will

Barron's reviewed a beer recently! What is happening?



For a thousand years the greatest share of labor in most societies has been supplied by adult women.  They produced and raised children.  They also produced much if not most of the good and services essential to human existence and comfort.  To do all this they typically worked from dawn to dusk, and even later once artificial light permitted it.

In the past 75 years, however, major changes have taken place in the pattern of women’s work in the United States.  Between 1900 and 1975 the workday of U.S. housewives was cut in half.--Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s book, The Americans: An Economic Record

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/02/kidnapped-women-among-native-americans.html
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Kidnapped Women Among the Native Americans steeleydock.blogspot.com Mrs. Kelly's adventures among the American Indian was read to me recently and these notes are the result of some comparative stories I co...

... if no private markets exist to encourage the recycling of the likes of cans and plastic bags, a good presumption is that the value of the resources consumed in the recycling of such items is greater than is the value of the recycled outputs.  And remember that one of the resources consumed in recycling is human time and effort – time and effort that, for most Americans, are too valuable to spend recycling low-value items.--Bordeaux



It appears that Obama has decided to continue the true nature of modern politics by developing an entertainment product for Netflix. Sort of backwards from what Trump did.



Throughout history, when valuations have been as high as they are today, returns have been in the low single digits or negative over the next decade. JPMorgan Asset Management’s Gabriela Santos says investors should be focused on emerging market equities, specifically Latin America



Toys R Us  is preparing to liquidate all of its U.S. stores and abandon efforts to restructure through the bankruptcy process.

 

The New York Times reports that HHS Secretary Alex Azar said physicians “and hospitals should tell patients how much their care would cost before patients received treatment.” Azar said, “You ought to have the right to know what a health care service will cost – and what it will really cost – before you get that service.” He warned that if the healthcare industry fails to make this change “voluntarily...the government may use its leverage to force them to disclose the information.”




AAAAaaaaannnnnnnndddddd......a graph:
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Image: realinvestmentadvice.com