Oleg Zabluda's blog: July 12, 2018

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Thursday, July 12, 2018

How Labor Regulation Harms Unskilled Workers
How Labor Regulation Harms Unskilled Workers
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under the Davis–Bacon Act a laborer who places and picks up orange cones
around a federal highway project in California has a minimum wage of $43.97 an hour
[...]
“Obamacare,” [...] Firms that provide insufficient health insurance (or no insurance at all) face penalties of $2,000–$3,000 per employee per year.
[...]
Taken together, these regulations substantially increase the minimum cost of employing even the least-skilled workers. In a location with a $15 minimum wage, the actual all-in cost per hour with taxes and minimum benefits might be as high as $21 an hour. [...] 40% price increase
[...]
Liability for bad employee behavior [...] One potential way employers can manage this risk is to shift their hiring from unskilled employees to college graduates. [...] Similarly, because good information on prospective employees—credit checks, background checks, reference checks, discussions of past employment and salary—all have new legal limitations, employers who hire college graduates benefit from the substantial due diligence universities perform in their admissions process.
[...]
Most of these regulations impose fixed costs [...] tend to increase the
minimum size a business must be to remain viable. [...] even worse for many small businesses, the only person who can usually manage this compliance work is the owner [...] employment will shift from smaller to larger companies. This is indeed what the United States has experienced for over two decades [...] since 1992 most of the new small businesses formed have had no employees at all. These zero-employee companies are a predictable result of the increasing regulatory costs of hiring because these sorts of business owners are generally exempt from much of labor regulation. A company in which only the owners provide labor is substantially less expensive to operate than a company with even one employee.
[...]
The decline in the relative share of employment at small businesses and the decreased job creation from new small businesses have a disproportionate effect on unskilled labor because small businesses have always been a particular source of opportunity for less educated workers. In 1998, before most of these declines in small business employment share, 52.2% of small business employees had high school diplomas or less, while just 44.5% of larger company employers had this level of education.
"""
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2018/6/regulation-v41n2-1.pdf

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2018/07/i-have-the-cover-story-in-regulation-magazine-how-labor-regulation-harms-unskilled-workers.html
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2018/07/i-have-the-cover-story-in-regulation-magazine-how-labor-regulation-harms-unskilled-workers.html

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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plastic covers, costing $1.50 each, to hide four pads on the underside of the car where a jack goes. The decision reduced wind resistance and improved the car’s range by 3 miles.
[...]
Musk’s disregard for precedent [...] In the weeks before the March 2016 public unveiling of the Model 3 design, employees took bets on how many prospective buyers would pay a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve one. The most optimistic prediction was around 200,000; the actual number was twice that. [...] Tesla had said it expected to spend 28 months to reach large-scale mass production, but after seeing demand for the car, Tesla moved up the timeline by 15 months. It had previously said it would build 500,000 cars per year by 2020, a goal skeptics called outlandish. But in May 2016, Musk said the plan was to do that in 2018.

In an unconventional move, Musk restructured Tesla, assigning the engineers who designed the Model 3 to invent its manufacturing process. He put Field in charge of the factory and gave him the budget to automate as much of the car assembly as possible. [1]
[...]
In July 2017, Musk delivered the first Model 3
[...]
In retrospect, Musk says, trying to automate so much of Tesla’s factory at once was overly ambitious. “We thought it would be good, but it was not good,” he says. “We were huge idiots and didn’t know what we were doing.”

This April, Musk took over manufacturing engineering personally. “I’m back to sleeping at factory. Car biz is hell.” Field, who’d been in charge of the factory, took a leave of absence the following month; he later left the company.
[...]
Musk turned 47 in late June, during the final sprint to make 5,000 cars a week. “First bday I’ve spent in the factory. but it’s somehow the best.”
[...]
At present, the Model 3 is selling more units in the U.S. than any comparably priced midsize sedan, including those offered by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi.
"""
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-12/how-tesla-s-model-3-became-elon-musk-s-version-of-hell

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-12/how-tesla-s-model-3-became-elon-musk-s-version-of-hell

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Dropout as a Low-Rank Regularizer for Matrix Factorization (2018) Jacopo Cavazza, et al.
Dropout as a Low-Rank Regularizer for Matrix Factorization (2018) Jacopo Cavazza, et al.
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We demonstrate the equivalence between dropout and a fully deterministic model for matrix factorization (MF) in which the factors are regularized by the sum of the product of squared Euclidean norms of the columns. Additionally, we inspect the case of a variable sized factorization and we prove that dropout achieves the global minimum of a convex approximation problem with (squared) nuclear norm regularization. As a result, we conclude that dropout can be used as a low-rank regularizer with data dependent singular-value thresholding.
"""
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05092
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05092

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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"""
According to the pollster Ipsos, 70 percent of French people think that France is in decline. That's the same level as a year ago; but the proportion that thinks this decline is irreversible has risen to 24 percent, up four points from last year. In 2017, 53 percent thought the future of France was full of opportunity and new possibilities; that has fallen by 9 points one year later, and by 29 points among socialists. Confidence in the French president has fallen by 10 points, at 34 percent.
"""
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-12/world-cup-2018-france-scores-but-macron-gets-a-yellow-card
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-12/world-cup-2018-france-scores-but-macron-gets-a-yellow-card

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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