Chick-Fil-A Franchise

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0723/080.html

Fifty employees and one franchisee grew up in one of 13 Christian foster homes in the U.S. and Brazil run by a nonprofit organization Chick-fil-A funds, the WinShape Foundation. Sixteen others were in Sunday-school classes Cathy teaches at First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Ga. Cathy likes to give a leg up to people who have ambition but little else: The company asks operators to pay just $5,000 as an initial franchise fee. KFC, for example, demands $25,000 and a net worth of $1 million.

Chick-fil-A pays for the land, the construction and the equipment. It then rents everything to the franchisee for 15% of the restaurant’s sales plus 50% of the pretax profit remaining. Operators, who are discouraged from running more than a few restaurants, take home $100,000 a year on average from a single outlet. A solo Bojangles’ franchisee can expect to earn $330,000 (Ebitda) on sales of $1.7 million.

http://www.dbknews.com/2017/02/15/college-park-new-chick-fil-a/

February 14, 2017

Representatives from Chick-fil-A have approached the city about the site at 8907 Baltimore Ave., where the Cass Trailer Sales is currently located and across from Rita's, Mayor Patrick Wojahn said. 

Though it's very early in the process, Terry Schum, the city's planning director, said at this time the city has no way of knowing how quickly this project will move through the application process.

Chick-fil-A has previously tried to bring to College Park a store besides the on-campus location in Stamp Student Union, said District 2 Councilman P.J. Brennan. A proposed restaurant would have been located in the Shoppers strip mall, but the nearby community opposed it, Brennan said.

While there's currently no way of knowing if the Chick-fil-A will actually locate and when it could open, Brennan said if it's approved, things can move "pretty quickly." 

"Every project has its own timeline," Brennan said. "Depending on things like community support, the use of the site … [and] the ability to get it approved through the city's planning board."

http://www.dbknews.com/2017/03/17/chick-fil-a-meeting/

More than 30 residents and several city officials met with company representatives at a Berwyn District Civic Association meeting to discuss the proposed location at 8907 Baltimore Ave, where the Cass Trailer Sales is located across from Rita's.

Chick-fil-A has been "seriously looking" to build in College Park for about four years, said Dan Lynch, a local attorney hired by the company. The fast food chain intends to propose a two-story building with more than 4,600 sq. feet of space, along with an outdoor patio space, according to a Design Intent Package distributed during the meeting.

24 Hours with Ivanka Trump

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a2934/24-hours-with-ivanka-trump/

Min's Proposal Defense

Motivation: Entrepreneurship Lock

Contribution: The relationship of health insurance.

H: ACA medicaid expansion influence the rate of self employment
- increase in self-employment entry either from wage work or unemployment
- exit from employment or decrease in self-employment due to income effect

Sita: Focus on 400% BPL. What is the transition to SE rate?
Fraction is like 1% and so if we are looking at entry/exit. Do we have a big enough sample.

1099 form, they are self-employed but may not be entrepreneur.
Schedule C. What is CPS definition of Self-employed.

Young people don't really respond to ACA. But old people with health conditions do respond. Don't cut at 60 but go to 65 when they are eligible for Medicare.

Answer: Fairlie paper age 55-75. sample in CPS available was about 5100.

Len: How is SE measured. What CPS questions.

Answer: Incorporated or Corporated. Is there a way to look at with the employees vs. no employees.
$27,000 cut off! ACA is that condition of employment is independent if people have health conditions.

Answer: Size of work places. 1-10...

John:
1). I like the transitions to distinguish the substitution effect relative returns to SE. More thought on how to specify those. If income effect, impact those in wage and salary jobs too. It would reduce employment more generally, not just SE.

2). Entry. Relative returns SE vs. WE. Relevance only for those who already had salary jobs. Unfortunately, if you reduce estimation sample size, it makes it even worse. Then the comparison shouldn't be SE vs WE but rather E vs NE.

you need to earn income to qualify to private insurance. But ACA allows insurance even to unemployed.

Control for health status. But it will further reduce sample to a third.

Also look at just transition/job reallocation of employees too.

Lokesh defense

Stephen fuller
2000-2007: acceleration period
2008-2016: recession

How automation impacts job to job flows by periods

16-24 age. About 60% are part time.
2007-2014 almost no wage increases. Equal or less than inflation.

John Earle
Y is flow and x are levels
Young workers and old workers differ in tasks even if similarly coded
State level analysis?
What about wage?

White Supremacists Think

Interview with Jared Taylor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Renaissance_(magazine)
By Eddie Huang

https://www.facebook.com/VICELANDTV/videos/483061395392450/?hc_ref=ARTyqcVKCrQlFYuVT3CQY4srewszx0lzThGsngCIMr3ch52edLulRBAoOq3MaZy35ko


The whole episode
from ~30:00
https://www.viceland.com/en_us/video/huangs-world-washington-dc/593077afe6c3214e4dc3424b

Some thoughts from Econtalk (Solow and Duckworth)

Econ Talk -->

Angela Duckworth (from Econtalk):
Self-control is a skill too. Talent is operationalized as the rate of change in learnigng. Like mfp.

Robert Solow (from Econtalk):
Economic Growth is about having your capital as new as possible. Capital in the early life cycle.

My thoughts -->

Knowledge curse lie oil curse. Defense of liberal arts.
City of geeks that have no social skills.

Hal Varian: Causal Inference, Econometrics, and Big Data

Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xa-hSlJFo0

Lecture Notes
http://www.nasonline.org/programs/sackler-colloquia/documents/varian.pdf

• Train: a model on training data
• Test: a model on holdout data (placebo experiment)
• Treat: apply treatment to treatment group
• Compare: treated to predicted counterfactual (model and/or control group)

Machine Learning folks very good at training and testing data. And, identifying patterns and making predictions.

Social Scientists much better at looking at causal inferences.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act on Entrepreneurship

https://www.sec.gov/rules/other/265-23/2652364.pdf

Does the current securities regulatory system adversely impact or enhance this country's culture of entrepreneurship? Has the current system impaired or enhanced the ability of American companies to compete on a global basis? If so, how?

SOX adversely impacts this country's culture of entrepreneurship; since SOX makes it much less desirable for a smaller company to go public or be public, and going public was one of the major goals of many entrepreneurs. SOX makes American public companies less productive and therby impairs American companies' ability to compete.

Steven Levitt, Sackler Big Data Colloquium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5jATFtKtI8

Big data is big, real-time.

Government is in the business of ruling.
Business is where the big data is really collected.

However, there is less of an understanding in business sector of the importance of big data.

A big airline industry. 6-hour delay is a quasi-random experiment on human behavior. Frequent flyer program. A lot of decision and behavioral data is collected.

A fast food chain. The job application online is taken by 4 million people and some 1.5 million are hired. Simply linking the successful or highly successful to the test would benefit the company 50 million or so dollars. But a lot of resistance.

Revealed Preferences to Revealed Behaviors

Thoughts: We always knew that what people say don't line up exactly to what people actually end up doing. Before, certain industries did market studies whether through surveys or focus groups to identify consumer's revealed preferences. In the age of big data, now it is possible to see right through what people say they prefer or do; and, look at what they actually prefer and do based on their revealed behavior.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/streaming

Traditional network television programming has always followed the same script: executives approve a pilot, order a trial number of episodes, and broadcast them, expecting viewers to watch a given show on their television sets at the same time every week. But then came Netflix’s House of Cards. Netflix gauged the show’s potential from data it had gathered about subscribers’ preferences, ordered two seasons without seeing a pilot, and uploaded the first thirteen episodes all at once for viewers to watch whenever they wanted on the devices of their choice.

In this book, Michael Smith and Rahul Telang, experts on entertainment analytics, show how the success of House of Cards upended the film and TV industries—and how companies like Amazon and Apple are changing the rules in other entertainment industries, notably publishing and music. We’re living through a period of unprecedented technological disruption in the entertainment industries. Just about everything is affected: pricing, production, distribution, piracy. Smith and Telang discuss niche products and the long tail, product differentiation, price discrimination, and incentives for users not to steal content. To survive and succeed, businesses have to adapt rapidly and creatively. Smith and Telang explain how.

How can companies discover who their customers are, what they want, and how much they are willing to pay for it? Data. The entertainment industries, must learn to play a little “moneyball.” The bottom line: follow the data.

Success brings worries too

http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-employees-prepare-sell-stock-lock-up-ipo-2017-7

Unlike the "town hall" meetings at Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, the Q&A at Snap was a written affair. Using a shared document, employees submitted questions to the company's 27-year-old leader.

The result revealed a common anxiety: About one dozen of the questions were a variation of whether employees should worry about Snapchat's competitors, particularly Facebook and Instagram, which appeared to be crimping Snapchat's rapid growth.

Spiegel's responses were short, and the one-word answer "no" was all that was written next to some of the queries, according to multiple people with knowledge of the document. Other answers of Spiegel's explained how employees should not think about the competition and should instead focus on delivering the best products and on innovating.

Five months later, the nervousness percolating within Snap has not gone away. It has spread beyond the company's Southern California headquarters and rattled investors. Snap has lost billions of dollars in value and the stock is trading 50% below the peak it reached on its first day of trading. In the coming days, the window for employees and insiders to sell their shares will finally open, presenting an important test of confidence in the company.

Don't Compare, Part II: Bobby Jindal, Harvard Medical School & Yale Law School

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/24/416990332/5-things-you-should-know-about-bobby-jindal

Jindal graduated at just 20 years old from Brown University with degrees in both biology and public policy. He was admitted to both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but he turned down both to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar.

There, he studied health policy and eventually returned to his native state to serve as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals — all at the young age of 24. Four years later, at just 28, he was appointed the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana system.

http://www.newsweek.com/dozen-things-you-should-know-about-bobby-jindal-346772

After graduating from Brown University, Jindal was accepted to Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but chose to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. He studied health policy during his time at Oxford.

Don't Compare, Part I: John Urschel, From NFL to MIT

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607988/from-the-nfl-to-mit-the-double-life-of-john-urschel/

A set diagram depicts the places where different groups of objects overlap. Example: in the United States, there are about 1,700 professional football players, and thousands of people pursuing PhDs in math. In 2017, a diagram of those two sets overlaps in exactly one place.

Urschel is an offensive lineman with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, a three-year pro with 40 regular-­season games played and a couple of playoff starts on his football résumé. He is also a doctoral candidate in math at MIT who has passed his qualifying exams and has nine published or accepted research papers on his academic résumé.

Urschel grants a few parallels between studying at MIT and playing in the NFL, but he says the comparisons go only so far. “In math, you have to be comfortable with failure,” he says. “In football, that should never be a thing.” Working on math problems, he explains, involves trial and error to an extent that would never be tolerated on a football field.


https://www.theplayerstribune.com/why-i-play-football/

Objectively, I shouldn’t. I have a bright career ahead of me in mathematics. Beyond that, I have the means to make a good living and provide for my family, without playing football. I have no desire to try to accumulate $10 million in the bank; I already have more money in my bank account than I know what to do with. I drive a used hatchback Nissan Versa and live on less than $25k a year. It’s not because I’m frugal or trying to save for some big purchase, it’s because the things I love the most in this world (reading math, doing research, playing chess) are very, very inexpensive.

I play because I love the game. I love hitting people. There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else. My teammates, friends and family can attest to this: When I go too long without physical contact I’m not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work. I’ve fallen in love with the sport of football and the physical contact associated with it.

Simply put, right now, not playing football isn’t an option for me. And for that reason, I truly envy Chris Borland.

A New Gold Rush

Goldrush of Ivy Academics to the West: A New Goldrush for Big Data
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/upshot/how-stanford-took-on-the-giants-of-economics.html

Meaning of Marriage (Timothy & Kathy Keller)

Over the last forty years the leading marriage indicators - empirical descriptions of marriage health and satisfaction in the United States - have been in steady decline. 2

Bradford Wilcox, ed. The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America, 200 (National Marriage Project, University of Virginia). and the Marriage Index: A proposal to Establish leading marriage indicators (Institute for American Values and the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting, 2009).

www.stateoftheunions.org
www.americanvalues.org
www.haptonu.edu/ncaamp


The divorce rate is nearly twice the rate it was in 1960.3

Marriage Index, 5. State of our Union, 78.

In the 1970, 89 percent of all births were to married parents, but today only 60 percent are.4

The Marriage Index, 5.

More tellingly, over 72 percent of American adults were married in 1960, but only 50 percent were in 2008.5

pewsocialtrends.org. "Decline of Marriage and the Rise of New Families."

Today, more than half of all people live together before getting married. In 1960, virtually no one did.6

State of our Union, 84.

One quarter of all unmarried women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine are currently living with a partner, and by their late thirties over 60 percent will have done so.7

Mindy E. Scott. "Young Adults Attitudes about Relationships and Marriage: Times May Have Changed, but Expectations Remain High," in Child Trends: Research Brief.

While it is true that some 45 percent of marriages end in divorce, by far the greatest percentage of divorces happen to those who marry before the age of eighteen, who have dropped out of high school, and who have had a baby together before marrying. "So if you are reasonably well-educated person with a decent income, come from an intact family and are religious, and marry after twenty-five without having a baby firs,t your chances of divorce are low indeed."11

"The Chances of Divorce May Be Much Lower than You Think" The State of Our Union, 80

Many young adults argue for cohabitation because they feel they should own a home and be financially secure before they marry. 12

State of our Union 7

The assumption is that marriage is a financial drain. But studies point to what have been called "The Surprising Economic Benefits of Marriage."13

State of our Union 80


A 1992 study of retirement data shows that individuals who were continuously married had 75 percent more wealth at retirement than those who never married or who divorced and did not remarry. Even more remarkably, married men have been shown to earn 10-40 percent more than do single men with similar education and job histories.

All surveys tell us that the number of married people who say they are "very happy" in their marriages is high- about 61-62 percent - and there has been little decrease in this figure during the last decade. Most striking of all, longitudinal studies demonstrate that two-thirds of those unhappy marriages out there will become happy within five years if people stay married and do not get divorced.18

Linda Waite, et al. Does Diveorce Make People Happy? Findings from a Study of Unhappy Marriages (American Values Institute, 2002)

This led University of Chicago sociologist Linda J. Waite to say, "the benefits of divorce have been oversold."19

Linda Waite, et al. Does Diveorce Make People Happy? Findings from a Study of Unhappy Marriages (American Values Institute, 2002)