John T. Reed’s news blog

Wal-Mart today announced wage increases to stem an overly high turnover rate. I have often written about quit rate and its significance. Normal is about 20% per year. That is, in a normal organization, about 20% of the employees quit per year. I don’t want to quibble about the percentage. Whatever it is, there is a normal quit rate. Quit rate below 20% = overpaid If your quit rate is HIGHER, as at Wal-Mart, your pay/benefits/working conditions package is too low. Conversely, if your quite rate is BELOW 20% per year, your pay/benefits/working conditions package is too generous.Who fits that...

All baseball players should bat left-handed. I’m not kidding. If you know a coach who is letting any of his players bat right-handed, he is committing coach malpractice. If you know a father who is letting his kids bat right-handed, he is committing father malpractice.  Here’s why.

Donald Trump and Chris Christie have recently been denounced and dismissed as bullies. I have never met anyone who hated bullies as much as I did. The biggest fight of my life was a four-year battle when I was an Army officer. Against whom? Almost every single one of my military superiors. What was the problem? They were bullies. I refused to be bullied. To my amazement, I was accused of being a bully myself in the last year or two in some Facebook debates. No power over the bullied By my definition, neither I nor Trump nor Christie could...

I saw the movie The Big Short last night. I recommend it, although the book was far better.  Good explanations of the technical aspects They had an interesting approach to explaining the technical aspects of the sub prime crisis. Namely, they would essentially, stop the movie, and have the actors and celebrity experts in other fields speak directly to the audience using analogies to explain mortgage bundles, credit default swaps (insurance against bond defaults including mortgage bonds), side bets on the mortgage bundles, etc. Written by Michael Lewis The Big Short book by Michael Lewis (who also wrote Blindside and...

Profiling based on statistics, not bigotry, is legit Racial profiling is considered taboo in the U.S. The nation was too quick to make that change. They should undo it. Furthermore, only racial profiling was taboo, not any other kind of profiling. Americans have unconsciously grafted onto racial profiling the whole litany of race, creed, color, religion, sexual preference, and so on. The U.S. Supreme Court actually approved racial profiling under certain circumstances in the 1996 Armstrong case. We have had laws that discriminate against foreign Muslims since 2002: men over sixteen years old who enter the country from twenty-five Middle Eastern countries and North Korea are...