If you would enjoy a novel about family, love, product management, and Chinese manufacturing, then If You Can Get It might be just the book for you.

It is not shocking when a non profit at the scale of $200M/yr has a CEO or CFO paid $250k/yr It takes skills to run an org that large well, which few people have, and someone decent could make twice that in the private sector in that kind of role.

@ColumbiaMayor Unless this is some sort of joke to esoteric for me to get. Her general vibe is super MAGA Catholic mom, so it's not like her takes are normally commie.

According to the latest financials, the overhead percentage for Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston is 3%. That said, they're not in the business of just giving out money. They have CC employees to do food distribution, housing support, elder care, case management, counseling, etc. So those people who directly do work with the people they are serving would be considered a direct aid expense, while an overhead expense would be an accountant or fundraiser or executive. Since right now all funds are on a hold, the issue may be that they tend to send money right out the door as it comes in, so without a bunch of money in the bank, they can't keep paying people when the payments stop.

@EricRSammons @_gidDy_Up_ Or what if… the same bishops in most cases are both in favor in Trump actions in regards to trans issues and against Trump actions in regards to immigration.

Who do video game makers sometimes discount their games by 30%, 50%, or even 75%? Do they make money at those discount levels? In the latest Pricing Evolution Podcast I dive into video game pricing and the implications of a zero marginal cost product

@crousselle It's quite a throng, but the company is good.

I opened my email this morning and saw this ad. Why does it say "3 for $199" instead of "On sale for $66.33"? As I wrote in my latest pricing article last night, because they want to sell you 3 or 6 shirts, not 1.

The latest Dispatch Faith podcast had a really good interview with @MatthewSoerens in which he explained what @WorldRelief's refugee resettlement work actually does. Soerens also tackled tough issues like how refugee resettlement in Springfield OH was not how they do things in his organization, and arguably it was a key example of how clumsy government programs work less well than work outsourced to faith-based organizations affiliated with local churches, which focus on assimilation. The first half of the interview, with the Catholic bishop of of El Paso and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration was honestly pretty disappointing by comparison. He spoke in very broad terms, did not get into the details of the refugee resettlement programs the USCCB is actually doing, and did not engage much with questions he was asked about what reasonable border enforcement would actually look like. That first half was a missed opportunity for the Catholic bishops, but I really strongly recommend the second half.

@shadihamid It seems like “the West” goes beyond the US, and in Europe broadly we have most of the European economy slipping into stagnation (and trying to simultaneously stand up to Russia and buy oil from it.) Within Europe Poland seems to show pretty well.

@LeahLibresco @aarmlovi Though also note: the Calif pic is actually of 18 egg cartons

This week's edition of the Pricing Evolution Podcast was particularly fun to put together: How pricing disrupted the publishing industry, from mega bookstores to Amazon to eBooks.

@LeahLibresco There's something really decadent about a government that would take something as essential to keeping people alive as air traffic control and say, "We should really lower the standards and not hire as many people as needed rather than have the workforce look wrong."

I do agree that the bishops do not give much rhetorical weight to the necessity of a state having reasonable limits on immigration, or to the other limits of state spending and resources. But don't get the claim that the bishops have not spoken out on abortion and trans issues. They hit Biden on abortion the day he was inaugurated (to the extreme annoyance of the Vatican) and continued on from there. And on trans issues too, the USCCB has pretty clearly been out in front of the Vatican.

Just to be clear, the spending on the migrant and refugee related programs are categorized in their financials as a separate department (shown here as MRS) and the salaries and admin we're talking about are the salaries and admin shown as spent on that department. If it were correct that some of those salaries and admin allocated to MRS were actually doing other stuff (say, working on liturgy, or trimming the verge) what we'd see is that additional spending would mysteriously pop up in other departments when the government funding went away. It didn't look to me like we'd seen an effect like that when federal funding dropped by 50% during the first Trump admin, but I guess if the migrant and refugee funds go away entirely we'll find out.

I don't know if I'm super charitably inclined about the fact that bishops spend more than twice as much on "Development & World Peace" (over which they arguably have very little influence) as they do on Pro-Life Activities (over which they could have a lot)... But I do think the bishops clearly care about immigration and refugees as a topic and would allocate money to the issue regardless of whether they did government contracting or not.

I see the point that you're making there. The bishops do cut their spending on salaries and admin related to refugees and migrants when spending is lower: from $15M/yr during the Obama years to $13M/yr during the first Trump admin. I think it's reasonable to assume that if all government funding went away, they would probably continue to have a spending category related to immigration and refugees, but it would be more the size of the Pro Life Activities budget ($2M in 2021) or the Development & World Peace budget ($4.8M in 2021) In other words, the amount they would spend without government intervention would probably be similar to the "overspend" that we see now.