February 1, 2016

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Entertainment February 1, 2016

Today in Movie Culture: Grindhouse 'Star Wars,' Tim Burton's 'Pinocchio' and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Reimagined Movie of the Day:

Mashable made a trailer that makes Star Wars into a Grindhouse movie:

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Mashup of the Day:

Artist Jerome Gomez mixed together Star Wars and Blade Runner for a piece he titles “A Dark Jedi and a Renegade Princess” (via Live for Films):

Misunderstood Movie of the Day:

The Wolf of Wall Street is badly analyzed by an alien in the latest episode of Earthling Cinema:

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Fan Build of the Day:

Learn how to make a replica golden snitch from the Harry Potter movies in the latest episode of DIY Prop Shop:

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Cosplay of the Day:

Who wouldn’t want another Hellboy sequel if all the characters were recast with pugs (via Fashionably Geek)?

Visual Effects Reel of the Day:

See why Jurassic World should have been nominated for an Oscar for its visual effects with this video from ILM (via io9):

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Fake Remake of the Day:

Tim Burton is apparently the go-to guy for directing live-action remakes of Disney’s animated classics, but here’s what it would look like if he directed an animated remake of Disney’s Pinocchio. See other reimagined Disney animated films at Nerd Approved.

Retrospective Trailer of the Day:

In honor of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare‘s death, the British Film Institute has programmed a series on Shakespeare on film. Here’s a trailer for the retrospective:

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Supercut of the Day:

Jim Casey compiled what he believes to be the most beautiful shots in movie history (via Geek Tyrant):

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 55th anniversary of the release of John Huston‘s The Misfits. Watch the original trailer for the film, which stars Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, below.

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Business February 1, 2016

Farm Subsidies Persist And Grow, Despite Talk Of Reform

A farmer deposits harvested corn outside a grain elevator in Virginia, Ill., in 2015. Corn and soy have fallen, and farmers are receiving payments under a new program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that total government aid to farmers will swell to $23.9 billion in 2017.

A farmer deposits harvested corn outside a grain elevator in Virginia, Ill., in 2015. Corn and soy have fallen, and farmers are receiving payments under a new program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that total government aid to farmers will swell to $23.9 billion in 2017. Seth Perlman/AP hide caption

toggle caption Seth Perlman/AP

Farm subsidies don’t lack for critics. Free-market conservatives and welfare state-defending liberals alike have called for deep cuts in these payments to farmers. After all, farmers, as a group, are wealthier than the average American. Why should they get tens of billions of dollars each year in federal aid?

Two years ago, when the most recent Farm Bill emerged from Congress, the measure’s authors proudly announced what sounded like bold cuts in these controversial programs. The Senate Agriculture Committee noted in a press release that the new law would eliminate one big subsidy altogether and save taxpayers a total of $23.3 billion over the following 10 years.

Those projected savings, it turns out, were a mirage. According new estimates for Farm Bill spending over the next few years released by the Congressional Budget Office, total government aid to farmers will swell to $23.9 billion in 2017.

“What happened to the savings taxpayers were promised?” says Colin O’Neil, from the Environmental Working Group, a long-time opponent of farm subsidies.

Actually, many opponents of government subsidies saw this coming. “Cynics like me fully expected this to work out the way it has,” says Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. “Farm policy isn’t really about policy. It’s about farmers getting their money. And the agriculture committees in Congress are there to make sure that farmers get their money.”

Over the decades, Congress has periodically changed the way these programs work. This latest Farm Bill ditched a politically unpopular subsidy program that wrote checks to farmers simply based on the number of acres they owned. In its place, the law set up new programs that pay farmers when commodity prices fall. And indeed they have been falling since the last Farm Bill.

Many observers, in fact, expected corn and soybean prices to fall, because they had been extraordinarily high in recent years.

“Farmers made a gamble,” says David Orden, an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “They were gambling that if prices came down, they’d get more money this way.” That gamble, it seems, paid off.

If prices stay low, or rebound, spending under some of these new programs should decline, but only gradually — and within a few years Congress will once again revise the Farm Bill.

Orden does believe that over the long term, there has been progress in abolishing some of the most wasteful farm subsidies. “We used to do all sorts of things to maintain high market prices for farmers,” he says.

For example, the government used to buy up large amounts of agricultural commodities and either store them or export them at much lower prices. It also paid farmers to take vast amounts of land out of production. Those programs, Orden says, were probably more damaging to the overall economy than the payments and crop insurance payouts that farmers get today.

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Health February 1, 2016

Bosses Find Part-Time Workers Can Come With Full-Time Headaches

Skimping on health insurance carries a hidden price for some fast-food restaurants.
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Skimping on health insurance carries a hidden price for some fast-food restaurants. Paula Connelly/Getty Images hide caption

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Starting in 2016, the federal health law requires small employers to offer their full-time workers health insurance. In anticipation of the change, some fast-food restaurants looked to get around the law by making more workers part time. Now some owners are rethinking that approach.

At a Burger King off Highway 99 in California’s Central Valley, a half-dozen workers in black uniforms scurry around, grabbing packets of ketchup and stuffing paper bags with french fries.

Tiana Mua has worked here part time for almost a year. She’d like to be full time, but at this Burger King only the managers are full time. (The company didn’t respond to an interview request.)

Mua says that’s the situation at fast-food joints all over town. “They’re cutting back on all the jobs, and a lot of people have been let go and everything already,” Mua says.

One reason: The local economy is bad. People aren’t eating out as much, and sales are down. But there’s another reason that might explain why fast-food employees aren’t getting more hours: Obamacare.

Starting Jan. 1, businesses with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health insurance to all full-time staff or pay a hefty fine. Employers with 100 or more workers had to start offering coverage last year. But smaller businesses that operate on lower margins, especially restaurants, complained loudly about the cost.

And some fast-food franchise owners figured out a way to avoid paying for coverage: Just make as many workers as possible part time. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey found nearly 60 percent of small franchise businesses said they would make personnel changes like this.

“The ones that did it successfully did it three or four years ago,” says Kaya Bromley, an attorney who helps employers comply with the Affordable Care Act. But, Bromley says, some of the restaurant owners who cut hours to sidestep the health law now regret it.

“A lot of the fast-food franchisees that did this,” she says, “are now coming back and saying, ‘it was a great idea for reducing the number of people that I have to offer benefits, but now I can’t run my restaurants.’ “

They tell her it has been a nightmare trying to manage a part-time staff.

“Because you’ve got people who are less loyal, you’ve got people who are less skilled — who don’t understand the business,” she says. There’s also more employee turnover.

Bromley has seen many of those restaurants reverse course. “Employers think that there’s a shortcut here or there, and then they realize, yeah, that shortcut really hurt me more than it helped me,” she says.

The people hurt most by all the workforce management gymnastics are the people at the bottom of the restaurant pecking order who want to advance, but can’t, says Angelo Amador, vice president of labor and workforce policy for the National Restaurant Association.

“Someone who’s working part time, but wants more hours so they can move up the ladder, they can’t get the hours,” he says. “It ends up taking out that middle rung of employees.”

Obamacare has made restaurants less flexible, he says, mainly because it defines full-time work as 30 hours a week or more. Amador says most other laws restaurants have to comply with, like overtime pay, define full time as 40 hours. He thinks the Affordable Care Act should be changed for consistency.

“It would be much easier if we could have one definition of full time,” he says.

At the Carl’s Junior in Chowchilla, Calif., manager Silvia Campos tries to keep as many workers full time as possible. She says it makes her job easier. “It’s a small town,” she says. “For me, it’s hard to find a really good employee.”

But some workers don’t want more hours. Their part-time salary is low enough that they’re eligible for government coverage in California through Medicaid.

Some workers say they’re better off making less money and getting their coverage free from the state.

This story comes from a reporting partnership of NPR, KQED and Kaiser Health News.

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Sports February 1, 2016

John Scott Named MVP With 2 Goals In NHL All-Star Game

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John Scott is the most unlikely NHL All Star. NPR’s Kelly McEvers talks to Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo! Sports about how the enforcer scored two goals and was an MVP at Sunday night’s All-Star Game.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

All right, now for a story of a goon-made-good. Stay with me, here. NHL defenseman John Scott is an enforcer. And in hockey, the term for enforcer is goon. Goons aren’t paid to score goals. They’re paid to fight. So goons are unlikely heroes. But John Scott is a favorite of fans. They voted him into this year’s All-Star game much to the dismay of the NHL. And to the delight of hockey fans everywhere, Scott scored two goals in last night’s All-Star game and is now the most unlikely All-Star game MVP ever. Joining me on the line to talk about this is Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo Sports. Welcome.

GREG WYSHYNSKI: Great to be here. Thanks.

MCEVERS: All right, so how often do goons like John Scott actually make the All-Star game?

WYSHYNSKI: That would be never.

(LAUGHTER)

MCEVERS: OK.

WYSHYNSKI: They’re hardly ever – there have been a few through the years. Chris Nilan, who was an infamous fighter in the 1980s and ’90s was the in to an All-Star team at one point. But for the most part, these are players that are on the outside looking in while the skilled players in the National Hockey League do their thing in the All-Star game unless, of course, you’re the NHL and you open up the fan voting to allow any player to be elected to the All-Star game, which, in their tomfoolery, they did. And a chaotic group of miscreants and NHL fans on Reddit and social media pushed John Scott to the top of the popular vote. He had more votes than Alex Ovechkin, Patrick Kane, Jaromir Jagror and other stars, and he was an All-Star captain.

MCEVERS: I mean, I said that, you know, he was voted in to the dismay of the NHL. Explain how the league dealt with this and reacted to it.

WYSHYNSKI: Poorly would be the word I’d use.

MCEVERS: (Laughter) OK.

WYSHYNSKI: They – for the first time in my career as a sport’s writer, an All-Star vote was held where they didn’t reveal any of the vote totals during the voting, which is something, like, they like to crow about. They didn’t reveal the vote totals during the voting. They didn’t reveal the vote totals after the voting. Once this unlikely candidate led all voting, they didn’t do any kind of feature story on him or anything else.

But it goes beyond that. John Scott revealed in an article in The Players’ Tribune a few days before the All-Star game that the NHL actually was discouraging him taking this spot in their All-Star game. Somebody from the NHL actually said to John Scott, what will your daughters think if you take this spot in the All-Star game over somebody who is more deserving? And that was his breaking point. That was the moment in which John Scott decided, I’m going to go to this game because no one is going to try to…

MCEVERS: Tell me what to do.

WYSHYNSKI: …Tell me that my family’s ashamed of me.

MCEVERS: Wow. And so here we have this newly minted All-Star MVP, and now he’s actually going to be playing in the minor leagues for the St John’s Ice Caps in Newfoundland. What happened there?

WYSHYNSKI: He was playing with the Arizona Coyotes. In Scott’s theory, he was traded out of spite after refusing to step down from his All-Star game spot. The Montreal Canadiens team to which he was traded to put him in the American Hockey League. And the theory was, being that he wasn’t in the NHL anymore, he wouldn’t be in the NHL All-Star game. But the league said, you’re more than welcome to come. So not only was there an enforcer in the NHL All-Star game. There was a guy who was not even in the NHL anymore in the NHL All-Star game.

MCEVERS: And I got to ask, like, why would the NHL not want somebody to play in the All-Star game who the fans had voted?

WYSHYNSKI: Because it wasn’t planned, and they don’t roll with the punches very well, this league. But the beautiful irony of this whole thing is, none of this happens – none of this cult heroism and folk heroism and fans chanting MVP when John Scott touched the puck in the All-Star game happens if there isn’t a villain. And the NHL coming so hard down on this guy and trying to subvert the popular vote and trying to find ways around him being in the game created this environment where what was the class-clown-becoming-student-council-president all of a sudden becomes, like, the Joan of Arc of the All-Star game with all of the fans rallying around him and chanting his name all game.

MCEVERS: That’s Greg Wyshynski. He writes the Puck Daddy blog for Yahoo Sports. Thanks so much.

WYSHYNSKI: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

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