Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: Not Great at Getting His Way With the State

THIS PIECE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO CORRECT AN ERROR. Caffeinated News & Gossip featuring hacking, equivocating, and sharing.

By Morning Fizz August 15, 2013

 

1. This morning, we ran an item that said the Seattle Times' circulation had declined since they implemented a paywall. We were looking at outdated data. We apologize for the embarrassing error. 

2. The city clerk's site was down for much of the day yesterday, thanks to an attack from an overseas hacker.

According to an email to city employees, "The Clerk's web site is down due to an attack from an unknown source in the Netherlands."

But public-disclosure aficionados can rest easy: The site, as of last night, was back up and running.

3. Yesterday, we reported that Mayor Mike McGinn says he supports a $15 an hour Seattle minimum wage in general, though he thinks we should prioritize changing the law at the federal and state level. (That was based on what McGinn told Erica when she moderated a labor-sponsored forum in late June
.) Workers at fast-food chains have been walking off the job nationwide to protest low wages.

However, on KUOW, the morning after the primary election last week, McGinn sounded even less enthusiastic about fighting locally for the gold-standard $15-an-hour Seattle minimum wage ordinance.

When KUOW host Ross Reynolds asked McGinn if he supported a $15 hour minimum wage for Seattle, McGinn first echoed what he told Erica: "The best place to work on minimum wages is at the state level first." But pressed by Reynolds (9:50 mark)—the city didn't wait for the state on paid sick leave, so why wait for the state on the minimum wage?—McGinn was even more equivocal: "Well, you know, there's a good place to start, and then we'll see where it goes from there."

Fizz will say, McGinn is not great at getting his way with the state. His attempt to extend bar hours flopped with state regulators. (It's worth noting that his opponent, state Sen. Ed Murray, when tasked with a similar city nightlife agenda item at the state level, quietly succeeded, repealing the "dance tax.")

4.  We're pretty hot on the so-called Share Economy, which is why we love this item that ran on one of Seattle Met's other blogs (our food blog, Nosh Pit), yesterday about an app that allows you to share your leftovers.

Snap a picture of food you no longer want, post it onto the app’s database listing, and wait for someone to place dibs on your meal. “There are two parts to this: There are people who have excess food and are looking to reduce waste, and there are people who are looking to eat, in general,” Newman says.

The app will be free, which means that Newman, a freelance writer, and Summersett, a software engineer at Amazon are likely to make little profit, but they’re most excited to see how people will use it to reduce food waste by diverting leftovers in the direction of someone hungry rather than a garbage or compost bin.

The app is called Leftover Swap, but we prefer how the punks and hippies have always referred to it: "Dumpster Diving" or "Scrounging."

 

 

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