Last week, a conservative friend asked me how I liked living in Sweden under Comrade Obama. I sighed. Somehow or another, it has become accepted that Sweden is a frightening socialist state and that life there would be horrible. I am here to defend Sweden, a nation I have never visited.
Sweden is a monarchy, a governmental structure very far from socialism and from the American ideal that all people are created equal. Marx, of course, believed that his radical socialist ideal started with the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, which pretty much eliminates a monarchy. The United States was founded on the principle that people did not need a king because they could rule themselves. We might think that the trappings of a monarchy are pretty and that their personal lives are fascinating, but is anyone really excited about the prospects of Prince Charles replacing Barack Obama?
Marx’s version of socialism, Communism, failed everywhere it was tried. No one seriously advocates Communism anymore. Socialism is more complicated, but it is not what Barack Obama or anyone else in U.S. government advocates. (By the way, “The Communist Manifesto” is in the public domain, in English, and it is short. There is no excuse for not reading it. Frederich von Hayek would be good to read, too, but his books have a lot more pages.) (more…)
Stories about the death of newspapers are tired. Yeah, we get it, newspapers are struggling.
This is a drawing of Annie Logue, no relation, a character in a comic novel by Mike Kennedy.
But the story is all about how there won’t be any more investigative journalism or how bloggers are sloppier than Judith Miller when they do their reporting.
No one looks at the real tragedy: the death of the comics. The comic strip is an art form in its own right, but it is also one closely tied to newspapers. As newspapers cut back, they often eliminate the page that introduces the paper to new readers in the first place.
$12 a week per paper? Shared equally with the syndicate? For a cartoon that’s run in 100 papers, that represents an income of $31,200 – which means you can’t quit your day job. Scott Adams, Garry Trudeau, and the estate of Charles Schultz may have a little negotiating power, but not many other cartoonists out there do. If the strip catches on, there are greater profit opportunities in the form of books, calendars, character licensing, and possibly television. If you look at your daily paper, though, how many of the strips are good enough to get you to rush out for the book?
The low syndication rates date from a time when a cartoonist would most likely be on staff. The syndication money was meant to be a bonus, not the primary way that the cartoonist made a living. Comic strip writers would often be employed by a newspaper and also create political cartoons or draw illustrations for stories. Very few were completely independent, at least not when they started. (more…)
The latest trend in the “something for nothing on the Internet” game is the pay-to-bid auction site. The auction operator lets such items as cash and gift cards go at prices far below face value because all the bidders, even the losers, have paid to place their bids. Some of these sites claim to be helping people beat the recession. One, PsychoAuction.com, even has a complicated back story involving a founder, Nick Dickreuter, who was let go when Lehman Brothers failed. According to the PR version of the story, Dickreuter lost all respect for money and now gives things away online.
Except, of course, that Dickreuter clearly respects money. Hs site stands to make a lot of it from those who don’t understand how giveaway auctions work. It’s not like Dickreuter took a vow of poverty and went out to serve the poor.
PsychoAuction isn’t the only site following a pay-to-bid model. DFWbid.com is another that has been mentioned on different bargain-hunting Web sites. The pitch is that you can get a $25 gift card for $8; the reality is that a lot of people spend money to bid without winning. (more…)
It’s darn near impossible for an investment manager to beat the market once you adjust performance for risk and fees. Every quarter, when Morningstar shows its fund reports, more than half of all funds prove to be laggards after adjustments. We all know that Warren Buffett can beat the market because he’s pretty much the only person who can. Bernie Madoff lied. And Raj Rajaratnam allegedly traded on inside information.
Alleged Inside Trader
Even then, it does not seem to have helped him much. The Galleon Group of hedge funds, which Rajaratnam managed, has shut down in the wake of insider trading charges against Rajaratnam and several associates. However, it doesn’t look like the funds’ performance was all that great, so Rajaratnam and company may base their defense on the fact that they did not make excess profits. One of the charges is that Galleon made $500,000 trading in options in Google after receiving a tip from an employee of Google’s investor relations company that earnings would be lower than expected. To make that profit, an inside trader would have to identify informants, figure out how to reach them, compensate them, act on the information, and take the risk that it was good information. These steps involve time and expense that cut into the profits from insider trading. The profits have to be huge to overcome the costs, and they may not be big enough to compensate the inside traders for the risk. And then, of course, the information has to be good. A wise inside trader would probably sit on the first few tips just to see if the tipper has good information. But even a tipper with mostly good information will have a few duds. (more…)
The academic world is its own little terrarium that ends up affecting the broader cultural ecosystem. Universities are relatively (though not completely) removed from the economic cycle, so they tend to be stable employers. Students spend their three, four, or five years immersed in new ideas, meeting new people, and managing a set of new responsibilities. Faculty members do research, teach students, and talk to other people all day in an attempt to find out new things. It all filters into the world that the rest of us live in, although not always directly.
College students often take up causes, some of which they continue to pursue after graduation. A popular cause is the environment. Does student activism make a difference? The annual College Sustainability Report Card, released early this month, attempts to measure the influence of students and others in making campuses more sustainable. The report is prepared by the staff of the Responsible Endowments Institute, an organization that evaluated campus governance and endowment investing and is supported by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. This is the third year of the study, which now tracks the 300 colleges with the largest endowments as well as another 32 campuses that asked to participate.
The study evaluates campus facilities, student life, and endowment policies to grade different schools. Campuses can pick up points for green buildings, bringing organic produce into the dining halls, or committing part of the endowment to investments in sustainable technologies. The researchers focus on the money for two reasons. First, it gives some clues about the administration’s approach to transparency and engagement. Second, the more money a college has, the more it can spend on such things as LEED-certified buildings and alternative-fuel shuttle buses. It’s not necessarily a surprise that Harvard has an A- (the highest possible grade this year) and Youngstown State University is a D+. (more…)
Years ago, I had a friend who was a singer in a retro-punk band called Vaginal Cancer. He picked the name after his girlfriend had had a suspicious Pap smear. (It was through this couple that I met my husband. They broke up, and we’ve been married for 16 years.) There was a brief moment in my life when I felt very cool, being in divey Chicago punk clubs and hanging out with the band during all three of their shows. Or maybe it was just two.
That’s one reason that the press release about the gynecological cancer awareness album No Evidence of Disease by the band N.E.D. caught my attention. The band name is medical shorthand for the album’s title; the members are gynecological surgeons who are also skilled amateur musicians. The group came together to play covers at medical conferences and benefits, and they found that people stayed to listen and even invited them back. They decided to write songs, engage professional producers, and turn their project into a full-fledged Cause CD. (more…)
The Author of this piece is pushing her own book, so no money changed hands.
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would fine bloggers as much as $11,000 for violating its guides to the use of testimonials in advertising. The rules are designed to ensure that customers have a fair basis for buying a product. The basic rules are that if someone is compensated, that should be made clear; if a celebrity endorses a product, he or she should actually use it. Most of us didn’t want to know about Bob Dole‘s Viagra prescription or Lita Ford’s favorite ball gag (NSFW), but at least we know they are telling the truth about their preferences. The full details are on the FTC Web site in all their bureaucratic glory.
This creates some sticky problems for people blogging about books, movies, and music. You know, folks like us here at Popdose and our readers, at least some of whom are artists looking to get attention for their work. I can’t speak for everyone involved with Popdose, as that is a job for Jeff Giles. But, yes, we receive books, MP3s, DVDs, and bottles of tequila to review. We also write reviews about things that we bought with our money. I write book reviews for Barron’s, and those books are usually sent to me through my editor. Sometimes, though, he has misplaced the book or can’t remember if the publicist sent him a copy, and he doesn’t want to ask the publicist to send out a new one, so I go to the bookstore and buy it.
Like most reviewers, I quickly end up with more free books than I can possibly read. I usually end up dropping these books off at random places through Bookcrossing or donating them to the thrift shop. Some reviewers sell their excess copies to used bookstores or online, turning them into cash that way, although I have heard tell of writers who use something close to their real name on Amazon being shunned by authors who feel cheated out of royalties. (more…)
Given the massive Federal deficit, it’s a sure bet that taxes are going up sooner rather than later. Before the Teabaggaz start posting, I think we can all agree that cutting taxes while starting a war is a bad idea. Stuff costs money, whether we’re talking about body armor for our warfighters in Afghanistan or Under Armour shirts. But the problem is what to do about it, because we have to fund our deficit somehow. However, we also have a really fragile economy. If the government raises taxes, will it crowd out the investment and spending needed to create jobs?
The idea behind cutting taxes in the Reagan era was that if less money went to taxes, more would be used for private sector investing, and that the private-sector investing would generate so much economic growth that the loss in revenue from the tax cut would be short-lived. Eventually the economy would expand so much that more taxes would come in at the lower rate because of the larger base. Private-sector investing did increase; the U.S. remains the strongest capital market in the world. It didn’t increase by enough to offset the tax cuts, and part of Reagan’s economic legacy was an increased Federal deficit.
Money can be spent on taxes, consumption, savings, and investment. (Paying down debt is a form of savings.) Money that goes to one purpose cannot be used for another. Â Money that the government takes in from taxes can also be used for consumption, savings, or investment. War and Medicare are examples of government consumption spending (which may be on behalf of citizens). Paying down debt is a form of savings, and goodness knows that the government at all levels has plenty of debt to pay off. The government invests when it spends money on bridges, schools, airports, and the like. For accounting purposes, this is handled like consumption. (more…)
The site of the 2016 Olympics will be announced on Friday, and Chicago is considered to be a close contender along with Rio de Janeiro. Speaking on behalf of my three million fellow citizens, I’d say that Chicagoans are torn. The Olympics would be fun, and Chicagoans would love for the world to realize that we have indoor plumbing here, something that folks on America’s coasts don’t seem to know. But despite the inferiority complex, Chicagoans don’t have the puppy-like need to be loved that Atlanta or Salt Lake City seem to have. If you think our only claim to fame is Da Bears, then you are the idiot.
The problem is that Chicagoans are keenly aware of the costs of corruption. We have one former governor in prison and another who is likely to join him soon. We have a federal prosecutor issuing subpoenas and indictments left and right. Students have been admitted and received scholarships to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign based on who they knew; a current grand jury investigation is looking into clout admissions at the city’s elite public high schools. Who knows how many businesses have put off expanding or relocating to Illinois because of the tax from the take? Graft has been accepted here because politicians used to be careful to deliver goodies to the neighborhoods, but that’s not happening. Consider that two city high school students were murdered this past weekend. One, who attended a magnet school, was shot by an unknown assailant; the other, who attended a regular neighborhood high school, was beaten to death after school by a mob of his fellow classmates.
But sadly, the legacy of corruption makes Chicago a good fit for the International Olympic Committee, which has its own history of taking theirs. The IOC does things the same way Chicago politicians do; Mike Royko used to say that the definition of an honest politician in Chicago is that when he is bought, he stays bought. Many people in town assume that the fix is already in. (more…)
Ben Bernanke said that the recession is over, but what he thinks isn’t important. The more important arbiter of the business cycle, Federal Express, reported its earnings last week. Profits were down 53% from the year prior. Profits were expected to be down, but they did not fall as much as expected. That’s because FedEx is seeing improvement in its freight and ground-shipping divisions. That means that the economy seems to be turning around, because FedEx’s performance is a leading economic indicator.
People ship items because they have received orders for them. The freight business in particular represents shipments between suppliers and manufacturers and then between manufacturers and retailers. The primary measure of economic growth, gross domestic product, measures the total amount of goods and services in the economy at the consumer level. That avoids double-counting, but it also means that producer activity will show changes before the GDP does. That’s why the FedEx news is so exciting. If manufacturers are starting to order materials, then they must be seeing demand. If so, the recession that officially began in December of 2007 may finally be ending.
FedEx’s financial results will be a measure of economic performance as the business cycle unwinds. Overnight shipping via a private carrier is a luxury. The United States Postal Service has cheaper rates; it costs just 44 cents to send a first-class letter from Maine to Guam, although it probably won’t arrive the next day. An increase in spending on FedEx indicates not only an improvement in the economy, but also a willingness to spend more for better service. (more…)
Last week, a conservative friend asked me how I liked living in Sweden under Comrade Obama. I sighed. Somehow or another, it has become accepted that Sweden is a frightening socialist state and that life there would be horrible. I am here to defend Sweden, a nation I have never visited.
The academic world is its own little terrarium that ends up affecting the broader cultural ecosystem. Universities are relatively (though not completely) removed from the economic cycle, so they tend to be stable employers. Students spend their three, four, or five years immersed in new ideas, meeting new people, and managing a set of new responsibilities. Faculty members do research, teach students, and talk to other people all day in an attempt to find out new things. It all filters into the world that the rest of us live in, although not always directly.
Years ago, I had a friend who was a singer in a retro-punk band called Vaginal Cancer. He picked the name after his girlfriend had had a suspicious Pap smear. (It was through this couple that I met my husband. They broke up, and we’ve been married for 16 years.) There was a brief moment in my life when I felt very cool, being in divey Chicago punk clubs and hanging out with the band during all three of their shows. Or maybe it was just two.
