The Daily Parker

It's 6:30 am in the UK, and the results are mostly in. The United Kingdom has apparently voted to secede from the European Union. That makes David Cameron about the unluckiest person ever to head Her Majesty's Government.

Cameron pushed the "Brexit" vote on the understanding that it wouldn't pass. How'd that work out?

In literary terms, the apotheosis of Nigel Farage is the dramatic climax in the story of the United Kingdom. David Cameron mooting the referendum was the technical climax. The denouement? England winds up a has-been little country surrounded by the European Union states of Scotland, Wales, and a united Ireland.

Congratulations, you lot who voted "Leave." You're about to find out why it's better for the head to rule the heart in matters of economics.

 

And this chart below? You idiots who voted to leave the EU? This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. But since you obviously don't believe rational thought is an important part of statecraft, what do you care? It's only your economy collapsing.

For the first time since 1880, more young people are living with their parents than with each other:

Adults between 18 and 34 are more likely to live with a parent than to get married or move in with a romantic partner, according to an analysis of Census data by the Pew Research Center. The researchers note that it's the first time in more than 130 years in which young adults have chosen their parents' homes over living on their own in a relationship.

In 2014, 32.1 percent of young adults were living with a parent, while 31.6 percent were living in what Pew calls a romantic relationship — either with a spouse or a partner.

In a separate recent report titled "Missing Young Adult Households," the National Association of Home Builders attributes a lack of demand for single-family homes to millennials living with mothers and fathers after graduating from college or high school. That study said 20 percent of people born 1981 to 1996 were living with parents.

The two organizations found a number of factors leading to these outcomes. In time this will reverse—assuming young people actually have enough families of their own.

The Swiss have built a 57 km tunnel under the Alps, and it opens June 1st:

[T]he new Gotthard Base Tunnel burrows deep beneath the mountains to connect Switzerland’s German- and Italian-speaking regions, ultimately linking the Swiss lowlands with the North Italian plain. It exceeds the length of its longest predecessor, Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, by a little over three kilometers (1.9 miles). Running at up to 8,000 feet below mountain peaks at times, it also runs deeper below ground level than any other tunnel yet built. So great is the amount of rock and rubble created by the excavation—over 28 million tons—that steep artificial hills have been created in the valleys at the tunnel’s mouth.

Now that trains will run on a specially constructed, almost entirely flat track, trains through the tunnel will be able to reach speeds of 150 miles per hour. This will slash the journey time between Zurich and Milan to just two hours and 30 minutes, considerably faster than the current four hours and 40 minutes. While that’s impressive, shorter hops between sub-Alpine cities aren’t really the new tunnels main raison d’etre, and wouldn’t alone necessarily be worth an injection of over $10 billion.

Why is Europe in generally better shape even though their economy is technically in worse shape? This might be an example.

Paul Krugman leverages the Treasury's announcement that Alexander Hamilton is staying on the $10 note to remind us that Hamilton would have supported stepped-up U.S. government borrowing to fund infrastructure:

I have read Hamilton’s pathbreaking economic policy manifestoes, in particular his 1790 “First Report on the Public Credit,” a document that remains amazingly relevant today.

In that report, Hamilton proposed that the federal government assume and honor all of the debts individual states had run up during the Revolutionary War, imposing new tariffs on imported goods to raise the needed revenue. He believed that doing so would produce important benefits....

Unfortunately, policy makers won’t do the right thing, largely because they keep listening to fiscal scolds — people who insist that public debt is a terrible thing even when borrowing costs almost nothing. The influence of these scolds, their virtual veto over fiscal policy, somehow persists even though their predictions of soaring interest rates and runaway inflation keep not coming true.

The point is that Alexander Hamilton knew better.

Elsewhere, the Times and other evidence-based publications are welcoming the changes to the $20 note.

For a big reason that I'll announce tomorrow afternoon, I've just ordered what may turn out to be the last desktop computer I'll ever buy. I think this may be true because (a) I've ordered a box that kicks proportionately more ass than any computer I've bought before; (b) each of my last three computers was in use for more than two years (though the one I bought in 2009 would probably have lived longer had I not dumped a bowl of chicken soup on it); and (c) each of the previous 2-year-old computers was replaced by an incrementally-better one, not a hugely-better one.

The new computer will have a 6-core Xeon E5-2620 2.4 GHz processor, 40 GB (!!!) of 2133 MHz ECC RAM, a 512-GB SSD boot drive and a 2-TB data drive, and an nVidia Quadro K620 video card. It replaces a laptop running a Core i7 2.4 GHz processor with 12 GB of RAM and a single 512-GB SSD augmented by a portable 2-TB data drive that runs through a USB 3.0 port. And whatever onboard video Dell stuck in there.

I'm going to disclose the total cost of this machine because I've just calculated the costs of several other boxes I've bought over the years against the consumer price index. It's a crude measurement, and probably overstates inflation when applied to technology, but it does give you an idea of how things changed over time. Here, then, are a few of my older computers—just the ones I used as my principal, daily machines, not servers:

Obviously cost alone doesn't line up with value. Even in the last 5 years the computers have gotten better, despite the flattening-out of Moore's Law. I mean, the software development environment I work in would barely function in 4 gigabytes of RAM, and yet that's what I was using as recently as October 2011. Going farther down the list to the first computer I ever bought, in October 1991, yes it really did have 4 megabytes of RAM (1,024 times less), but that was just fine for Windows 3.1 back then.

Is the new computer going to change my life? Not a lot, though it will significantly cut compile-and-run times while I'm coding (and slightly increase my electric bill). And yet in 10 years I probably won't even have a desktop computer anymore, because I'll be doing my job on some other kind of device. I mean, when I got the Pentium 4 laptop in 2002 for $2,700 in today's dollars, I could hardly have predicted that 10 years later l would get about the same power and storage space in a mobile phone for 20% of the cost.

There are two other computers on the list whose prices I don't really know, because they were gifts, but they're worth mentioning. In 1986 I got a hand-me-down IBM PC with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 640 kB of RAM, and two 5.25-inch floppy drives. I believe that computer originally cost about $9,000, which would be about $22,000 today. Then, in 1988, I got a hand-me-down Toshiba T3100 "laptop" that weighed about 7 kg and came with a 12 MHz 80286 processor, still 640 kB of RAM, and had a huge 20 MB hard drive. That one cost (I believe) about $2,500 new, or $5,100 today. And that 20 MB drive? That's 1/2,048th the storage space of the working RAM that my new box will have.

Still, every time I've bought a computer, I've outgrown it in less than three years. This time I hope I'm getting enough computer to make it four.

In the wake of last week's news that Chicago lost close to 0.2% of its population last year, Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton says it's not too bad here:

Maybe it's time to face the truth: Chicago has been in a downward spiral lately and our reputation is tarnished. We've slipped in a lot of crucial areas and moved to the top of the heap in several areas where we'd prefer not to compete.

For example, we recently learned that our beloved Willis Tower — or Sears Tower as Chicagoans still insist on calling it — had been kicked off the list of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world. We were barely hanging on to the last spot, when Shanghai Tower came in and knocked us to No. 11.

We conceded a once fierce battle with Atlanta for the nation's busiest airport years ago. And now O'Hare International Airport has slipped from another list — travelers no longer rank it as one of the world's 100 best.

There's a little more good news as well, at least for single people looking for love.

Chicago was named the best city for dating in the U.S. by "The Great Love Debate," a national touring event that unites single men and women in the audience with a panel of relationship experts to discuss dating.

And when it comes to deep-dish pizza, we are way ahead of the game. The smart folks at TripAdvisor listed Chicago as No. 1 on the list of the top 10 U.S. pizza cities.

There really are a lot of areas where Chicago deserves its ranking at the bottom of the barrel. But hockey is one of the few areas where we have consistently risen to the top.

But it takes more than a good sports team to keep people from moving away.

Yeah, but a lot of people are also moving here. Remember, 2015 was the first year in 7 that saw net out-migration from Chicago. Let's see what the next few years look like before we write the obituary.

Also, many people leaving Chicago are heading to warm places in the South and Southwest. This is a mistake, and they may be back, particularly when those places get a few degrees warmer—and so does Chicago.

As someone with both student debt and mortgages, our encroaching deflation (and consistent below-target inflation) frustrates me. Take a look at this special report by Crain's showing how bad the problem of student debt has become in general:

The share of college grads owing at least $30,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars jumped from 6 percent to 30 percent in the eight years ended in 2012, according to the College Board, while the average debt of new graduates in Illinois ballooned 85 percent, to $29,984, over the last decade. Among 46 Illinois schools reporting data to the Princeton Review, 19 say 2014 graduates' debt averaged more than $30,000. Debt for graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was $42,097, topped only by downstate MacMurray College's $50,039. Neither school commented.

A study published in 2014 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, noting that small businesses account for about 60 percent of net jobs and rely primarily on personal debt for startup capital, found "a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation" between growth of student debt and small-business formation.

February's unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds was a seasonally adjusted 5.1 percent, not much higher than the 4.9 percent overall rate and down from 9 percent four years ago. Yet median compensation for 30-year-olds in 2014 has dropped over the last decade to mid-1980s levels, according to the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

So let's review:

• You need a college degree to meet the minimum qualifications for most jobs.
• College costs have risen at multiples of inflation for 20 years or more.
• Students have to borrow more money than ever before to get the college degrees they need to get jobs.
• The resulting debt service depresses consumer spending, reducing demand for goods and services, and making the jobs even scarcer.
• Republican Party policies aimed at reducing taxes and government spending, especially in the wake of the 2008 crash, have also suppressed demand for services.
• Republicans have also simultaneously chipped away at the social safety net built up by bipartisan governments from 1934 to 1976, making repaying debt even harder for people living on the edge.
• Let's not forget the Republican-drafted, Bush-approved bankruptcy law of 2005 that makes it impossible to get out from under crushing student-loan debt in most circumstances.
• All of these Republican policies cause—cause—lower inflation verging on deflation, which makes it harder to repay debts. Keep in mind that the biggest beneficiaries of lower inflation are the bankers who contribute disproportionately to Republicans.

As we say in software, the transfer of wealth from young students to old bankers is a feature, not a bug, of Republican economic and tax policies.

You want to know how to keep student debt from destroying the Millennials? Simple. Government stimulus to get us out of the deflation trap, and allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy.

You want to know how to do those things? Simple. Elect Democratic majorities in Federal and state legislatures, and vote for Hillary Clinton on November 6th.

A medium-length list this time:

• A Megabus exploded outside Chicago yesterday, but that shouldn't scare you away from intercity buses.
• Let's not forget that Antonin Scalia tried to take the country backwards, and was an intellectual phony on top of it.
• BBC Radio 4 has just released a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, featuring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer.
• While Flint, Mich., has bad things in its municipal water supply, Chicago's isn't much better.
• California tax offices have had to adapt to taking in large amounts of (herbal-scented) cash, because Federal banking regulations make it nearly impossible for marijuana sellers to open bank accounts.
• Paul Krugman is not shilling for Hilary Clinton, so stop accusing him of corruption. We Democrats are better than that.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has floated a plan to buy $2-3 billion in new rail cars, but there's a little more to the deal than meets the eye.
• Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee made Jewish humor mainstream.

And this brings me to lunch.

Calculated Risk updates the "scariest jobs chart ever:"

The chart shows each of the post-World War II recessions in terms of job losses from the pre-recession peak. Notice that the 2001 recession line slides right into the 2007 line, as the Republican policies that led to the housing boom and bust tanked the banking sector.

We haven't fully recovered from the 2001 recession, in other words. We've had a generally-down cycle for almost 15 years now. That is why we should not elect a Republican legislature until they figure out how economics works.

Washington Post writer Fritz Hahn is freaking out that the U.S. now has more breweries than ever:

As of Dec. 1, 2015, the Brewers Association had counted 4,144 breweries in the United States, the most ever operating simultaneously in the history of the country. According to historians, the previous high-water mark of 4,131 was set in 1873.

Even when they are given a chance, some small brewers have expressed frustration with the way beer bars order products. Instead of buying three kegs of a new beer and running through them all, as it might have done when local beers were a novelty, a bar tends to buy a keg and, once it’s empty, fill the draft line with a competitor’s product, and then another one, and so on, before rotating back to the first brewery’s beer weeks or months later.

Many in the beer industry pin their hopes for small breweries on localization: the idea that consumers would rather drink beers made down the road than across the country. Lary Hoffman, who co-owns Galaxy Hut in Arlington and Spacebar in Falls Church with his wife, Erica, prefers to stock most of the taps with Virginia breweries, such as Blue Mountain, Champion and Three Notch’d. “You can get any style of beer locally now, and the quality is on par with the best beer in the world, so why not seek out the regional option?” he asks. A handful of national brands, including Bell’s and Avery, show up on the 28 taps at Galaxy Hut and the 24 at Spacebar, but they’re the exception. Customers would be angry “if our draft lineup looked like a Safeway shelf,” Hoffman says.

So, the problem seems to be, too much choice? Yeah, I'm not sure that's something we need to solve. Of course it can be daunting to look at a beer list from a place like Beer Bistro or The Green Lady. That's a problem we want. I lived through the 1980s and early 1990s, when we had maybe four "craft" breweries including Anchor Steam and Sam Adams. I'd rather live today, thank you.