Via Andrew Sullivan, the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta graphs underemployment:
So what news story should I focus on today? The Cubs using the bankruptcy code to speed up their sale to the Ricketts family? General Motors ramping up production by 45% to see if we'll bail them out a second time? Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court?
No, I want to point people toward the Night of the Stripping Dead event at the Admiral Theater tomorrow night:
Exotic dancers and zombies, the two grand pillars of American subculture, have finally joined forces -- thus proving our nation's obsession with the walking dead has irrevocably crossed the line of mainstream consciousness, where now strippers are parodying a trend.
Wednesday night, club organizers are throwing an event...where professional makeup artists will transform otherwise pious dancers into undead dancers.
Riiiight.
For completeness, the Admiral Theater is on Lawrence just east of Pulaski.
A number of confusing changes occurred to the world while I slept:
- President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I love the man; I voted for him; I gave lots of money[1] to two of his campaigns. I'm still confused. It might offend some of my fellow progressives to say, but possibly the prize means nothing more than "thank you for not being like the last guy, and keep up the good work." The President is, in fact, the second person who is not George W. Bush to win the Prize in the last four years.
- For reasons which passeth all understanding[2], we crashed a rocket into the moon. We want to find out if the moon has enough water to make long-term habitation possible. Otherwise, we'll have to build a pipeline from the Great Lakes, which poses certain engineering challenges.
- Both of these stories came to me during WBEZ-Chicago's pledge week, which started yesterday. Please, I beg all my readers in Chicago, please make a donation so they'll stop begging. The only glimmer of good news in the timing of the Fall pledge drive comes in the form of an exquisite torture perpetrated upon me and my 118 classmates by Fuqua. I won't be able to listen to much NPR this weekend because:
- I have two final exams due this weekend, both take-home, one 90 minutes long and the other with 24 hours to complete. (The clock starts when we download the exams from the school's web portal.) The professor for exam #1 says it's relatively straightforward, everyone will pass, don't worry. The professor for exam #2, who served six years on the Financial Accounting Standards Board and who drafted important regulations of the accounting profession itself, says "someone who is reasonably prepared and who doesn't need to use notes should be able to complete it in 4 or 5 hours." So, a former FASB member who's taught accounting for 30 years will find it "challenging." One hundred eighteen people started crying. (One dude in our class is an accountant who got 117 out of 120 on the midterm.)
- The U.S. dollar continues to slide slowly into uncomfortable depths. I got an alert while writing this entry that the Canadian dollar has risen against our currency from a low of 76c in March to 95c today. We're also slipping against the Euro and the Yen, but not, I'm happy to say, against Sterling or the Emirati Dirham, the two currencies I'm concerned about in the next few weeks.[3]
- Finally, a dear friend from North Carolina sent a delightful finals-weekend care package to Parker and me, including doggie fortune cookies and human chocolate-chip cookies. And now Parker has the whole world in his paws (see below).
[1] Lots for me, anyway; NPR wouldn't have given me a mug for the amount I gave.
[2] Aaron Sorkin's favorite phrase, from Phillippans 4:7. Yes, athiests quote Bible verses sometimes.
[3] I'm concerned because I'm about to go to Dubai, via London, for school. The Dirham hasn't changed because it's pegged to the dollar...for now.
Oh, for a two-hour link from Raleigh to Washington, or a three-hour train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Not soon, unfortunately. But maybe...Baton Rouge to New Orleans? No, not that either:
Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Republican governor, made headlines on Saturday for rejecting $300m in stimulus money intended to jump-start high-speed rail in the Bayou State. Mr Jindal missed the deadline—midnight Friday—to apply for the funds. The governor said he worried about the future maintenance costs of the proposed high-speed rail line between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
OK, so not that, either. How about just a 15-minute trip from the Loop to O'Hare? Now that we have all that money we're not spending on the Olympics?
They only have about half an hour of Gandhi's birthday left in India, so I just got this under the wire.
Everybody knows that Gandhi fasted often, making him somewhat frail. People also know that he walked all over India barefoot in solidarity with the nation's poorest citizens, which gave him extremely tough feet.
Many people do not know that the Mahatma had bad breath, however. All of his treks across the Sub-Continent left him little time or opportunity to brush his teeth, it seems.
Anyway, if you put all of this together, you will see that Gandhi was...
(Wait for it.)
...a super-calloused fragile mystic who suffered halitosis.
The International Olympic Committee has eliminated Chicago from consideration for the 2016 games.
The defeat marked the first time since 1980 that the U.S. has failed in consecutive bid attempts. Los Angeles lost to Montreal in 1976 and Moscow in 1980, but then was awarded the 1984 Games when it was the only viable candidate bidding.
There was a stunned reaction in Chicago to the decision.
Yes, the people gathered in Daley Center Plaza, including the Mayor, would be disappointed. I confess to being about 5% disappointed and 95% relieved; the Olympics would have been hugely costly for Chicago, and we need all our money right now to buy back the parking meters.
This time, though, Bloomberg picked up the story in the context of Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid:
Chicagoans are angry about Mayor Richard M. Daley’s deal to lease the city’s parking meters to Morgan Stanley investment funds.
So angry that Daley’s popularity is at a record low, according to a Chicago Tribune/WGN poll. So angry that the 20- year mayor may not have taxpayer support to lease or sell more assets and bolster the city’s budget.
That means Daley is under even more pressure to abide by his pledge that residents won’t pay anything for staging the 2016 Summer Olympics, which organizers say will cost $4.8 billion. The winning site is to be announced Oct. 2 in Copenhagen.
"When they see the city get it so wrong, voters rightfully get very skeptical," said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a nonprofit public policy group in Chicago.
(Via The Expired Meter.)
Duke will release our financial accounting exam on the 8th, and we'll have 24 hours from the time we download it to finish and hand it in. Our professor, when asked this morning for general guidance about the exam, seemed confident that someone who didn't need to look anything up (e.g., an accounting professor) could finish it in "four to five hours."
In other words, until October 8th, I will likely post link lists, like this one. Sorry.
- The Economist's Gulliver blog highlighted the differences between Virgin America and the "legacy" carriers. Now, as a lifetime elite member of American Airlines' frequent-flyer program, I might be treated better than non-elite passengers. It still sounds like Virgin America might be on to something. (I'm still going to fly American, because I live in Chicago, which they dominate.)
- Mark Morford outdoes himself this week tackling the problem of how to talk to a complete idiot. He explains: "The absolute best way to speak to complete idiots is, of course, not to speak to them at all. That is, you work around them, ignore them completely, disregard the rants and the spittle and the misspelled protest signs and the fervent prayers for apocalypse on Fox News. Complete refusal to take the fringe nutballs even the slightest bit seriously is the only way to make true progress."
- The Cook County Sheriff this week broke up a dogfighting ring at a day care. The descriptions of the dogs they found turned my stomach. (The current story on the Tribune's website omits the descriptions.) That this went on in a building where 10 children spent their days added to the horror. People who inflict cruelty for sport deserve nothing less than the same inflicted on them, I think.
More later. Now, back to financial accounting....
People who live outside Chicago might find it shocking and dismaying to read a newspaper report that their city's Olympics bid will, if successful, make the mayor's friends rich. For us, it's actually comforting. I mean, we all knew someone would get rich; now we have a better idea who:
Chicago 2016 committee member Michael Scott also served as a consultant to the developer on a condominium project near the proposed athletes village, a development that would increase in value if the city wins the Olympics.
Scott, who negotiated key components of the $1.2 billion Olympic Village plan, said his business relationship with the developer, Gerald Fogelson, does not interfere with his role with the bid team. Chicago 2016 officials declined to say whether Scott's relationship with Fogelson was a problem, with Daley's Olympic team poised to spend billions of dollars in coming years.
What? You think civic pride alone would motivate the mayor to put us on the hook for $4 bn to get a sporting event?
In other news, the White Sox are officially out of the post-season, but the Cubs are still hanging on.
Perhaps we should look at Atlanta's example:
Thirteen years later, the financial legacy of the Olympics in Atlanta is harder to detect. Like many major cities, Atlanta has fallen victim to the recession, forced to lay off teachers and city workers while slashing services. The City Council recently voted to raise property taxes to cover a $56 million budget deficit.
Winning the Olympic bid catapulted Atlanta into the big leagues, giving it name recognition around the globe. Atlanta's $1.7 billion private-funded investment in hosting the games helped revitalize its sluggish downtown and poured $5 billion into the metropolitan area's economy during the next decade, according to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
Atlanta's cost was less than half of the $4.8 billion Chicago has estimated it will need to raise if the city is awarded the 2016 Olympic Games.
In sum, no one knows. The Tribune doesn't analyze with much rigor what parts of Atlanta's economic problems come from unrelated factors. Nor do they tease out the direct economic benefits or costs of hosting the games. In short, it's one more frustratingly unhelpful piece of journalism about local politics.
I think our problems and our strengths look nothing like Atlanta's. Possibly Los Angeles might have been a better model; it's hard to say. I honestly don't know whether Chicago will benefit or lose from 2016. No one does. But I think we'll find out, whether we want to or not.