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Posts concerning economics

Energy Consumption, Data Centers, and Heat

15:03 15 Oct 2009

The Kardashev Scale is used to measure a civilization’s technology level, using the measure of its energy consumption—or, more accurately, the amount of energy the civilization can harness. In light of the ongoing computing/networking revolution, I’m curious about what percentage of our energy use is by data centers.
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Yankee Stadium and What’s Wrong with America

12:53 09 Oct 2009

The new Yankee Stadium opened this year, and with it came a rather large increase in ticket prices. The most outrageously-priced seats are in the “Legends Suite”, and they go from about $500 to about $2500 each.

Reporter Wright Thompson got an assignment to write about what having one of those seats is like, and his article “Seats of Gold” is excellent. Included in it is a damning critique of Wall Street, because the corrupt culture of brokers inducing traders to buy things includes lavishing them with all kinds of entertainment, including prime Yankees tickets:

In exchange for tickets, the trader orders whatever the broker is selling. Everybody wins. The broker gets his sale. The trader gets his seat behind the dugout. Well, almost everybody. You, I’m afraid, get screwed with your pants on. Wall Street was not only trifling with our financial future but also driving up ticket prices.

—Wright Thompson. “Seats of Gold”. ESPN, 5 Oct 2009.

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NCAA Ethics Violation: Bagels with Cream Cheese

22:22 21 Aug 2009

The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletics Assocation, the governing body for American college sports. One of the responsibilities it has taken upon itself is the policing of student amateur status, to make sure that colleges do not entice star athletes to join their progams with money or other bribes. I already considered this a ridiculous situation, but realized today that I underestimated just how ridiculous it was.
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Considering Carnivorism

14:05 20 Jul 2009

(Actually, I’m considering a return to a wider variety of omnivorism, but that’s not as cool a title.)

I gave up eating meat about ten years ago. Since then I’ve been an ovo-lacto-pesce-vegetarian. Now, for the first time, I’m seriously considering eating meat again.
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Passwords Please

22:52 18 Jun 2009

I know this has been on BoingBoing already, but it seems so ridiculous that I can’t resist posting it here too:

[The City of Bozeman]‘s background check policy … states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate
(emphasis mine)
“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns”, Dan Boyce, montanasnewsstation.com, 18 Jun 2009

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Pirate Bay Guilty Verdict

23:35 17 Apr 2009

I’m not surprised, but I’m not happy: ‘Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders’.

I figured, given the amount of pressure brought to bear, that the court would use any means it could to find them guilty. I’m not sure they actually are guilty given the way the laws are written.

(Oh, and for anyone who wants to claim that their defense was to get away on a “technicality”: as my friend Deirdre used to say, all laws are technicalities.)

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Less Room in the Ivory Towers

20:26 14 Apr 2009

From one form of labor exploitation to another, different but with some similarities: grad school in the humanities.
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Pro Athletes Can’t Hold Onto Their Money

17:18 13 Apr 2009

It’s not surprising that some athletes make terrible financial decisions, and one often hears about the Michael Vicks and Mike Tysons of the world ending up with nothing. But I didn’t realize that it was quite so common, and that these examples aren’t exceptions but rather the rule. According to a recent Sports Illustrated article, “[b]y the time they’ve been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce”.
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Foreclosure Squatting

23:35 10 Apr 2009

This is pretty interesting: advocacy groups for the homeless are helping them move into empty foreclosed homes.

Also, apparently US banks have a significant “shadow inventory” of foreclosed homes they’re not selling.

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Hudson on Financing the Empire

23:55 30 Mar 2009

Michael Hudson’s Counterpunch article on how the USA’s global economic hegemony functions, and how it relates to the current international economic climate, is worth reading.
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Comparative Costs of US City Living

22:52 08 Feb 2009

Even though I don’t live in Manhattan, I’m still disturbed by this graph:

I love San Francisco and have no desire to leave; moreover, if I did leave, New York City would be one of the places I’d consider going to! I’ve been a city person my entire life, and somehow even the difference betwewen Berkeley and San Francisco is something I feel on an emotional level. Worse, I’m picky about cities, and moving to Houston isn’t looking too likely right now.

I’d love to see Dublin (probably quite high) and Berlin (possibly a lot lower) on this graph, but I’m not sure where I could find that data.

The graph is from page 12 of “Reviving the City of Aspiration”, a report by Center for an Urban Future, and I found it via this post on the Queens Crap blog.

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Detroit: Hope and Satire

23:07 09 Dec 2008. Updated: 17:05 28 Jan 2009

By “Detroit” I primarily mean the Big Three automakers. The first thing I’m linking to isn’t satire, although it might seem that way. It’s also quite important to register the fact that the headline is not a metaphor. Oh, and look at the pictures in the slideshow.

Once done with that, have a chaser. The chaser is satire. Although it might be closer to actual reality in several respects than the hope piece.

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Hummer On the Way Out?

23:35 04 Dec 2008. Updated: 23:58 28 Jan 2009

I think that Katharine Mieszkowski is being overly optimistic predicting the demise of the Hummer, but I’d really love to see that damn thing disappear. Being utterly obnoxious and ugly (which it is) is one thing, but the sheer deliberate wastefulness is simply appalling. I know that’s part of the point for many owners, but that doesn’t make it any better.
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Will Citigroup Collapse?

23:01 20 Nov 2008. Updated: 17:14 28 Jan 2009

I didn’t realize they were still in such significant trouble, but BusinessWeek reports they’re on the rocks. I’m not shedding too many tears for them, but a number of the figures cited in this article make for worrying reading. (Foremost being, if you’re a Citigroup investor, the 66% drop in their share price in November…)
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Michael Lewis on Wall Street

22:49 17 Nov 2008. Updated: 17:15 28 Jan 2009

Michael Lewis returned to writing about Wall Street in this article for Portfolio.com, and naturally it’s full of the tidbits that are so great to hear about how our economy works (or doesn’t work, depending on your perspective). There are plenty of good ones, but my favorite is this:

[Eisman] called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.
“The End”, Michael Lewis, Portfolio.com, 11 Nov 2008

Yes, those unbelievably savvy people at S&P, whose ratings department are/were supposed to be trusted with assessing the risk of investments/credit lines, simply didn’t have a “model” (that is, some black-box computer program of a mathematical formula some analyst thought would predict market movements) that could cope with the concept that house prices might, at some point in the future, not rise.

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How Fast A Fade?

23:56 17 Oct 2008. Updated: 17:28 28 Jan 2009

The current financial crisis, even though it appears to have died down a little, may have serious implications for the position of the US as the world’s greatest power. Economic crisis often precedes imperial collapse, and signs have been present for years that the United States has been spending far beyond its means. Aziz Huq discuss this issue in TomDispatch, with particular reference to the waning of British power after World War II.
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Bad Signs

23:51 10 Oct 2008. Updated: 17:31 28 Jan 2009

When Western governments start seizing assets belonging to companies from other Western countries, I think that’s definitely not a sign that the economic crisis is getting better. The specific example here is that Britain is using “anti-terrorism” powers to freeze the funds of Icelandic companies in an attempt to recoup the losses of British investors in Iceland, Iceland’s financial sector and currency having just suffered collapses.

That’s both ridiculous and quite frightening, terms which also apply to Berlusconi stating that “world leaders” are considering closing world financial markets while they “rewrite the rules of international finance”.

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Safe in the Hands of Henry Paulson

23:59 03 Oct 2008. Updated: 17:34 28 Jan 2009

The House passed it. Seven hundred billion or so, and that’s possibly just for starters. Unprecedented powers to Henry Paulson, who gets to spend that money more or less any way he wants.
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Bailout En Route?

23:52 02 Oct 2008. Updated: 17:34 28 Jan 2009

The Senate passed it, but given the fact that Senators are better insulated from public opinion, I’m not surprised. I continue to regard the bailout as utterly wrong, and even if Obama were perfect in every other way, I would regard his pushing of it as a reason to not support him. I certainly think that anyone who sees McCain and Obama in agreement on something like this should be deeply suspicious. This is a fantastic example of the well connected enriching themselves at taxpayer expense.
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No Bailout Yet

23:45 29 Sep 2008. Updated: 17:40 28 Jan 2009

Congress rejected Paulson’s Wall Street bailout bill this afternoon. It was primarily defeated by Republicans, with 133 of them voting against (as opposed to 95 Democrats). So much for the party of “progressives”—the Democrats tried extremely hard to pass this appalling giveaway, with Pelosi trying to go both ways by pushing for the bill, declaiming the removal of regulation and supervision in the financial system while simultaneously doing nothing to put them back by inserting them into the bill.
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WaMu Fails

20:50 25 Sep 2008. Updated: 17:41 28 Jan 2009

The largest bank failure in US history (so far). Washington Mutual, rumored to be in trouble for quite some time, was seized by federal regulators today. Apparently customers had withdrawn $16.7 billion over the last ten days.

They’re being sold to JP Morgan, who look like they’re doing well out of it, considering that they tried to buy Washington Mutual in March for $4/share. Apparently the feds have managed to get this done without using the FDIC fund, which is probably good overall. The big losers look to be Washington Mutual shareholders and creditors, who may get nothing.
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Opportunism Embodied

20:34 23 Sep 2008. Updated: 17:43 28 Jan 2009

So I think that my initial reaction to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley becoming bank holding companies was rather naive. I thought that they were doing it as a defensive measure, because they were struggling. Now I wonder if in fact they’re doing it because they see an opportunity for even more plunder.
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Various Bailout Items

22:03 22 Sep 2008. Updated: 17:43 28 Jan 2009

The big news at the moment continues to be Paulson’s “plan” to make everything in the markets okay by creating a fund to buy up all the “distressed assets” out there, e.g. the bad bets that the banks created and then spread around the entire financial system while hiding the risks from all concerned. If the taxpayers end up shelling out for this thing, it’s a gigantic transfer of wealth from the average American to the hugely wealthy. Seven hundred billion dollars, even today, is a huge amount of money (and works out to about two thousand dollars per American).
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