The latest threat to the economy: productivity

Its rare that I'll read an article and agree with every word but this morning I found one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-greater-recession-america-suffers-from-a-crisis-of-productivity/242704/

There's plenty of blame to go around for why the middle class has been struggling but the author isn't out to promote a particular agenda. He simply identifies the critical problems we're facing: health care and education. We are able to provide everything else with stunning efficiency, but health care and education remain slow, expensive and for millions of people - ineffective.

Also while reading this article I became more convinced of my view that the current crisis is really just a part of a decade plus long crisis with labor. The work force hasn't become educated fast enough to adapt to new technology. As a result the people who have adapted have seen their wages rise rapidly (due to insufficient labor supply) while people who haven't adapted have seen their wages fall (insufficient demand for their labor). No doubt the industrial revolution saw similar displacements but once the work force caught up economic growth skyrocketed.

Another weekend another music festival

This past weekend was my 4th music festival of the summer (Pitchfork, Lolla, Outside Lands). On Friday I went (mostly) to see David Guetta and on Sunday night I went to the ATB afterparty at the Mid. Both shows were very solid overall, Guetta closed with a remix of Club Can't Even Handle Me that blew me away. ATB played some MGMT and Robyn which was much appreciated by all the hipsters in the crowd.

I'm a relatively recent convert to electronic music but after creating a David Guetta Pandora station a few weeks ago I just had to buy the ticket. I feel like he has his hand in nearly every song that I recognize but don't know the name of:

Getting Over You ~ David Guetta

Ecstasy ~ ATB

Time is never time at all

Its incredible how little we understand about time. Its so fundamental to everything but every time I try to think about it I get hopelessly lost. This guy sums up some interesting "facts" about time:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/01/ten-things-everyone-should-know-about-time/

Disney.xxx

Remember when whitehouse.com was a porn site? It must have been at least 10 years ago, I remember doing research for a social studies paper in 8th grade and stumbling upon it by accident - I wonder how many others did too. Now there's a new .xxx domain coming out in the next couple of months, are we going to see a whitehouse.xxx site? The company which is running this domain is asking for $100-300 per year per url from companies to prevent someone from buying trademarked sites like disney.xxx. I'm not sure how legal it is for them to do this but something feels wrong about it:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/4/as-porns-pre-eminent-domain-xxx-to-mark-spot/?page=1&google_editors_picks=true&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=RSS_Feed

The physics of tennis

As I was reading about the US Open I stumbled across this article on the physics of tennis. I always knew the playing surface mattered but I never knew why, interesting stuff.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6906922/the-physics-grass-clay-cement

A culture of entitlement

Selfishness and narcissism are certainly not new, in fact the very word narcissism comes from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus. But it does seem like there's a bit of a entitlement epidemic going around - for example the guy who yelled "get the government out of my social security!" at one of those town hall meetings in 2009. And this is peanuts compared to the AIG executives - they were guaranteed hundreds of millions for nearly driving the country in bankruptcy and they believed they deserved every cent! In this article the authors describe how this culture is affecting children.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700174443/The-age-of-entitlement-Selfishness-is-rampant-but-can-be-corrected-experts-say.html?pg=1

This article definitely changed my feelings about how to teach children about money, respect and family obligations. I couldn't help but think of Kant's moral philosophy when reading this - the only truly good acts are those done for the sake of good itself. How soon is too soon to read Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals?

Swapping Debt for Equity

Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy frequently creditors agree to reduce the principal in exchange for equity in the newly created company. A couple of years ago I had this idea - why not apply the same principle to homeowners. The banks get (future) equity in the house and the borrowers get principal reductions and the housing market might even recover. Sounds like a win-win-win proposition. Clearly this blogger agrees:

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/01/a-mortgage-fix-for-lenders-and-homeowners-shared-equity/

But the more I thought about it, the more problems I find with the idea. Why would any borrower stick around once there's any equity in the house? As soon as they can sell the house and pay off their mortgage they would, borrower has a clear slate, bank gets nothing for their equity stake. Nin-Hai proposes that there much be a certain dollar amount of equity in the house before the person is allowed to sell. But it seems like those types of clauses would be a nightmare to enforce, plus it locks the person into their house for even longer. Also what bank wants to take on more house price risk? So I think its an interesting idea but ultimately impractical.