Apparently, The Motley Fool wants those on SS to believe that a COLA increase is bad news… which is TMF’s way to attract and steer you to the paid ad at the end.
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Kaiser Wilhelm II so openly despised countries that grew powerful through capitalism, that he had plans drawn to shell what he considered the seats of world capitalism… NYC.
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It’s so powerfully obvious to me, it might as well be written in ten-foot letters of flame: the platforms of the last decade are done.
I said it in April 2022, and I believe it even more today: their only conclusion can be abandonment; an overdue MySpace-ification.
This is … tremendously exciting! Some of you reading this were users and/or developers of the internet in the period from 2002 to perhaps 2012. For those of you who were not, I want to tell you that it was exciting and energizing, not because everything was great, but simply because anything was possible.
The concrete hadn’t set.
Now, after a decade of stuckness, the pavement is cracking — crumbling — and I want to insist to those of you who lived through that time, and those of you who didn’t: we all have a new opportunity.
In this newsletter, I want mainly to offer an exhortation. Then, because I can’t help myself, I’ll comment on an item of current interest. I’ll conclude with a technical question, because I know the right nerds are reading.
Here’s my exhortation:
Let 2023 be a year of experimentation and invention!
Let it come from the edges, the margins, the provinces, the marshes!
THIS MEANS YOU!
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For the 1%ters willing to shell out the $16K entry fee and who could never compete anywhere near a true Ironman level. Event locations are all at high-end vacation spots. I’m sure that cheating is not discouraged.
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Where are you seeing that? This looks pampered, but it looks like they’re still competing and finishing the same mileage as everyone else.
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I read the nytimes article that it was based on. They pay through the nose in order not to have bad luck like this guy.
Among the perks of XC is a choice room at the hotel closest to the starting line, and so in late June, Le Jamtel brought his wife, his 21-year-old son and his son’s girlfriend to Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, in the Laurentian Mountains 90 minutes northwest of Montreal, to watch him compete in the Mont-Tremblant 70.3. The 70.3-mile race format used to be known as a half Ironman, but Ironmen don’t like to think of themselves as doing half of anything, so the company rebranded it “Ironman 70.3.” In Mont-Tremblant, the hotel nearest the starting line was the Ermitage du Lac, a rustic lodge nestled at the base of the stone footpath that bisects Mont-Tremblant’s candy-colored ski village, just a few hundred yards from the swim start on the shore of Lac Tremblant. There was a more luxurious hotel, the Fairmont, at the crest of the hill, but the Fairmont’s luxuries — spa services, swanky bar, fancy bathroom products — hold little appeal for the kind of people who spend their very limited leisure time competing in an Ironman. You’d have to schlep your gear all the way down that hill at 5 a.m.! That’s inefficient. That’s poor optimization. XC runs the way XCers like their businesses to run. For them, true luxury is everything in its right place, operating like clockwork.
What else do XCers get for their thousands? “White-glove level of service,” says Troy Ford, XC’s tireless, unflappable master of ceremonies. XCers travel thousands of miles to put themselves through hell, the kind that makes muscles fail and bladders empty, and Ford’s job is to make this experience as fun and frictionless as possible. What they need most is for him to be the C.E.O. “We take all the logistics, headaches, hassles and hurdles out of it, and make it really easy on them,” Ford says. For an endurance athlete, that means arriving to a minifridge in your suite stocked with all your favorites — red bananas, a six-pack of Upside Dawn nonalcoholic craft beer, a box of chocolate ChocXOs. It means an on-call bike mechanic to resolve any prerace emergencies — and there’s always something. If you’re not in XC and you packed your 162.5-millimeter crank instead of your 167.5, you’re pretty much screwed. Ford will drive back to Montreal to replace it, if that’s what it takes.
(it’s paywalled).
There are parallels to be drawn with the current Everest climbing set.
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Cool stuff. [Interesting aside: if you right-click to open the link in a new tab, it doesn’t seem to provide a click-count next to the article. @codinghorror is that a feature or a bug?]
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(excerpts) Men without four-year college degrees, between the ages of 25 and 54, have left the workforce in higher numbers than other groups. And they’re leaving in part because of their perceived social status relative to better-educated men of similar age…
Younger white men in particular were more likely to leave when their expected wages fell relative to their more educated peers, according to the Fed study. Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.
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That seems a deeply dodgy conclusion that seems disconnected from reality. How on earth can a whole chunk of the population be “choosing to leave the labour force”? What do the researchers think they’re doing for food and rent?
I suspect that this is actually an artefact of the way unemployment and economic activity is calculated, with people who have been unemployed for a long time counting as dropping out of the labour force completely if they are not deemed to be “actively” looking for work.
If this is the root cause of the shift, the headline changes to “large increase in persistent, long-term unemployment amongst men with less education”. But that doesn’t let the researchers blame people for their own problems(especially icky uneducated men) rather than critiquing American capitalism for producing long-term unemployment.
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Yes, given the importance of the conclusion, a deep dive into the study’s methodology is warranted. Until then… it’s interesting.
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I’ve skimmed the original study from the Boston Fed. Not groundbreaking stuff, but certainly food for thought. I don’t see a problem in the math. It’s nice when you can take a hand-wavy, Adam Smith-level economic observation and pin at least the slope of a line to it and show it’s significant.
I’ll refer to my post above about David Thompson’s paper on “stagnant services” mopping up labour no longer required by high value-add, highly automated industries. This new paper might indicate some solid reasons why we need industrial policy in place to ensure that a skilled labour force is maintained when there’s pressure on wages from purely commercially driven industry.
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It’s good to have some evidence regarding the common Catholic tendency to downplay and look the other way about child-rape. Even if it’s not all that surprising that members of a cult would blind themselves to yet another form of reality.
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I and my year-older brother were altar boys. Only a couple of months after his arrival to our parish, a Fr. Balthazar attempted to molest my brother who – apparently unimpressed by a priest (initially) taking a seemingly innocent interest in him – immediately told our parents of the priest’s attempt. (Knowing my father, any subsequent discussion with our parish rector would have been loud, long, and borderline violent.) That sent Balthazar packing about a week later. I suppose the interim had been spent trying to determine where to send him off too next; his previous posting had been in the Philippines. Another “hot potato” being passed around – in his case – the globe. Within our family, the Balthazar affair had singularly created a suspicion about clergy-congregant interactions, and my brother and sister and I were sat down and taken through the obvious ground rules. The affair didn’t seem to affect my father’s friendly relationship with the other priests, one of whom was his bowling buddy; it was by that avenue that said priest asked my father if I could man the rectory for one evening while everyone else attended a large event outside our parish. I don’t know if my father and the priest had discussed Balthazar, but I did know then that my father had insisted that no one other than myself be in the rectory. I agreed to be its caretaker for the evening, but still with some concern. The then 120-year-old rectory was purported to be haunted. 
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Huh. Well, that didn’t go where i thought it would.
So what happened that night in the rectory?
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I sat most of the night on a small antique couch in the rectory den. Tried watching a ball game on the TV but obsessively remained hyper-aware of any creaks and noises likely to be produced by old buildings, and not much at all on purported spirits (which I don’t believe in) although I’m of the “you just never know” sub-sub-segment of skepticism. Being 11-years-old at the time, I’m allowed that dichotomy. 
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