Jon Stewart on "Occupy Wall Street"

I haven't really been able to piece together my thoughts on the growing Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, and I'm certainly not alone. The difficulty in assessing this situation/movement/protest is that we all want it to be some cohesive, coherent, easy-to-categorize group, when in reality it's anything but--and that's exactly what makes it so important.

The fact is, the people of the Occupy Wall Street movement are exactly what they say they are--the "other 99%". And since we know that 99% of people can rarely agree on anything (the closest we've been able to get is, ahem, 89%), it's unrealistic and frankly stupid to expect this group to have one consistent message. They're not anarchists, they're not Nazis (fuck the heck, Ann Coulter?!?), they're not lazy and uneducated, and they're not hippies--although some of them are probably all of these things. The only thing these people have in common is that they're unemployed (or underemployed), pissed off, and tired of not having their voice heard. And that much I can certainly get behind (well, not the unemployed part... whatever, you get my point).

So let's leave it to Jon Stewart to explain the rest, because he does a pretty terrific job of showing just how absurd things can become when we try so hard to categorize the un-categorizable.

The Daily Show
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Ignore these people at your own peril. I have a feeling this group won't be quite as easy to co-opt into a political party as was the Tea Party.

Clip of the Week

Some fun stuff this week, especially if you're into sports and cars. As far as sports go, this is a ridiculous goal (there's seemingly always at least one awesome soccer goal every week), and this is one of the more bizarre baseball plays I've ever seen (presented in gif form, for your enjoyment). Then there's also this video of a high school kicker booting a 64-year field goal with room to spare--yeah, it's in Nevada, and yeah, it looks at least 10% like it could be a viral video setup job, but it's still impressive to watch.

But I'm not feeling sports this week. I considered going the car route with this cool 11-car drag race with some of the world's fastest sports cars, and I definitely recommend watching it if you're into cars. But I'm all for mesmerizing videos, and I've rarely been more mesmerized than I was by this stupid video of a Slinky, shot with a slo-mo camera.



It's crazy to see that thing just hovering there in mid-air, seemingly ignoring the laws of physics. I feel like a little kid again, entertained by the simple pleasures of a Slinky. Yeah, I'm easily amused.

Google is nuts, Part II

If I'm right in asserting that everything Google does is in the name of data collection, I'm not sure I even want to know what they've got planned with this one.

Google’s first attempt at brewing has resulted in a beer that taps ingredients from all across the globe. They teamed up with Delaware craft brewery Dogfish Head to make “URKontinent,” a Belgian Dubbel style beer with flavors from five different continents.

If you aren’t familiar with Dogfish Head, they are a great brewery that makes kickass beer. They started small, but have grown to be one of the top craft breweries around. Their motto is “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” and they don’t disappoint. Their beers, especially their line of IPAs, are some of the best around.

For URKontinent, various Google employees joined the project basically to coordinate and organize the information gathering. Those ideas were then fed to the brewers at Dogfish Head.

Google grabbed beer ideas from their offices all across the globe, and they also received input from the rest of the online community. The project coordinators used tools like Google moderator to get suggestions and feedback from Googlers across the world.

For what it's worth, I love Dogfish Head beers, and the most likely explanation here is that this was just a bunch of bored beer-loving Googlers in search of a fun project. But maybe, just maybe, Google's up to something here...

[WebProNews]

Update on mortgage settlement talks

I first mentioned the Bank of America mortgage settlement talks in my Quote of the Week at the end of August, in which I portrayed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a lonely soldier fighting on behalf of the public versus the banks. Well now it seems that Mr. Schneiderman has some company, no matter what Kathryn Wylde may think about it.

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris will no longer take part in a national foreclosure probe of some of the nation's biggest banks, which are accused of pervasive misconduct in dealing with troubled homeowners.

Harris removed herself from talks by a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies investigating abusive foreclosure practices because the nation's five largest mortgage servicers were not offering California homeowners relief commensurate to what people in the state had suffered, Harris told The Times on Friday.

The big banks were also demanding to be granted overly broad immunity from legal claims that could potentially derail further investigations into Wall Street's role in the mortgage meltdown, Harris said.

“It has been  a process of negotiating and sitting at a table in good faith, but ultimately I have decided that we have to go our own course and take an independent path. And that decision is because we need to bring relief to Californians that is equal to the pain California experienced, and what is being negotiated now is insufficient," Harris told The Times in an interview.

Harris delivered the news in a letter sent Friday to Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, who has been leading the 50-state coalition.

Good for her. With California and New York now out of the settlement talks, the whole concept behind the settlement is essentially dead in the water. As Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith writes,

Now that Kamala Harris... has officially abandoned the talks, they don’t mean much, at least from the state side. The departure of such a big state, in population, foreclosure exposure, and Electoral college terms, along with other states (New York, Delaware, Nevada, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Minnesota, likely Arizona) means any settlement has limited practical meaning from the state side and even less credibility. It also considerably raises the odds of other states bolting. And needless to say, this is a major repudiation of the Obama Administration's “let’s sweep foreclosure fraud under the rug” strategy.

Indeed. For reasons known only to him, Iowa AG Tom Miller seems intent on pressing on with this zombie settlement, even though I can't even see why the banks would be interested at this point. The only benefit to the bank was coming from the wide indemnification that such a settlement would provide, and that benefit is now largely gone. Who cares about Iowa and Kansas when California and New York are out of the game? Just try winning a Presidential election while losing CA and NY--the math is pretty tough, even if George W. Bush did pull it off (twice).

At any rate, congrats to the AGs for standing up for themselves in this deal--even if they do end up negotiating their own state-specific banker-friendly deals down the road, it's important to show the federal agencies that backed this thing that the states refuse to let their rights be trampled on. Thank you, Kamala Harris.

[LA Times]  
(h/t Naked Capitalism)

Quote of the Week

This week, I'm going to cheat a bit on my Quote of the Week. No, I'm not going to steal my quote from the Red Cowboy, although I definitely could have. No, I'm going to cheat by giving you all a cartoon instead of a quotation, making this the first ever Quote of the Week awarded to a cartoon character. Take it away, Pointy-Haired Boss.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

[Dilbert]
(h/t Barry Ritholtz)

Google is nuts

Ever wonder why Google does some of the things they do, without requiring you to pay anything? Google Earth, Gmail, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Reader, etc.? The reason, of course, is that just about everything Google does is an exercise in data collection and data mining. That data collection enables them to enhance their core offerings to make them more capable and useful, which allows them to effectively write off any costs associated with the peripheral products as "R&D costs".

Here's one particularly creative example, courtesy of the Marginal Revolution blog.

By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things...

What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.

Three years later, the service was dropped, but by then Google had launched its Android operating system and had released into the wild an improved search-by-voice service that didn’t require a phone call. You tapped the little microphone icon on your phone’s screen – it was later extended to Blackberries and iPhones – and your speech was transmitted via the mobile internet to Google servers, where it was interpreted using the advanced techniques the GOOG-411 exercise had enabled. The baby had learned to talk.

Well played, Google. Very well played. The author goes on to wonder what might be possible if Google turned its voice recognition software loose on its massive library of YouTube videos, thereby making it possible to create an instant transcript of every video in the YouTube galaxy.

Pretty amazing when you think about it. Also mildly creepy. Just remember, whatever you're doing... Google knows about it.

[Marginal Revolution]

Not this crap again

Another week, another market meltdown... somebody really doesn't seem to want me to have any free time for the blog these days. But I won't give up that easily--not when an old cause of mine has somehow found a way to creep back into the news.

You'll remember from last year my ongoing tirade about currency and trade wars, and how engaging China in a game of "currency manipulator" chicken was destined to end poorly. I even wrote a letter to my Senators about it, and thought that maybe the issue would fade into the background.

No such luck. With the economy seemingly primed for another leg down, and politicians once again frantically scampering about to shift blame away from themselves, here comes the scapegoating.

After years of trying, Congress is taking another stab at retaliating against what many see as Chinese manipulation of its currency to make its exports to the United States cheaper and U.S. goods more expensive in China.

The Senate is expected to take up legislation Monday that would impose higher U.S. duties on Chinese products to offset the perceived advantage that critics say China gets by undervaluing its currency...

Beijing denies that its exchange rate is responsible for the huge trade deficit that the United States has with China, and it's not clear that U.S. lawmakers have the political will to follow through.

The Senate bill has bipartisan support and is expected to clear a procedural hurdle Monday evening. But intense lobbying against it by American-based multinational corporations and their trade associations could spell trouble for the legislation.

In addition, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, doesn't like the bill, saying quiet diplomacy is a better way to influence Chinese policy and warning that overt penalties could lead to a destructive trade fight.

Sigh. As a reminder, my vicious opposition to this kind of legislation has everything to do with the fact that the loss of manufacturing jobs to China is now and has always been a two-way street. The "undervaluation" of the Yuan and the cheap labor rates that U.S. corporations have enjoyed are among the only factors that have prevented rampant inflation in the U.S. over the last two decades.

The only certain consequence of protectionist legislation like this is that prices of consumer goods will increase overnight. This will ironically do the most harm to those whom it professes to support--the unemployed and the working poor. Inflation in consumer prices is something that we simply can't afford to absorb right now, and protectionist policies like this will have the same effect of the Smoot-Hawley Act, which sent us spiraling deeper into the Great Depression.

Don't believe me? Consider this chart. Higher prices--of oil, food, consumer products, or anything else--are devastating for our economy, especially for those who have been hurt most by the recent economic downturn. For more of my thoughts on the insidious effects of inflation, read this, this, this, this, and this. Or you can just read Mish Shedlock's take on the re-emergence of this zombie bill.

The scapegoating and misdirection plays (don't look here, look over there!) that our politicians insist on utilizing are a huge part of why we're in this mess to begin with, and going back to that same ridiculous playbook isn't going to help. True leadership is not performed by standing on a platform and saying "it's all China's fault"--it's performed by standing up, looking in the mirror, and saying "we're all to blame". And if we don't start realizing it now, we're never going to solve a thing in this country. It's not China--it's you (and me).

Cut this crap out, Washington. Now.

[Yahoo Finance]  
(h/t Mish Shedlock)