Quote of the Week (Santa Clara joins the Wasteful Hall of Fame)

I had a few good items in mind for Quote of the Week last week, but then I never ended up getting around to writing the post. Well, that's too bad for those quotes (especially the one from Jim Grant, who I think was on fire in that CNBC interview), because this week I've got a new one, and it's a doozy.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may remember my mention of the Sacramento Kings' new arena deal, which includes a significant amount of city financing via a proposed parking garage plan. I have always thought that publicly-financed venues for private businesses represent the height of insanity--the team in question always enjoys any profits from the deal, while the city (or state) remains on the hook for any potential losses from the project (like, if people stopped going to Kings games, or if there was, you know, a work stoppage or something).

We've seen instances of privatized gains/socialized losses elsewhere in our nation, and it's pretty much never a good idea, particularly when municipal budgets are strained like never before (seriously, California, you folks out there should know better). And yet, the Sacramento deal isn't even the most insane sports arena project to be under consideration right now. In fact, it's not even the most insane project of its type in California. I give you the (recently spurned) San Francisco 49ers, with this week's Quote of the Week, regarding their proposed new stadium in Santa Clara.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"This will be a cutting-edge, new-technology building because we're in the heart of Silicon Valley. We believe we need a significant budget to pay for things not currently on the market."
                                    - Larry MacNeil, 49ers' Chief Financial Officer

Wow. "A significant budget to pay for things not currently on the market". So, a blank check from the government to spend on things that DON'T EVEN EXIST YET. That is literally taking the circus to the next level. Congratulations, Santa Clara... you guys win. I hope, for your sake, that tax revenues bounce back in a big way and you can actually afford these imaginary luxuries that the 49ers want to charge you all large sums of money to come enjoy. Uh-oh...

Well done, California. You continue to amaze me.

A few of my favorite charts

I realize I went radio silent last week, and I apologize. Work and family concerns took a front seat for a bit, but I'm intending to get back to blogging business soon. For now, enjoy a few of my favorite charts that I've come across lately. There's a bit of a common thread here... see if you can spot it.

STUDENT LOAN DEBT OUTSTANDING

GLOBAL CENTRAL BANK ASSETS (i.e. MONEY PRINTING)

MARKET IMPACTS OF "QUANTITATIVE EASING"

APPLE STOCK (AAPL)

Remember, buy Apple. It's "cheap". And now it even pays a dividend!

Picture me rollin'

Last week, I came across this crazy photo gallery of rare color pictures from early-20th century Russia. The photographer, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, was a pioneer in color photography and these shots are staggering--the clarity and vividness of the colors makes many of the pictures look as though they could have been taken yesterday.

The whole gallery is worth a look, but I got stuck on one particular picture (#23 in the gallery) that absolutely cracked me up. This is just perfect. They see me rollin'...

Another link dump

Yeah, it's time for one of these again... lots of news-worthy articles, none of which completely justify a full post but all of which I think are important. It was either a link dump or a whole bunch of Twitter posts that would probably get ignored, so here we are. As usual, I'll give a quick summary and then my brief thoughts.

The first two articles are semi-related, as both of them concern people's shocking willingess to sacrifice their basic rights.

Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords
Bob Sullivan, MSNBC.com

Pretty simple, but troubling.

If you think privacy settings on your Facebook and Twitter accounts guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts, guess again. 

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes. 

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall... 

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts. Schools are also turning to social media monitoring companies with names like UDilligence and Varsity Monitor for software packages that automate the task. The programs offer a "reputation scoreboard" to coaches and send "threat level" warnings about individual athletes to compliance officers.

I hate that I have to explain why this is dangerous--the usual excuse/response is "I don't care, I've got nothing to hide". That's not the point. Whether or not you've got anything to hide, you've got a right to privacy that absolutely must be protected. The whole concept of an "unalienable right" is that even you cannot opt to forfeit that right--one cannot sell oneself into slavery, hard as we may try with unpaid internships and the like.

I'm particularly troubled by the "threat level" warnings about student-athletes--we need to stop treating everyone as though they're a potential terrorist. It's ridiculous and it's wholly in opposition to the founding principles of this nation. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, he who would sacrifice liberty in pursuit of security deserves neither. Why are we all so eager to sacrifice liberty these days?

How Big a Deal is H.R. 347, That "Criminalizing Protest" Bill?
Gabe Rottman, ACLU.org

There's been a lot of hub-bub surrounding this most recent bill, which would seemingly criminalize protests of the ilk of the recent "Occupy" variety. The ACLU blog tempers the conspiracy theorists slightly, but still raises some disconcerting points.

It's important to note — contrary to some reports — that H.R. 347 doesn't create any new crimes, or directly apply to the Occupy protests. The bill slightly rewrites a short trespass law, originally passed in 1971 and amended a couple of times since, that covers areas subject to heightened Secret Service security measures. 

These restricted areas include locations where individuals under Secret Service protection are temporarily located, and certain large special events like a presidential inauguration. They can also include large public events like the Super Bowl and the presidential nominating conventions (troublingly, the Department of Homeland Security has significant discretion in designating what qualifies as one of these special events)... 

H.R. 347 did make one noteworthy change, which may make it easier for the Secret Service to overuse or misuse the statute to arrest lawful protesters. 

Without getting too much into the weeds, most crimes require the government to prove a certain state of mind. Under the original language of the law, you had to act "willfully and knowingly" when committing the crime. In short, you had to know your conduct was illegal. Under H.R. 347, you will simply need to act "knowingly," which here would mean that you know you're in a restricted area, but not necessarily that you're committing a crime... 

Also, while H.R. 347, on its own, is only of incremental importance, it could be misused as part of a larger move by the Secret Service and others to suppress lawful protest by relegating it to particular locations at a public event. These "free speech zones" are frequently used to target certain viewpoints or to keep protesters away from the cameras. Although H.R. 347 doesn't directly address free speech zones, it is part of the set of laws that make this conduct possible, and should be seen in this context.

Basically, we're now allowing DHS to determine what does and does not constitute a legal demonstration of our right to free speech. That's cool, if we assume that everyone within DHS is absolutely acting in the best interests of the citizenry (as opposed to certain hand-picked moneyed interests)... but what if they're not?

Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days
Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic

This is brilliant, even if the research is a couple years old. Many of you are probably aware that by visiting a website, you are implicitly agreeing to that site's privacy policy, whether or not you have read it (which you haven't).

One simple answer to our privacy problems would be if everyone became maximally informed about how much data was being kept and sold about them. Logically, to do so, you'd have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie Mellon, decided to calculate how much time it would take to actually read every privacy policy you should... 

So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies! If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. Nationalized, that's 53.8 BILLION HOURS of time required to read privacy policies.

Hahahaha, oh wow. Good thing this kind of stuff doesn't threaten to follow us around, right? Ah, crap... Again, people, with the privacy? Seriously?

Alright, that's it for today. Unless, of course, you feel like reading another one of my rants about how TARP didn't actually make money--but let's be honest, you don't. Anyway, get some sleep tonight, people--I lost one hour of sleep this weekend and I swear it feels like I lost 20. So be it.

Song of the Week(end)

I could've gone a couple directions with this week's Song of the Week(end). I thought about posting Bruce Springsteen's new "Death to My Hometown" song, which has an incredibly catchy Celtic-inspired back beat and has been in my head all week long. (Side note, I watched this performance of his on Jimmy Fallon... and the guy is sounding more like Tom Waits by the day. Kinda strange.)

I also thought about being the world's biggest nerd (which, realistically, is more a state of being than a state of action... you know what, nevermind...) by honoring my alma mater's long-awaited Ivy League basketball title-- and the NCAA tourney berth that it brings--with a little Ten Thousand Men of Harvard. But... no.

The Red Cowboy also came through with a late entry to the show, with Will Ferrell's "Yo No Se". Awesome. But it's March 9th, and 15 years ago today the music world lost its second star in six months, when Biggie Smalls was murdered. So we'll honor the big man here with not one but two of my favorite Biggie songs (yeah, I couldn't choose). Have a good weekend, people. Don't buy any Greek bonds.

Soylent pink

Now that I've got a daughter at home, stuff like this makes me even angrier than it used to...

When McDonald’s and other fast-food chains announced last month that the infamous “pink slime” was no longer being used in their burgers, some thought the ammonium hydroxide-treated beef cuts had disappeared from our food supply once and for all. 

But a new report in the Daily tablet newspaper suggests the slime will appear in school lunches this spring — 7 million pounds of it. 

The USDA, schools and school districts plan to buy the treated beef from Beef Products Inc. (BPI) for the national school-lunch program in coming months. USDA said in a statement that all of its ground beef purchases “meet the highest standard for food safety.” The department also said it had strengthened ground beef safety standards in recent years. 

Last April, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver reported that 70 percent of America’s ground beef is made with BPI’s ammonia-treated product. 

BPI recently said that figure still holds. In a statement, the company called ammonium hydroxide a “natural compound ... widely used in the processing of numerous foods.” 

Gerald Zirnstein, a former microbiologist at the Food Safety Inspection Service who coined the term “pink slime,” told the Daily that the continued purchase of ammonium hydroxide-treated beef cuts for school lunches doesn’t make any sense. 

“I have a 2-year-old son,” he told the Daily. “And you better believe I don’t want him eating pink slime when he starts going to school.” 

Zirnstein came up with the “pink slime” phrase when he toured a Beef Products Inc. production facility in 2002 during an investigation into salmonella contamination in packaged ground beef. After the animal byproduct is mixed with ammonia, it has a pink appearance. Zirnstein e-mailed his colleagues after the visit to say he did not “consider the stuff to be ground beef,” according to the Daily.

The fact that something that was once relegated to pet food is now considered perfectly acceptable for our children to eat at school is somewhat nauseating. I certainly don't want to force my children to eat something that has been rejected even by McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell--frankly, the prospect of home-schooling has never seemed more appealing.

Of course, I'd argue that this kind of thing is yet another inevitable unintended consequence of the Fed's long-standing inflationary monetary policy. Nobody ever would have considered re-purposing this stuff for human consumption unless food inflation had gotten to a point that other alternatives were no longer affordable. That's also why you're now finding high-fructose corn syrup all over the place, since it's more cost-effective than sugar and the average consumer simply can't afford the real stuff anymore.

These kinds of trade-downs are everywhere lately, but of course they don't show up in "official" inflation statistics. A hamburger is considered a hamburger by the Fed, regardless of its content--the Fed makes no distinction between pure ground beef and something that is 30% "pink slime". I've ranted about this before and could do so all day long, but it's frankly pretty terrifying, and yet it's completely avoidable. We need to stop with the monetary hijinks and the nasty unintended consequences that they've created. Now.

[Washington Post]

Clip of the Week

This was an absolutely loaded week for videos--just the way I like it.

We'll start with music, where we've got this really cool video of a couple of guys (the Piano Guys, apparently) playing music on the shores of Hawaii, as well as this video of a bunch of robots playing the James Bond theme song. I'm honestly not really sure what's going on in that one, but I'm pretty sure it's awesome.

We've also got a few things going on in the animal kingdom--there's a koala bear running down the hall (I've always loved koalas, don't ask why), a baby sloth in a onesie, a seriously badass owl, and a seriously excited dog playing in a rainstorm of tennis balls.

And then there's sports. Lionel Messi scored five goals in a Champions League match, setting an impressive record, and Michael Beasley is an odd dude. Meanwhile, in Miami, this... is just weird. It seems that the Marlins, having changed their name from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins, are now totally embracing the bizarre kitsch that defines South Beach--those hideous uniforms, the weird centerfield sculpture thing, this guy over here is calling himself Giancarlo now, Ozzie Guillen is the manager... this is a complete and total circus. Fitting, given the mentality of their braindead owner. Anyway, moving along...

This week, instead of any of those worthy videos, I'm posting a TED talk about what makes videos go viral--isn't it about time that we had a video about videos here on Clip of the Week? At any rate, this video made me laugh hysterically while also checking in as one of the most interesting videos i saw this week--it's one of the better TED talks I've seen recently, on all accounts.

The theory of what makes videos go viral is nothing Earth-shattering--it always has to do with certain cultural gatekeepers (the speaker calls them "tastemakers") who pass on videos to tons of other people at once. If your blog, video, or song gets tweeted or talked about by somebody with millions of followers, then that's pretty much all it takes to go viral. (You hear me out there, Lady Gaga?). Without further ado, here you go.