The next generation of America: a portrait

If you're curious about the next generation of Americans—and what our country's got in store for it—do yourself a favor and read this little New York Times article regarding the steady decline in importance of college campus bars. It just may be the greatest (and most complete) portrait of the next generation that I've seen, for better or worse.

Via Kid Dynamite's World, as teased by me yesterday on Twitter (all emphasis mine):

To anyone who has ever been to college, it doesn’t seem like much of a problem: how to lure students to bars, the earlier in the evening the better. 

But bar owners in the Collegetown neighborhood of Ithaca recently convened a worried summit about just this topic. Once upon a time, in the Pleistocene epoch before cellphones and social media, students used bars as meeting places, heading there after class to find friends and to plot evenings over beer. 

These days text messaging, Facebook and Foursquare make it possible to see if a bar is worth the trip (translation: who is there) without leaving the dorm. Meanwhile, location-based mobile apps like Grindr, which point to the nearest available candidates looking for sex or not-quite-sex, are helping dethrone college bars from their place as meat markets. 

Students have spent so many hours pregaming (as in, getting as cost-efficiently drunk as possible, usually on hard liquor at a private party) that there is little need to waste money even on cut-price drinks, and they often don’t arrive at the bars until midnight or so, before the bars in Ithaca close at 1 a.m. ... 

Pregames often are single sex, with men playing beer pong or video games, and women drinking vodka sodas or a peach-flavored Champagne called André and refusing to head out until they have captured the perfect photo, which they promptly post to Instagram and Facebook. 

“You could have this really amazing night, but if you didn’t get a picture, it’s like it didn’t happen,” said Ms. Parr, 22, a senior at Gettysburg, whose friends often order designer outfits from the Rent the Runway Web site because incessant documenting makes wearing anything more than twice taboo. “It’s crazy how much pictures consume our lives. Everyone knows how to pose and how to hold your arm and which way is most flattering, and everyone wants the picture taken with their phone.” 

That preamble tends to delay arrival time at bars, another factor in their decline. At Cornell, three Collegetown bars have closed in the last year, including the 71-year-old Royal Palm Tavern, a storied dive where students convened at “Palms o’clock,” meaning in time for one last drink. 

“These kids today won’t pay even $2 for a drink,” said the former owner, Lenny Leonardo, as he cruised down a highway in Florida, where he retired in August. “They buy a bottle of Southern Comfort and show up in time to try to get laid. But they just end up throwing up in my men’s room, and I get reprimanded because it looks like I’m the one who let them get this drunk.”... 

This article seriously has it all. The upcoming generation is resourceful, creative, frugal, but also incredibly narcissistic, exhibitionist, with maybe just a little bit of nihilism sprinkled in (you know, not that there's anything wrong with that).

These kids are absolutely amazing at cutting through the crap and getting what they need without wasting an ounce more time, energy, or money than is absolutely necessary. Generally speaking, that's a positive thing. At the same time, everything is always on display, and therefore nothing that happens actually matters unless and until everybody else knows about it. By itself, that's neither good nor bad—it just sort of is what it is.

Social media has created a bizarre keeping-up-with-the-Joneses dynamic for the internet age, where everything happens at hyper speed and is instantly spread throughout the world—if a drunk pukes in a bar and nobody tweets about it, did they ever really puke?

But here's the article's pièce de résistance:

“Students want to get drunker faster and cheaper,” said Jason Sidle, general manager of Rulloff’s Restaurant and Bar in Collegetown. In its last decade, the Royal Palm Tavern sold about twice as much hard liquor as it had in the previous one, Mr. Leonardo said. 

Mike McLaughlin, 21, a senior at Cornell, said, “I drink liquor because it takes too long to drink beer.” On the drinks menu at Rulloff’s, “Bitch Fuel” (vodka, gin, rum, peach schnapps and lemon-lime soda) is a popular recent addition, but Mr. Sidle has also required all his bartenders to download mixologist apps to their phones. “We get all these requests for weird drinks we’ve never heard of because they’ve seen someone drinking it on Facebook,” he said.

Takes too long to drink beer, huh? I guess that's not so far different from my own college-era mentality, truth be told. But hey, if you're really having a problem with not getting drunk fast enough, you could just hop on down to Home Depot and pick up some rubber tubing and... you know what... just... nevermind.

In many ways, there's something very familiar about this next generation—just about every American generation has defined itself by its resourcefulness and inventiveness, and that's absolutely present here—it just happens to all be draped in a cloak of social media showiness that can often be hard to get past. Either way, for better or for worse, these are the trends and dynamics that are likely to define the future of America. It may not be exactly what I grew up knowing, but it's also not that far different at its core. Should be an interesting next couple of decades, don't you think?

[New York Times]
(h/t Kid Dynamite)

Clip of the Week

Time for the weekend, and another quick flurry of posts before we head out the door (or stay in to watch the Ryder Cup). First up is the Clip of the Week, where we've got a few decent contenders.

As election season wears on, and my phone rings a million times a day because I'm in a swing state, I got a kick out of this Simpsons clip (nice satirical summary of the Presidential choices) and this Stephen Colbert clip on Romney's struggling poll numbers.

As far as animal videos go, this was the only thing I saw this week worth sharing, but it's a doozy. And then Jimmy Fallon did another one of those things he loves doing, which is honestly about the only thing he's good at.

Then there's sports, where we had this absolutely ridiculous catch by the Pirates' Travis Snider, which probably should've won your Clip of the Week. But we'll hold off on the baseball until October, and for now we'll give this week's honor to the (now defunct) replacement refs, via this fantastic montage of some of their best work.

Nice knowing you guys. Enjoy life back on the high school football fields. And now the rest of us can get back to doing what we normally do—complaining about the usual refs and pretending that we care about concussions.

On intellectual inconsistency

In yesterday's Quote of the Week, I presented a line from actor Craig T. Nelson that displayed a stunning lack of self-awareness, a trend that's seemingly everywhere in our country these days. I had previously discussed this dynamic in a post on "blind spots", which hold the potential to swing elections (and the political and economic future of our nation).

In that post—which focused on a graphic that revealed that a significant percentage of recipients of government welfare programs did not consider themselves to be government beneficiaries—I wrote:

To fully appreciate the importance of these blind spots, I think it's useful to attempt to put these numbers into context. Using just the final line item, "Food Stamps"—which I think is a fairly clear and unambiguous example of a "government social program"—we see that 25.4% of food stamp (pardon me, SNAP) recipients do not consider themselves to have benefited from a government program. This is certain to impact the way they view national issues in federal (especially Presidential) elections, especially when debt and deficits are as large a story as they have currently become. 

Recall next that in several states, food stamp usage covers close to (or more than) 20% of the total population (nationwide, food stamp usage rates are at 14%). If a full 25% of people in these states do not think that they benefit from our "big government", that leaves us with 5% of that state's population—easily a big enough group to decide just about any Presidential election—believing something that is patently false.

Simply put, how can we expect voters to make intelligent and informed decisions about their political leaders when they have such blatant and vicious blind spots obscuring their view of the world (and their role in it)?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this issue has been coming up quite a bit lately, most recently in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker found himself in a bit of a weird spot with respect to the NFL's disastrous replacement referees.

Nothing brings political enemies together in Wisconsin like the Green Bay Packers. 

Following a controversial game-ending call by replacement referees that cost Green Bay a win over the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football, Wisconsin officials from across the political divide united behind the Packers. 

Even Gov. Scott Walker and a Democratic state senator who were bitter opponents in the 2011 battle over Wisconsin public workers' collective bargaining rights found themselves on the same side Tuesday. 

Walker, whose union-busting efforts have made him the darling of fiscal conservatives, posted a message on Twitter calling for the return of the NFL's locked-out unionized officials. 

"After catching a few hours of sleep, the #Packers game is still just as painful. #Returntherealrefs," Walker tweeted early Tuesday... 

Walker's spokesman, Cullen Werwie, tried to spin the governor's post on Tuesday, saying it wasn't meant as a pro-union political statement. Walker's tweet was being widely mocked on Twitter in light of his push last year that effectively ended collective bargaining for teachers, nurses and most other public workers. His proposal didn't affect private sector unions. 

"I don't think this anything to do with unions, but has everything to do with refs making bad calls," Werwie said.

To be fair to Walker, there's an important difference between the role and operation of public-sector unions as opposed to private-sector unions, a difference that even FDR recognized and appreciated. Nevertheless, the more we dig into this issue, the more inconsistent Walker's analysis seems to be.

According to Sports Illustrated's Peter King, there are some fairly significant parallels between this case and the Wisconsin (or Chicago, take your pick) teachers' case:

One of the emerging and major reasons why a deal has been so elusive... is that the NFL is insisting on getting some control of the officials back that it has ceded in past negotiations with the NFLRA. This includes the league's desire to have three seven-man officiating crews in reserve with the ability to replace—either for a game or longer—underperforming current officials. 

Another source with knowledge of the locked-out officials' position said Tuesday that the NFL would not guarantee that they would work at least 15 games in a regular season. Currently, other than due to injury, an official that starts a season works the full season. The officials source said that this is the main crux of what the NFL is trying to do in these negotiations: wrest back control of the officials' performance week to week in an NFL season. I've been told that the NFL is insisting on being able to make in-season changes to crews based solely on performance of individual officials... 

There's also still the matter of the league trying to roll back the officials' pension. Over the last five years, the league has contributed, on average, about $5.3 million per year to the officials' pension plan. The league, in keeping with the current cost-cutting practice of corporations across America, no longer wants to guarantee how much each official would get in retirement, but rather tie the contributions to a 401(k)-type pension.

The ability to fire underperforming workers? Questions over the funding (and fundability) of workers' pensions? You know, this situation is starting to sound pretty familiar, which of course makes Gov. Walker's support of the referees in this situation that much more ironic.

But then, intellectual inconsistency and self-justifying behavior has become the norm in this country, especially since the financial crisis of 2008-09. As I wrote in this blog post last summer,

In the housing crisis, there were some who blamed the borrowers (i.e. homeowners) for irresponsibly using debt to live beyond their means, but the vast majority felt that the real story of the crisis was one of overly greedy and predatory bankers taking advantage of borrowers, originating loans that were destined to fail. This "blame the lenders" dynamic ultimately became the "winning" narrative in the aftermath of the crisis, hence the incredible vitriol directed at banks today. 

In today's [global sovereign debt] crisis, though, that's far from the case. Instead, we direct our ire primarily at the irresponsible borrowers, blaming the nations in question (rather than the enabling lenders) for their predicament. Instead of blaming China for consistently purchasing our national debt time and time again over the past few decades, we blame our own government for its irresponsibility (which is probably fair, just noticeably different from how we viewed the housing crisis). 

After watching the strange theater of the forced "austerity measures" in Greece this week, I tried to imagine the proper analogy in the housing crisis. What if, instead of foreclosing on a home, banks and mortgage companies came to an individual's house and demanded that they cancel their phone service, cut down on their food intake, and sell their cars in the name of "austerity" and improving the chance that they repaid their mortgage? That sounds completely ridiculous, right? And yet, that's exactly what we're seeing here. 

Ultimately, I think that the differing responses to otherwise similar stories derives from our pre-existing notions of who is the more sympathetic party, rather than the facts of the matter. In the housing crisis, it was far easier (and incredibly satisfying) to blame the big, evil banking institutions than it would have been to accept the blame ourselves, as homeowners. 

In the sovereign debt case, it is far easier to blame one or two basket-case governments (especially when it is so fashionable right now to blame governments—in this case, THEY are the big, evil corporation relative to the smaller banks) than it would be to place the blame on the lenders, who span everyone from the European Central Bank to nearly every American who places money in a money market fund. 

It's hard to trust ourselves when we try to analyze complex situations like these, simply because our reactions are so utterly inconsistent with regard to the actual facts of the case. We all approach situations in life with inherent, trained biases, and it's exceptionally difficult to get past these and assess problems at face value.

We all like to view the world as a universe full of simple narratives, with clear villains and heroes and obvious lines of culpability when things go wrong. But the truth is always somewhere in between—both heroes and villains share some of the blame, and sometimes the heroes in one situation are in fact the villains in another. Because this doesn't fit well with the way that we like to view the world, we instead end up with bizarre and contradictory approaches to what are in fact similar situations, based simply on the role in which we place ourselves.

As a nation, if we are ever going to be able to engage in an open and honest conversation about the issues that plague our country's political and economic systems, we must first start by appreciating our own biases and blind spots, and approach these complex situations from a more detached (and less emotional) standpoint. If we can't do this, then we'll be forever destined to make poor and inconsistent decisions, and we'll all end up in an awkward spot, just like Gov. Walker.

But hey, breaking news, looks like the NFL's "real" referees are on their way back to work, after all. That's great news.... isn't it?

[Sports Illustrated 1]
[Sports Illustrated 2]

Quote of the Week

This week's Quote of the Week is going to be a bit of a cheat, in that it's really a Clip of the Week. I'm not going to do any setup of this quote (short of posting up this blog post, which is particularly apt), except to say that this is actor Craig T. Nelson, it's three years old, and yet I just saw it for the first time and think it's terrific.

I'll be referring back to this Quote in a blog post that I intend to write tomorrow, but for now, enjoy the awesomeness.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We are a capitalistic society. Okay, I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not gonna bail me out. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No." 
                                             - Craig T. Nelson

Simply stunning ignorance. Amazing work.

Our food supply issues grow

I hadn't blogged about our food supply here in a long time, but then I came across two articles in one day that gently reminded me that I was overdue for an update. I've previously blogged here (and here) about the dangerous (and creepy) nature of genetically modified (GMO) foods, and the evidence continues to pile up in favor of my argument.

From Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, citing a study from the Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN):

For the first time, the health impact of a GMO and a widely used pesticide have been comprehensively assessed in a long term animal feeding trial of greater duration and with more detailed analyses than any previous studies, by environmental and food agencies, governments, industries or researchers institutes. 

The two tested products are in very common use : (i) a transgenic maize made tolerant to Roundup, the characteristic shared by over 80% of food and animal feed GMOs, and (ii) Roundup itself, the most widely used herbicide on the planet. The regulatory approval process requires these products to be tested on rats as a surrogate for humans. 

The new research took the form of a two year feeding trial on 200 rats, monitored for outcomes against more than 100 parameters. The doses were consistent with typical dietary/ environmental exposure... 

The results... included increased and more rapid mortality, coupled with hormonal non linear and sex related effects. Females developed significant and numerous mammary tumours, pituitary and kidney problems. Males died mostly from severe hepatorenal chronic deficiencies...

The implications are extremely serious. They demonstrate the toxicity, both of a GMO with the most widely spread transgenic character and of the most widely used herbicide, even when ingested at extremely low levels, (corresponding to those found in surface or tap water). In addition, these results call into question the adequacy of the current regulatory process, used throughout the world by agencies involved in the assessment of health, food and chemicals, and industries seeking commercialisation of products.

As Yves and the study's authors point out, what sets this research apart from previous studies is the duration of the testing. While regulatory analyses of these products last only 3 months, this particular study lasted two years, a significant portion of the rats' lives. This study therefore sheds more light on the long-term effects of these products, which is frankly significantly more relevant from a public health standpoint.

At issue here is Monsanto's GMO corn, an herbicide-resistant product (Monsanto also sells the herbicide in question, Roundup) that is in a distressing number of the products that we buy regularly—one estimate pegs the percentage at 70%, largely because GMO corn is the primary ingredient in high-fructose corn syrup, which is in basically everything in the supermarket these days. Think you're doing your best to avoid GMO corn in the supermarket? So did I, until I read this blog post, which scared the crap out of me.

Finally, since I promised that I'd read two articles that made me want to revisit this topic, here's the second.

If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die. 

Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program. 

Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. 

In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products. 

Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

Perfect. Am I the only one creeped out by the fact that we regularly eat chemicals that disorient and kill bees? If it's toxic to bees, then it's toxic to us as well, even if it doesn't immediately kill us or send us wandering aimlessly off the grid in search of our homes. No, we just die decades later from mysterious cancers that we can't seem to cure, never knowing what the hell happened to us or why.

Just because there isn't a short-term problem doesn't mean there it isn't a long-term problem (hey, sounds a lot like our debt situation, doesn't it?), and I'm increasingly convinced that's what's going on with our nation's food supply.

Yes, in the short term it seems like these foods are just the same as the foods that we grew 20 years ago—they look the same, nobody's dropping dead from them, we don't show any visible ill effects in the first few years, so we all assume that everything is hunky-dory. But is that really the case? Increasingly, science is answering "no" to that question, and I think we all need to stand up and take notice. Our food supply is inexorably deteriorating in quality, and it may already be too late to reverse the damage.

[Naked Capitalism]
[Reuters]

Clip of [Last] Week

Alright, we're back at it here after a couple-day unplanned hiatus from the blog (I had family in town, so I ranted and raved to them in person instead of on the blog... so be it). I've got at least 3 blog posts coming your way this afternoon, starting with last week's Clip of the Week, which never got posted.

As you all know by now, I harbor some pretty negative feelings toward Apple and their iPhone—I think they've transitioned from being an ingenious and admirable company to being an evil genius company, and there's an important difference between the two. Given that backdrop, I got a huge kick out of these two iPhone-related clips, the first from Jimmy Kimmel (awesome) and the second courtesy of Barry Ritholtz (also awesome, in a different way).

It was also another week in which sports were played, so we got this and this from the college football ranks and this goal from a one-legged soccer player.

If you're familiar with the work of the rapper DMX... just... watch this, I guess. And if you want to see a fun visualization of what contagion looks like (and how stable systems can quickly become very unstable), watch this little experiment.

But this week's spot is reserved for the recognition of Steve Sabol, the President of NFL Films, who died last week after a long illness. NFL Films was a huge part of my childhood, back when VHS tapes were a thing and YouTube (and the internet) hadn't yet been invented. I had tons of NFL Films videos at home, and I would watch the same ones over and over again. They were that good. Frankly, Steve Sabol's work is a big reason that the NFL is so popular today, and of course the league is now throwing up all over itself in the wake of Steve's death. Solid work, Commissioner.

At any rate, I love sports, I love NFL Films, and I love profanity, so this clip here is the perfect way to honor Steve Sabol's memory. R.I.P.

On patents and innovation

I'm often tempted to write a post about patent law and its ambiguous-at-best impact on innovation, but for some reason I never actually do it. In part, I think that's because I assume I've already covered it on the blog, but in searching through my history it seems like I haven't (maybe here, and here, kinda sorta, but those are sort of different points).

At any rate, in the wake of the overly broad and frankly pretty ridiculous court ruling that went in Apple's favor against Samsung in the companies' ongoing patent war, I thought this was a useful time to broach that topic once and for all. To set the table for this argument, I'll first share with you a nice little chart from Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution blog.

In layman's terms, Tabarrok's chart argues that while some level of patent protection is necessary in order to protect intellectual property and encourage experimentation and innovation in the business realm, there comes a tipping point at which overly strong (or overly specific) patent protections become counter-productive.

At that point (which we have now passed), large companies begin to use their vast legal resources to patent everything under the sun (read this piece for an example of how it goes down), even those things which are not yet commercially viable and which they have no intention of bringing to market. They do this simply to protect their dominant market position, preventing smaller competitors from threatening their near-monopolies.

Apple, for one, has become particularly aggressive in its manipulation of patent law, literally attempting to patent every aspect of every product that it manufactures, in an obvious attempt to prevent competitors from entering into any market in which Apple operates. That's ironic, given Apple and Steve Jobs' well-known, unapologetic history of being an imitator and/or thief of other companies' intellectual property—but Apple doesn't care much about irony or intellectual consistency, just piles of money.

Regardless of the details of the cases discussed in that last link, Apple and Microsoft are indisputably stronger companies today because of the competition between the two of them (oh, and Xerox, don't forget about Xerox). Now, Apple is trying to stifle just that kind of competition in the present day, and so far courts are falling for it.

That may not last for long, though, if U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner (whom I've written about here and here) has anything to say about it. In this ruling and others, Posner has consistently referred to a "dysfunctional patent system" in this country, one that has run amok and now operates contrary to the public interest (that last remark is a direct rebuke of the primary justification of patent law in the first place). Will Posner be able to do anything about it? In the short run, it's doubtful, but I certainly hold out hope.

In the long run, our economy's only hope for rescuing itself from its current malaise is not via money printing or trade sanctions against China (so please, guys, seriously, stop trying that dumb shit), but through innovation—real, honest, serious innovation, the kind that makes us all legitimately more productive and prosperous. Our country has been great for the last century not because it has protected its largest corporations' market positions, but because it has allowed and enabled start-ups to thrive without smacking down their creations on dubious patent grounds.

So let's hope our country's future is determined a little bit more by Richard Posner and a little bit less by Apple—no matter how much you like your new iPhones, believe me, you shouldn't be rooting for Apple, at least not anymore. I know I'm not.

[Marginal Revolution]