-- Tyler Cowen
Economic View
Means Testing, for Medicare
By TYLER COWEN
Published: July 20, 2008
No matter who sits in the Oval Office next year, there won't be many degrees of freedom in the federal budget. The main problem: Medicare.
Hey, is there anywhere to get a decent cup of coffee around here?
Oh, come on. Don't look so sad. When we're in the mood for a twenty-four-ounce cup of pumpkin-pie-flavored Cool Whip, a Feist CD covered in mocha fingerprints, a possibly exaggerated memoir by a former child soldier, and some customer "service" that denies our essential humanity, we still head straight to our corner Starbucks. Or the one across from that one. Or the one that will have opened farther down the block by the time we finish typing this sentence.
Here's the thing, though: We're never, ever in that mood.
What we do like is coffee. If coffee were smack, we'd be Pete Doherty and we'd refuse to give it up, even if it cost us our career and our supermodel girlfriend. And we'll tank up anywhere: the neighborhood joint with the womyn-friendly breast-feeding policy and the couches composed entirely of rusty springs; the swill dispenser down the hall; an AA meeting. Anywhere, that is, but Starbucks.
In this we're not alone. America is a caffeine nation, perpetually jacked up on gallons of magma-hot ****-yeah juice, and logically you guys should still be making more money than Halliburton and Hannah Montana combined. Instead your market share is crumbling, and so is your cultural primacy. Snooty people have moved on to snootier coffee--shade-grown, fair-trade, artisanal, brought down the mountain by mules that have good dental coverage. Everybody else went back to Dunkin' Donuts. You're still part of the fabric of American life--think of Mary-Kate Olsen's ever present Venti cup, proof despite massive evidence to the contrary that she's Just Like Us--but so is soul-crushing corporate suckitude. Your new ads spotlight a straight-down-the-middle brew called Pike Place Roast. We're glad you're getting back into the coffee business--seriously, is there anything you haven't put in a latte yet? Courvoisier? DayQuil? unicorn tears?--but we've tried this stuff, and it should come with an Egg McMuffin on the side. It's a rich, complex blend of desperation and mediocrity.
The real problem is that there used to be something about you, Starbucks, and now there isn't. You were a quintessentially '90s company. You were from Seattle, the same rainy cradle of anticorporate corporateness that gave us Microsoft and major-label grunge. Young dreamers camped out in your stores all day like the cast of Friends, filling napkins with business plans for e-commerce Web sites. ("It's like Pets.com for Wiccans!") We were all going to get crazy rich and wear ironic sexy grandpa T-shirts to offices where we'd play Frisbee golf instead of working. A $4 latte wasn't an extravagance; it was a little rehearsal for the cushy life that was about to be ours. Even your stupid fake-Italian language made us feel sophisticated. The 7-Eleven crowd could have their week-old bubblin' crude; we'd be over here, talking like Marcello Mastroianni, because we knew better. Even back then, you seemed a little evil-empire-ish. But man, your chairs were comfy. So we drank your overpriced espresso-shakes. We drank them up!
...
In other words, you've brought this on yourself. If we learned one thing from The Wire, it's that you can only control all the corner real estate in town and pay disenfranchised young people to sling an addictive product for so long before you lose your grip on the game. But we're not mad at you, Starbucks. Give us a call sometime. We'll grab a coffee. It's on us--we just shorted your stock.
Yours with shaky hands,
GQ Magazine, July 2008
[Via Men/ Style and F-chat]
Some people are going to be open-minded and listen to your objections,
and if you're actually right, they'll consider the evidence and take
your advice. Some people will get defensive, however, and refuse to listen.
Some people will get so defensive that they'll actually double down to
prove the nay-sayers wrong--they'll marry that bad boyfriend or put more
money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that
they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of
"I told you sos", will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last
possible moment when it's becoming clear that they cannot sustain this
bad decision any longer.
Having framed the question, the fact that America's reaction to
increasing evidence of both peak oil and global warming would be to
reduce our average gas mileage was entirely predictable.
...
it was inevitable that a high percentage of people would like SUVs not in spite of their low mileage, but because of the low mileage. Instead of wishing human nature to change, then, I'm going to suggest that the people who exploited this rationalization tendency hold the lion's share of the blame. For people who wanted to engage in wishful thinking about the relationship between oil and environmental problems, right wing pundits, car companies, and oil companies did all the hard psychological rationalizing work for people. They painted critics as effeminate hippies that are just trying to tell you what to do because they're sanctimonious and nosy. (That some really are sanctimonious only made the situation worse.) They gave people pseudo-scientific explanations they could latch onto.
]]>He was right -- and the Implode-O-Meter took off. Traffic on the site soared,
reaching as many as 100,000 regular visitors, and advertising dollars rolled in.
Mr. Krowne quit his day job and hired 10 people for his company, Implode-Explode Heavy Industries.
"The crisis has come in waves," Mr. Krowne said. "It just keeps coming."
Business: Loan Pains Turned Site Into a Hit
By LOUISE STORY
Published: July 8, 2008
The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, a Web site, is gleefully tallying the
number of lenders that run into trouble.
Total Assets - $2.118B
(RC-C.1) Loans secured by real estate $1.360B ( 64.2% )
Where does one get the RC-C.1 data?
Each bank submits CALL data to the FDIC on a quarterly basis.
The data usually becomes available 15-30 days after the quarter
ends.
Search for banks and download/view as PDF data at the FDIC
Institution Directory.
[Via CR/Comments]
-- Slate's William Saletan sets the bar higher than the NYT's 'ethicist'.
]]>-- Mr. Chris Lehane, the Democratic operative, pronounced himself
delighted that the McCain campaign was feeling victimized.
A more refective take on the attorney factory.
[Via lawandletters]
Great live news at NHL.com.
Previously: 2007 Stanley Cup playoffs.
I can, for the first time, understand how people who are
heavily medicated feel crazy and out of control and even suicidal..
-- Like the Amazon.com customer reviews of drugs, but much
more entertaining.
-- Overheard.
]]>"So if I'm paying that minimum payment, I'm not actually
putting a dent in my principal though right? My principal and
interest they're just going to keep climbing up right?" the
borrower asks in the video tape. "It's optional," the broker
in the video replied.
Oakland, California's Golden West Financial Corp., the No. 2 U.S.
savings and loan specialized in ARMs, which comprise about
99 percent of its mortgage lending.
World Savings and Golden West are both now part of Wachovia.
-- CC@unfogged.