Posts Tagged ‘economic bubbles’
Wednesday Links!
* Some CFPs I posted yesterday: Buffy at 20! SFFTV Call for Reviewers! And Paradoxa 28: “Global Weirding” has officially appeared in the world as well; see a table of contents and our introduction, and then get one of your very own…
* I’m still gathering the loooooing list for the Pioneer Award — so let me know if you know of a peer-reviewed edited collection in SF studies broadly conceived, published in 2016, or a peer-reviewed article on SF published in a non-SF-studies journal, also in 2016!
* Visiting MLA 2017? Can I interest you in #s444?
444. Infinite Jest at Twenty
Saturday, 7 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 112A, Pennsylvania Convention Center
A special session
Presiding: Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.
1. “Infinite Jest‘s Near Future,” Lee Konstantinou, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
2. “Aesthetics of Trauma in Infinite Jest,” Carrie Shanafelt, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ., Teaneck
3. “No Year of Glad: Infinite Jest after 9/13/2008,” Gerry Canavan
Responding: N. Katherine Hayles, Duke Univ.
* I shared that one, so here’s the debunking: The Bad Research Behind the Bogus Claim That North Carolina Is No Longer a Democracy. I guess I relied on the journalistic summaries (classic blunder) didn’t realize how bad the base research was. North Carolina is still not a legitimate democracy, though.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Constitution has strangled American democracy for long enough. We need a constituent assembly.
* Drexel, Twitter and Academic Freedom.
* Oh boy: A Turning Point in the Campus Culture Wars? For Some, Trump Raises Hopes.
* Rethinking the legacy of writers who worked with the CIA.
* Why saving the congressional ethics office isn’t as big a victory as it seems. At least it was a win!
* Here’s How We Prepare to be Ungovernable in 2017. Six policy ideas that can lay the groundwork for a more progressive America.
* Why liberals need to get a grip on Russia.
* The coming restaurant crash.
* The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.
* Rogue One editors reveal which scenes were part of reshoots. Women’s Health and the Fall of the Galactic Republic.
* An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton.
* The 16 Black Panthers Still Behind Bars.
* Twilight of the curly quote.
* 47% of Jobs Will Disappear in the next 25 Years, According to Oxford University.
* Counterpoint: Why Star Trek: Discovery Belongs on CBS All Access.
* An oral history of the Sokal hoax.
* Towards an abolition ecology.
* Darkest timeline watch: Wisconsin Senate leader says he’s open to toll roads.
* And with 2016 over, a toddler has now shot a person every week in the US for two years straight. We did it, everyone. We did it.
Friday Morning Links!
* CFP: Anticipations: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions.
* It’s basically become a standing assignment at the Marquette Tribune to ask me about some weird thing I like once a semester. And while we’re on that subject: a preview of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Hard times at Mizzou. This new enrollment decline — seemingly on top of the demographic dip nationwide — looks like a complete disaster for the troubled campus, which the administration has effortlessly managed to weaponize in pursuit of its own goals. Meanwhile: Melissa Click Breaks Silence, Backs AAUP Inquiry.
* Luxurious College Apartments, Built on Debt.
* The end of tenure in Wisconsin.
* Fukushima: Tokyo was on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, admits former prime minister. Miami’s oceanfront nuclear power plant is leaking.
* What happens if there’s a supervolcano?
* Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English.
* Alternate title: Bernie Sanders has no path to a delegate majority. Even so, that Michigan win was pretty great.
* Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias: How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* In stories of classroom sexual harassment, popular teachers are often the perpetrators.
* Dystopia now: United confirms 10-abreast seating on some of its 777s.
* …just another instance of the bipartisan “smell weakness, then mercilessly swarm” routine that everyone has apparently decided is a healthy and beneficial norm for online life.
* At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump. It’s Getting Harder For Donald Trump To Deny That His Top Aide Assaulted A Reporter. Donald Trump Encourages Violence At His Rallies. His Fans Are Listening. Legitimacy and violence. The plan.
* The arc of history is long, but Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked.
* “Magic in North America”: The Harry Potter franchise veers too close to home.
* Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income. (via)
* 100% absolutely yes: Janelle Monae Will Co-Star in a Movie About the Women Behind the Space Program.
* Former College Student Wins Lawsuit After Being Told Men Were ‘Turned On’ By Her Pregnancy.
* xkcd: Map of the Repositioned United States.
* As a result, the complaint stated, Choudhry was disciplined with a 10 percent reduction in salary for one year and required to write a letter of apology to Sorrell. Sorrell alleged in the lawsuit that she was told by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele that he had “seriously considered terminating the Dean” but had decided not to because “it would ruin the Dean’s career.” Berkeley’s handling of sexual harassment is a disgrace.
* U.N.C. Football Player Who Ended Up Homeless Had C.T.E.
* Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF.
* How many LEGO would it take to…
* A brief history of allergies.
* google spiderman sounds weird truth
* The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age.
* The making of Cosmic Encounter, the greatest boardgame in the galaxy.
* Sleep is important, apparently. I know I miss it.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Orpheus.
* Y’all ready for a tech crash?
* And the worst part is, now they won’t even let us complain!
* And this is very promising: Huntington’s disease gene dispensable in adult mice.
Mondayish Reading
* In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests. The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss.
* Marquette is hiring a sustainability coordinator.
* “Why I’m Teaching a Netflix Class.”
* What Do You Have to Make in a Year to be in the Top 1% of Your State?
* The Death and Life of Simulated Cities.
* You could call it Rahm’s revenge—the whole point of passing a more ambitious, more politically risky version of Obamacare was to get enough healthy people to buy coverage, and that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening.
* Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. How to Decimate a City.
* On science fiction and post-scarcity economics.
* I suppose I’ve always been ahead of the curve.
* Junot Díaz talk discusses social activism in academia.
* To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’
* Penn State Cancels Recreational Class Trips To NYC & DC Due To “Safety Concerns.”
* Star Wars, before the EU. Alan Moore’s Star Wars. Hang the Jedi.
* A brief history of judicial dissent.
* On Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s racism wasn’t the matter of a few unfortunate remarks here or there. It was a core part of his political identity, as indicated both by his anti-black policies as president and by his writings before taking office. It is completely accurate to describe him as a racist and white supremacist and condemn him accordingly.
* The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor?
* Antonin Scalia, fraud, part 87.
* The rise of “white student unions.” They’re probably fake.
* Use of High-Tech Brooms Divides Low-Tech Sport of Curling.
* When administrations co-opt student movements, Duke edition. Also at Duke: debate over continuation fees.
* CNN, still the worst, forever and ever amen.
* Trump has aggressively weaponized the ability of right-wing politicians to lie with impunity. Though you always wonder if there’s still some limit after all.
* The further I get into my thirties, the more depressed I become.
* Music stops, everybody switch positions on free speech.
* Colbert Drops to 3rd Place Behind Kimmel as New Poll Shows CBS Host Alienating Audiences. I’ve never understood CBS’s plan here.
* The McDonaldization of Medicine.
* The Unholy Alchemy behind Cheetos.
* Super-excited to trust my kids to the wisdom of the public school system.
* In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future.
* ‘Hunger Games’ Box Office: Why $101M Weekend For ‘Mockingjay 2’ May Be Cause For Despair.
* A “lost” James Bond movie written by Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, would have seen Daniel Craig’s 007 forced to kill Judi Dench’s spymaster M in a shock finale, according to a new book.
* The tech economy, still a bad joke.
* All U.S. Lab Chimps Are Finally Going To Paradise: A Retirement Home in the South Somewhere.
* Enjoy it while it lasts: Coffee’s good for you again.
* Elsewhere in science facts that are definitely going to hold up forever and ever: Scientists Say Psychopathic People Really Like Bitter Food.
* SyFy wants a Black Mirror too. Syfy is Releasing a Film, De-Rebranding, and Becoming Super Interesting.
* What crime is the founding of a bank, compared to the founding of a police department?
* But just in case you had any ideas that this wasn’t going to be a super-depressing list: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era.’
Monday’s Links Has Learned to Tie Its Bootlace
* Wes Anderson’s The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders.
* A billion-year storage medium that could outlive the human race.
* New drugs could extend cancer patients’ lives—by days. At a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars. Prompting some doctors to refuse to use them.
* Friendship Is Magic: Malcolm Harris on branding the left.
* Maryville, Missouri Is a Lawless Hellhole, And Other Things You Can’t Say About Small Towns.
* The rich are different: Filthy Lucre.
* The wisdom of markets: Pinterest is now valued at $3.8 billion after its most recent round of fundraising generated $225 million. It’s an impressive feat for a company without any revenue. Note: that’s not no profit. That’s no revenue whatsoever.
* Milwaukee police use-of-force reports more than double.
* A City Or A Swamp? One Year Later, Hoboken Still Struggling With Sandy.
* With a $100 million endowment and annual revenues approaching $300 million, TFA is flush with cash and ambition. Its clout on Capitol Hill was demonstrated last week when a bipartisan group of lawmakers made time during the frenzied budget negotiations to secure the nonprofit its top legislative priority — the renewal of a controversial provision defining teachers still in training, including TFA recruits, as “highly qualified” to take charge of classrooms.
* Abolition never happened: There could be slaves in the supply chain of your chocolate, smartphone and sushi.
* Decadence watch: Mixed Martial Arts for kids.
* Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book Asks Us To Pity the Rich.
* Editorial: F**k Jared Diamond.
* Douglas Hofstadter, The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think. The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence. Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.
* More Than 15 Million Americans Now Live Within One Mile Of A Fracking Well. Nearly 300 Oil Spills Went Unreported In North Dakota In Less Than Two Years.
* Someone should put this guy in charge of a hypertrophic, paranoid security state. He’d do great.
Every Financial Bubble Begins with a Disturbance
There’s another name for what happens when people start to make money out of speculation and hype: it’s called a bubble. Like the dotcom bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the credit bubble and the derivative trading bubble before it, the DIY epublishing bubble is inflating around us. Each of those other bubbles also saw, in their earliest stages, a great deal of fuss made over a “new” phenomenon, which was then over-hyped and over-leveraged.
From the comments on the last post: Ewan Morrison on “the self-epublishing bubble.”
Monday Night Links
* The upcoming issue of Criticism is all about The Wire. Looks great.
* Making the rounds: How the bubble destroyed the middle class. The consequence of all this is that the “middle class” of the last forty years in the U.S. is essentially an accounting fiction.
* Apocalypse now: Nearly a fifth of the contiguous United States has been faced with the worst drought in recent years.
* Super Mario Bros., with the lowest possible score.
* And cynical, self-defeating betrayal we can believe in: Obama proposes raising Medicare eligibility age to 67. Taibbi: Obama Doesn’t Want a Progressive Deficit Deal. See also.
Lost Generation
The total balance of all outstanding US student loans (given as $730 billion in DIY U, based on OMB estimates) is now estimated by Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org at more like $830 billion—$605.6 billion in federally guaranteed student loans, which have interest rates fixed and in some cases interest subsidized by the government, and a further $167.8 billion in private student loans, with interest rates that hover around 18-20%. Furthermore, Kantrowitz says, $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.
More on Bubble Economies
That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.
More on bubble economies, this time from Harper’s, via the same MeFi thread. Special attention is paid to the forthcoming alt-energy bubble Taibbi also describes at the end of his article:
There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom—under the rubric “Web 2.0”—is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.
There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded. Wired magazine, returning to its roots in boosterism, put ethanol on the cover of its October 2007 issue, advising its readers to forget oil; NBC had a “Green Week” in November 2007, with themed shows beating away at an ecological message and Al Gore making a guest appearance on the sitcom 30 Rock. Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which assisted at the births of Amazon.com and Google, to oversee the “climate change solutions group,” thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize–winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob. Other ventures—Lazard Capital Markets, Generation Investment Management, Nth Power, EnerTech Capital, and Battery Ventures—are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to “energy management” software, and so on.
Total market value: Alternative energy and infrastructure. Estimated fictitious value of next bubble compared with previous bubbles
Infinite Politics Thursday
Infinite linkdump Thursday, just politics.
* The Mark Sanford story grows stranger by the day, with 19 South Carolina politicians now on the record calling for his resignation. (TPM reports that Senators DeMint and Graham have gone to Sanford to prevail on him to resign.) Today he backed off a pledge to release his travel records, which suggests more trouble may be brewing for him.
* Who could have imagined that Exxon-Mobil would lie about its continued support for climate-change “skepticism” advocacy groups?
* Highlights from the first day of the Al Franken Century.
* Democrats can now “hijack elections at their whim”: just another responsible, measured, and most of all empirically provable claim from RNC chairman Michael Steele, truly our country’s finest elder statesman.
* But it’s not all craziness: Michele Bachmann is facing criticism from the GOP for her weird lies about the Census.
* What caused the financial crisis? Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via MeFi) points to bubble economies nutured and created by giant investment firms, pointing the finger especially at Goldman Sachs. An Oklahoma lawmaker says it was “abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery.” I report, you decide.
* Malthusianism and world history: a chart from Conor Clarke.
It’s clear these growth trends can continue forever.
* Ezra Klein has a new Washington Post column on the politics of food.
Gerry Canavan 