A severe recession, crippling unemployment, a housing collapse, long-lasting foreign wars, a growing chasm between rich and poor, and a political system crippled by partisan gridlock, unable to grapple with entrenched problems…not a few commentators have speculated that American hegemony is rapidly waning, and that an analogy to the Fall of Rome might be in order.

Personally, I look for more esoteric signs of impending collapse. Perhaps this qualifies:

Chocolate Cheerios

In the midst of downsizing lifestyles and mandatory austerity, is such a product an offensive decadence or merely an inexpensive treat when more luxurious pleasures have fallen out of economic grasp?

In either case, Thought Gadgets deconstructs the pitch:

To understand Americans’ hunger for self-pleasure, simply read this box.

Cheerios has launched a new chocolate cereal that must compete with hundreds of alternatives in the aisle. In the U.S., Cheerios is a favorite of moms who want a wholesome, feel-good breakfast for kids. Yet General Mills knows that the real consumers — children — love a sweet treat in the morning. So here comes its new product with 9 grams of sweetness per approximately 25.5-gram serving, more than one-third pure sugar. When Sigmund Freud wrote of humanity’s lustful, chaotic “cauldron full of seething excitations,” he could have meant this.

So how can Chocolate Cheerios break through? By appealing to both Freud’s Id (lust) and Ego (restraint) at the same time. Chocolate Cheerios is “made with real cocoa” (natural ingredients), it “may reduce the risk of heart disease” (what mom doesn’t worry about her family’s health?), and of course comes with a “whole grain guarantee” (this is not just real natural food, but General Mills is so certain this is real, it guarantees it). Even the colors of the cereal itself are half white and half cocoa, visually meeting Id and Ego halfway.

“More than one-third pure sugar.” I hope at least you recycle the box.

If you’re near the end of your rope about your unemployment situation, try this compilation of web content: 100 Motivational Blog Posts for the Unemployed, from PsychologyDegree.net. Includes:

• 10 Valuable Tips to Keep Spirits High During Recession (paggu.com)
• 100 tips,tools, and resources-to help you survive without a job (Examiner.com)
• Things I like to do to keep busy while I’m laid off (Unemploymentality)
• When (Not) in Doubt, Hire Yourself (Living the Unemployed Life)
• 25 Well-Paying Jobs that Most People Overlook (and Why) (Business Pundit)
• Using Your Blog as Job Search Tool (DailyBlogTips)

Click on an image to see it full size.

More photos here.

From the blog Love Your Layoff, some thoughts on buying a home at the wrong time at the wrong interest rate, in perhaps the wrong town…

As much as I’m proud of the work we’ve done on our house, there are some weeks I’d kill to be a renter again. The biggest reason lately is mobility. Last week I was in San Francisco for a conference and feeling the creative vibrancy of the place made me yearn to pack our bags for good… except for the ball and chain that is our mortgage.

It’s been hard lately to watch friends who purchased real estate around the same time we did sell their homes and move on to new cities, new neighborhoods. I’m happy for them, just insanely jealous. If we sold our home today at the high end of what units are going for in our neighborhood ($150,000), we would still owe the bank around $80,000. (That’s about twice what I have left in student loans.)

Continue Reading

PBS NewsHour tried something interesting this year for the State of the Union speech: The show opened up its video comments section on its YouTube channel and posted some video reactions from its audience. Some user videos:

American Association of University Women policy advisor expresses support for the speech’s focus on jobs, deficit reduction, and education; and disappointment in a lack of any mention of reproductive rights.

The speech was “littered with twisted facts” and “liberal interpretations of reality.”

Obama espoused a “centrist message” in a “shrewd speech.”

NYU student likes Obama’s proposals on student loans.

Oregon woman says speech re-gained her confidence in President Obama.

Below is a lecture on the question of institutional corruption given in October by Professor Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard. The center has posted a summary of the lecture; an extract from the summary, on the institutional corruption of the U.S. Congress, is below the video.

Institutional corruption in the U.S. Congress

Institutional corruption should not, Lessig argued, be thought as exemplified by the blatantly unethical and illegal activities of individuals such as Rod Blagojevich or Jack Abramoff. Rather, Lessig argued, distinctly institutional corruption ought to be understood as activities that, despite their being in accordance with existing institutional rules, either result in or from some improper influence within that institution’s economy of influence that brings about either 1) a weakening of the effectiveness of that institution, or 2) a weakening of the public’s trust of that institution.

To illustrate this framework, Professor Lessig went on to discuss its application with respect to the institution that he regards as being most obviously rife with institutional corruption: the US Congress. Describing Congress’s economy of influence, Professor Lessig explained the ways in which members of Congress, lobbyists, and the corporate interests that fund those lobbyists have developed a deeply entrenched interdependency (e.g. members of Congress have become reliant on lobbyists for campaign contributions during their time in office, and for employment once they leave office) that results in lobbyists and their corporate sponsors having an undue level of influence on the shape of Congressional legislation. In support of this analysis, Lessig cataloged a wide variety of cases involving Congress giving bad answers to seemingly easy policy questions (e.g. cases involving nutritional standards, copyright extension, global warming), arguing that the only way to make sense of this level of legislative incompetence is by appeal to either idiocy on the part of the legislators (an explanation that Lessig rejects as implausible) or the undue influence of lobbyists and their corporate sponsors. Worse still, Lessig went on, not only has this dependency on lobbyists and their corporate sponsors resulted in Congress being less effective (thus satisfying the framework’s first criterion for institutional corruption), but it has also resulted in a severe weakening of the public’s trust of the institution (thus satisfying the second criterion). In defense of this second claim, Lessig noted that in his (previous) home district in California, a dramatic 88% of citizens now assent to the claim that “money buys results.”

Altered business cards uploaded by people who have either been laid off or experienced a change in career situation, from the web site cards of change.

Click on each photo to see it full size.

More cards of change here.

Reading individual headlines on housing data this week only serves to confuse the picture:

• Home prices rise for 6th straight month (Washington Post)
• Home prices decline for first time in 7 months (CNNMoney)
• December home sales down nearly 17 percent (AP)
• Sales of new homes fall 7.6% to nine-month low (MarketWatch)
• Home prices suggest tenuous housing rebound (Reuters)

Can we make any more sense of it on Seeking Alpha, where market watchers, financial savants, and economic bloviators hold forth? The prevailing outlook — with some exceptions — seems to be negative. Some choice extracts, followed by longer excerpts.

Reviewing the November 2009 S&P/Case-Shiller

Now that the strongest selling months have been reported, look for all remaining CSI releases until early spring to continue to indicate notable price weakness coming from typical seasonal declines as well as extra-seasonal declines as a result of reduced demand from activity that was “stimulated” forward into the summer and early fall by the tax sham.

Also, looking at the 1990s-era comparison charts its obvious that even after the main downward thrust has been reached, the housing markets have a long tough slog ahead with the ultimate bottom likely many years out… Or if we are currently experiencing the Japanese model… decades out.

Further, is important to remember that the 90s housing recovery played out against the backdrop of a truly unique period of growth in the wider economy fueled primarily by novel and ubiquitous technological change (cell phones, internet, personal computers, telecommunications, etc).

Today, we may not be so lucky…I aligned the CSI data from the last month of positive year-over-year gains for both the current decline and the 90s housing bust and plotted the data with side-by-side columns.

What’s most interesting about this particular comparison is that it highlights both how young the current housing decline is and clearly shows that the latest bust has surpassed the prior bust in terms of intensity. The “peak” chart compares the percentage change, comparing monthly CSI values to the peak value seen just prior to the first declining month all the way through the downturn and the full recovery of home prices.

…(T)he last downturn lasted 97 months (over 8 years) peak to peak including roughly 43 months of annual price declines during the heart of the downturn.

Continue Reading

From Paper Economy – A U.S. Real Estate Bubble Blog, yesterday:

It’s no doubt that we live in speculative times, so in an effort to keep perspective on a day in which the traditional media will endlessly debate and interpret the outcome of the latest S&P/Case-Shiller report, let’s reflect for a moment on Robert Shiller’s famous 1890 “real” home price index.

The three most prominent features of this dataset are the giant crater in prices that commenced somewhere in the early 1900s and lasted until the mid 1940s, the epic run-up that started in 1997 and ongoing decline that we are experiencing today, and finally the fact that taken together the whole series indicates that home prices, more or less, have remained flat (in real terms) for more than 100 years.

That’s quite a contrast to the overconfident “houses never lose value” sentiment or the epically speculative “flip this house” mentality that ran roughshod over our culture in the 2000s.

Not only do prices sometimes go down, sometimes they go down and stay down for over twenty years.

Sometimes they trend up so dramatically, inflated by transient and artificial conditions in banking and government, that they eventually must revert to the mean in order to remain in-line with more fundamental and longstanding economic trends.

Finally, although this latest housing boom convinced many in the 2000s that they should “go long” housing, levering up and speculating to the extent that they traded pre-construction condo contracts like they were internet stocks, the long term price curve eked out by U.S. housing, as an asset class, is so unspectacular that it warrants only the most dispassionate and utilitarian “investment” approach.

Spied on Craiglist: A restaurant owner and chef explains his posting for a sous chef/assistant at minimum wage:

Restaurant Seeks Sous Chef – POSITION CLOSED, but for the haters…

This position has been filled, but never in my life have I ever received so much hate from a job posting, and I just want to make a few comments. The original posting remains below.

1) For all of those who wished me ill for being such a taker, bastard, and dumb ass for offering minimum wage, you’ll be pleased to know that I actually pay more than minimum. That was just a way to weed out all the people too proud to work at that wage. I want people who view their job as more than just a paycheck; that want to be part of something bigger. I take very good care of my crew and they are extremely loyal. And I am very proud to actually be creating jobs in this economy.

2) I anecdotally heard through the vine that I somehow offended the crews at F2F and Jory for saying they had nice six-figure kitchens. I don’t know how that ruffled feathers and as far as I’m concerned we’re all in this boat together, so good for you for being in sweet set-ups. I only wish I could be as well equipped as you.

3) For all of you that understood my ad and gave me great responses, including the people that commented on it even though they weren’t interested or qualified for the job, thanks for being part of a better culinary culture and wanting this valley to progress. Maybe I’ll send you all invites to our soft opening when we’re ready. Thanks!

Continue Reading