The Leisure of the Theory Class

Thanks to peer pressure, I've been reading bits of Thorstein Veblen's extended joke, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The basic line is that the actual ruling class values status above all, and gets that status by not working. By using the language of virtue, which for everybody else has been associated with work, he's doing mockery.

Dip a toe in anywhere, & you get something good -

In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in the deliberate production of a cultured class—often with a very happy effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as snobbery, a syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is achieved in the case of a goodly number of families and lines of descent.

Cute, but he pounds the same joke for hundreds of pages.

Take away the snark, and the way this plays out in what now passes for real life is a desperate striver confused as to whether they are showing off industriousness or elegance, culminating in a desperate mess



As our economy moves more from reality to finance & propaganda, class & connections settle firmly into place. What's one to do? Fevered striving or feigned indifference?


Barbie can't handle mixed messages.

Angry Barbie, no Beckinsale

It's an average gray afternoon in February, so what better time to base a post on a random story from boston.com. Little did I know that today was the day they release the state employee salary list.

The University of Massachusetts again has the distinction of employing all but one of the state’s 50 highest-paid public workers, 2011 state records show.
The two top earners are Michael F. Collins, the University of Massachusetts Medical School chancellor, who made $761,314; and Terence R. Flotte, the medical school’s dean, who was paid $701,141.

The actual list is pretty amazing:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/specials/mass_state_salaries_2011/

3 chancellors, more deans and vice deans than you can count, associate & assistant professors...

Point being, that it's not the amount any one person makes that's the issue here. My problem is that there's so bloody many administrators wandering around doing nothing that it makes the whole place freeze up.



Barbie is about to default on her student loans.

Kate Beckinsale Does Squat

Kate Beckinsale has been pretty busy as she closes in on 40. She has 3 movies in the can. One is a remake of "Total Recall". Phil Dick was ahead of his time in some ways, but in a lot more was utterly of his time. One of these was the sexist violent world we'd lived in since approximately forever.

It seems that, very quietly, we've become a much less violent country:

Number of Students Struck Each Year in U.S. Public Schools


YEAR # WHITE % # BLACK % TOT. KIDS HIT %
1976 992,675 65 447,314 29 1,521,896 3.5
1978 940,467 65 411,271 29 1,438,317 3.4
1980 901,032 64 403,386 29 1,408,303 3.4
1982 no statistical projection was made this year
1984 852,427 64 374,315 28 1,332,317 3.3
1986 659,224 60 345,411 31 1,099,731 2.7
1988 549,572 61 255,296 28 898,370 2.2
1990 346,488 56 208,543 34 613,760 1.5
1992 295,050 53 215,684 39 555,531 1.3
1994 256,363 54 182,394 39 470,683 1.1
1997 241,406 53 178,114 39 457,754 1.0
1998 199,572 55 135,523 37 365,058 0.8
2000 181,689 53 132,065 39 342,038 0.7
2003 159,446 53 115,819 38 301,016 0.6
2004 143,002 53 104,627 38 272,028 0.57
2006 119,339 53 79,613 36 223,190 0.46


Wich may have someting to do with why violent crime is down 60% since 1990.
Not sure how this all will play out, but maybe Kate & Barbie have something to teach us.




Nope. I got nothing.

It's a Gas Gas Gas

This weeks EIA natural gas storage report shows that there's 2888 billion cubic feet in storage. Natural gas is seasonal. In a normal year, it peaks around 3000 bcf about Halloween and then bottoms out at 1200 in late March. Anything over 3500, they're wondering where to put it. So, with winter winding down, we have enough in storage to start a whole new winter.

You can see that this is a problem. Everybody went crazy into fracking at the same time a few years ago, and due to the long lead time, they're all going into full production at the same time, so that now the stuff is absurdly cheap. Gas at $2.50/ 1000 cubic feet is energetically equivalent to oil at $15/ barrel. Oil is trading at $115/ barrel. So, some companies are going under, and then, the price will shoot back up. That's capitalism!

Once the gas is gone, what do we have?



Yep. Sunshine. Meanwhile, how are gas companies getting by? Producing at $5 and selling at $2.50 is not easy. First, strip out every bit of longer hydrocarabons & sell it. When petroleum engineering fails, go to financial: Capitalize everything, then every 3 or 4 years, write off a billion. This makes it look like they're profitable in general, but have the occasional bad year.

Until the writedown leaves them insolvent & the next bond won't sell. If you're ready for the serious version, AE Berman at TheOilDrum
(Edited because the first video bored me & the wrap needed clarity)

Kate Beckinsale Nose

Blogger & Google are nice enough to tell me what people who come here are looking for. Don't worry, they don't say who you are. To me, anyhow. Assume that the NSA knows everything. The titular search term launched one of those Voyages of Discovery.

Is this worth noticing? Or is it just makeup?



Somebody* was assuming that, being British and all, Dear Kate was natural. Guess we showed him!

Also too:


Unleash Marissa Wiegler!


*

Meanwhile, back at WGU

So I just posted about reducing staff expenses. Harvard is about to layoff some librarians. In a budget of $3.5 billion, a couple of librarians is , well, lets look at the compensation of some suspects at the management company (which invests the $32 billion endowment):

Steven Blyth : $8,443,253
Steven Alperin: $6,848,872
Jane Mendilo: $3,498,269
Apoorva Koticha: $4,467,157

Their 990s for the last 2 years are too big for the AG site, but it turns out that ERI has a nice database. Other than the management company, Harvard isn't quite as insane as other Ivy League Schools. Faust barely made $800,000. They have 20,000 students and 33,000 employees.

Hoo Rah Kai Rah! It's going to take more than one look to understand this elephant. There's a lot more here than a school.

My Five Year Mission starts with an info Bleg

I need to join the struggle to reduce college costs. There are a lot of aspects to cost inflation at universities, and there seem to be people upset at all of them:
The number of administrators continues to rise. At some schools, they are starting to outnumber faculty.

The higher pay scales are ridiculous. At UPenn, there are 15 people who made over $1,000,000 in 2010. In Massachusetts, the place to get basic information is the AGs office look up - http://www.charities.ago.state.ma.us/charities/index.asp?charities_app_ctx=search&charities_sub_ctx=entry&bod=1328433332
Tufts had 2832 staff, 1014 faculty in 2010.

Tenured faculty are bought off from complaining with generous salaries, absurdly light teaching loads, and nobody even making them show up.

To compensate for this, actual teaching is dumped on underpaid non-tenure track lecturers, adjuncts and grad students.

The big picture is, just like in corporate world, management is operating Universities for the benefit of management. Everybody else is a cost or a sucker.

The obvious need is to turn on the lights and make the cucas scramble.

My need is information - links to organizations, cost data, places that are bucking the trend. Or else, in a few years, I'll be just another sucker.

In case you wondered

I've nothing against cats, but on 2nd viewing of the Devo video "Pink Pussycat", decided it isn't really that good and took it down. It did have an image that looked a bit like this:


which is on a page that starts with some mildly interesting astronomy but rapidly descends into a mishmash of 2 major strains of hooey : astrology & stock charting. These are tools to be used against fools, if you remember what Nitschke said : I'm not a madman.

The Metro Mathcounts competition is today in Melrose. I'll be going to watch the last round. At least those kids should grow up immune to this kind of nonsense.

Shiny Plastic People

One of the most interesting things I've heard about the Superbowl was good old Andy



explaining that cheerleaders do nothing for him because they were too plastic. This is actually pretty easy to understand. Consider the plastic twosome- Barbie & Jessica:


In your efforts to remain unreal, when gravity overtakes diet, exercise, makeup, dye & plastic surgery,

there's still Photoshop*

So, unless you're SARAH, or Mary C Ricks:



you roll with it.

As you sit in a group in front of a TV this Sunday, and a squad of robotronic cheerleaders performs, while you're pondering whether it would be lamer to not fake enthusiam or to fake it, remember : Once they leave the stadium, they're as real as the rest of us.




And ignore the screen. You know you want to. Because somewhere Barbie

is plotting revenge against the Komen Foundation.

And sorry, Andy, but Beckinsale - no thanks.

Time for Project Runway!


*Good catch, Mew

UPDATE: Gin & Tacos puts this notion to a motion.

Release the Hounds!

It's kind of sad when a once respected magazine turns into a hit squad.

I give you The Atlantic Monthly. Please don't try to give it back.

The CBO did a routine study of Federal vs private sector wages. After 40 years of beating down the lower orders, not surprisingly, Federal employees making minimal living wages are doing better than the poor bastards in the private sector.

Megan McArdle pretended to analyze.

Clive Crook said Me Too

Jordan Weissman channelled Beavis & Butthead

Notice anything missing?

Nothing about how this affects the federal budget. (Total wages are 4% of the budget)

Nothing about what wages actually are.
No hint of the power structure that sets private sector wages.

No discussion of why squeezing the last nickel from people might or might not be good policy.

In sum, total crap. Sad really. Do they not even want anyone to take them seriously?

No. If you're selling propaganda, you want the buyers to know what they're buying.

Handling the Truth

One of the easier things to understand in the Messenger of Doom business is that most people won't want to listen. Most people have enough problems with things as they are that they don't need to worry about what's coming in 10 or 20 years. Most of the rest figure there's nothing they can do now that will pay off in a measurable future. Even most Jim Kunstler fans get their weekly dose of impending collapse then go back to regular life.

Which covers normal people. The 27 percenters, who worship in the Cult of the Hand, hoping to be trickled on if they repeat the mantra? Them, I have no patience for. Soon enough, the increasingly violent insanity of the True Believers will split them from the profiteer, but that's another story.

So what am I doing about the near certainty that resource depletion will make a mockery of The American Way of Life in the near future? We've already gone through 10years of very little growth, declining stock values, and stagnating or worse incomes for almost everyone. And what have I done? Near squat. Minor conservation & aggressive saving indistinguishable from natural miserliness.

So, shouldn't there be some Big Steps towards preserving the future?

Oddly enough, this intersects with something I've been doing a lot of lately, financial planning. It's fairly easy to project how people will do under moderate economic assumptions. Your assets grow at 6%, prices rise 3%, you can spend $x per year and not expect to die broke.

So what's the chance your retirement village will be overrrun by a desperate horde? And what can you do to prevent it?

I'm seriously considering whether root cellars & ammo should become part of the planning process. Fortunately, I work in a nut friendly environment.

In the meantime, might as well get off the computer, hug somebody, read a book, and help somebody else practice for a math competition next weekend.

Overshoot

A lot of stuff in the last few days has pointed back towards the main (public) issue that has concerned me for the last 40 years or so.

We have 7,000,000,000 people on a world that isn't getting any bigger, degrading the resources that support us at a rate that pretty much guarantees increasing trouble, starting about now and just getting worse for the next 50 years.

Is that clear enough?

Anyhow, the specific items:

The Club of Rome decided not to do a 40 year update to Limits to Growth because it's too late to do anything to stop it.

The NYT says mackerel stocks - yes, that overly fast, not so tasty fish, are down 90% in 10 years.

A pinhead who pretends to have read Limits to Growth published a Yergenite pile of rubbish & got his hat handed to him. Oil is stuck at $100 as a century of increasing driving has crunched to a halt. The rich countries of the world are preaching utter economic rubbish - expansionary austerity. Do they really believe this nonsense? How could they? It fails basic arithmetic to think that you can increase employment through mass firings. So what's up?

If we did have growth, with oil supply flat since 2005, there is nothing to fuel it. We'd simply have another oil price spike & another recession.

(Overshoot is the condition where we're living off land, water, fertilizer & other basic resources at a level far above their replacement, and headed for a crash)

Make of this what you will. If you have some investible assets, put them into something real. If you only have $100: It's Friday night. Get out & have some fun, leave the internet to tired old cranks.

Losing it

While the Shelley Long/Tom Cruise movie was a classic, it's not the subject of this post. Pity, since the 1980s frankness about the desperate need of teenage boys to get intp circulation in the face of an antiseptic society that rejected their nature holds a lot of relevance today, in the face of a society that not only rejects their nature but refuses to talk about it. So maybe that will be the subject of the next post. Or not, since it would require talking to a teenage boy, which would probably make me a Level 2 sex offender just for saying Hello. So forget that.

This is about work.

Long, long, ago, in a place about 3 blocks from where I work now, I was young and confident. Always willing to start something. Now, not so much. It takes a lot to get old DP on the warpath.

All year, I've been angling to get 200 or so complete accountings from our custodian. Now that they should be ready, I go off into the weeds and find - Nothing! And it's our fault. After spending 2 days chasing down the problems, I found an utter, complete, total, redundant failure to train, supervise or give a shit about maintaining accurate records of expenditures.

Trouble is, the person directly responsible for this failure is somebody I like. And the ultimate responsibility is due to a total void. Almost enough to get the old fires burning, to move in, take control, etc.

Almost. We all know how that would end.

Just wondering...

While I'm totally at sea about what's happening at home, at work & in the world, how is Tom Waits doing?

Get offa my lawn?

I've been going to this restaurant for 20 years. Let's call it the "John Harvard's Brewhouse". I've rolled through the changes - they took away the salmon salad, raised prices, improved the beer. But some things have stayed steady : always the Pale Ale, stained glass, TVs, free bread plates.

Go in this evening, everything looks fine. We even get a booth with a nice view of a TV, FSU vs Duke.

First sniff of trouble is the menu. Nearly 6, but there's a page of lunch items, and no beer page. Still, all the usual dishes. 2nd trouble : the only 2 beers they have are both heavy.

Yadda, yadda - you don't need the details. In the end, my meal is spoiled by

1) The beer wasn't very good and a pitcher cost $20, which price wasn't on the menu
2) The fish & chips were a tiny portion
3) The ribs on the menu were a half rack for $14.99. The bill was $19.99, since we seem to have had the wrong menu - apparently the 4 mediocre ribs I got were a whole rack.
4) The bread never arrived. When we finally managed to ask, we were told it was now a $3 extra (not shown on the menu or mentioned)

At the end, I did get the waitress to admit there was new management. She offered to bring them over. I fled.

All pretty trivial, right? But having aggravated my groin injury jumping a slushpuddle, facing a painful 2k shuffle home, does being pissed make me a grumpy old coot?

Nah. I was just as annoying 30 years ago.

Fakelore Rulez!

Danny Boy is, of course, not a Real Irish song.



I no longer care.

The Greatest Postage Stamps Ever

This sucker has it all. That it came out right at the start of Colony Collapse disorder & White Nose Fungus makes it sad. Still pretty, but we are so screwed.

A serious post

on a Sunday? fuhgeddaboutit.

Turtles all the way down

Watching Willard the Undead clanking about the country trying to fill the emptiness of his soul by satisfying ambition is going to get even more painful in the next 10 months, so, on this reasonably nice Saturday morning - time to wake up small one.

I'm shutting down.

Clarifying the prior post

& trying to move some of the drop down from in front of the picture

Knowing my place on the internet

In case anyone wandering by here wonders why there is so little content - that's not what I do. Short pieces, either correcting a fact or making a joke, work better as responses to somebody else's well wrought (or better yet, inept) major opus.

New Years Assessment

Oil 98.83 WTI - $107.38 Brent
NG - $2.989 (Never expected to see that!)
Wheat-$652.6
Dow -12,150

Which I'm putting here because it's a nice, quiet untravelled place.
Goals for this blog, this year: 20 posts, 1000 views, 1 comment.

Goal in real life : get through the move without landing in the ER.

My Career as a Street Performer

Started & ended last night. Passing by the pit after dinner we paused to watch a chap in a green kilt with a unicycle and juggling act. The little pup spotted some of her friends, so we were stuck.

Then I got drafted as backup dancer/bagpipe holder.

Fortunately, the other 2 draftees were capable of holding the unicycle.

10-11-11

42 as of yesterday.

Planning on 50 by Christmas.