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Endy si! Chavez no!
Mar. 12th, 2009 02:03 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. High today: 8, at 8 a.m. Dewpoint dropped from 6 to 0 between 8:00 and 9:00.
Post-Canada-vs.-US highlight of the World Honkball Thing, Round 1, Pool C: Derek Jeter getting thrown out by a good margin on the back end of a double steal in the 9th with the US down by two to Venezuela. O-ver rate-ed!
You know what happens when you get your newspaper from the interwebs? You look up in spring training and discover that your team has, for some reason, acquired Jason Lane and Michael Barrett. I never know what's on the best-seller lists anymore, either.
Come to think of it, I don't know what Karelis means by "poverty". I doubt he's talking about the living-on-what-you-get-and-not-getting-much kind of poverty as the kind of poverty that comes with a moderate inflow and a bigger outflow, but I don't know. (Then there's the kind of thing that makes you eligible for an appearance on Oprah: middling middle-class income; upper-middle-class expenditures.)
I saw a headline referring to "the Great Recession" in the Globe today. There was a guy on Paikin last night talking about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe--he noted that "hyperinflation" is defined (by whom, I don't know) as inflation of 50% or more per month. (Zimbabwe's is the the first hyperinflation since Milosevic's Yugoslavia.) I wait with interest to see that definition up for grabs, as the definition of "recession" was and of "depression" now is, if the price of oil shoots back up. (What I used to hear was, a recession is two quarters of GDP contraction, and a depression is a year. But, you know, Environment Canada says a "heat wave" is three consecutive days of temperatures breaking 30C. Well, really?)
Speaking of the price of oil: back when oil was $130 a barrell, you used to hear about how that was going to murder the economy because it was killing manufacturing and transportation and it was going to come home to auto sales and so forth. And then the economy was murdered and sub-prime mortgages were summarily arrested, convicted, and executed. What's with that, anyway?
I feel like it felt more like something in the early-'90s recession in Toronto. I think back to Crawfordsville, Indiana, 2004, one of those North American towns with the shut-down downtown--Toronto would have to recede a long way to get that far back. Hard to tell. I was "looking for work" in the early '90s, so it's something I would've noticed. Of course, I'm "looking for work" again now, but in a bubble, it feels like. Hard to know what to think about what's going on and what's coming up for the universities. Tenure-track job postings have been cancelled all over the place, but enrollments aren't going down--the question for poor schmucks like me is, how many of the young stars with senses of entitlement will seek their $70K starting salaries in other lines of work when they can't get them in academia? Somebody came out with a report a few weeks ago saying that Toronto needs another university, concentrating on teaching, since more Ontarians are going to be needing post-secondary educations (in the new economy? Are we still talking about the new economy?) This is, well, interesting, in light of the demographic bomb that's about to hit Canadian universities.
What I keep thinking, though, is, what happens when we declare the recession over and it's time to pay the piper? (I see the idea of out-growing your debt is coming back into play. That's a nice idea, but, you know, what's even nicer is not having to throw 2% or whatever of your budget down the hole of interest payments every year forever.) In an election or two, we'll be getting Super-Harris in Ontario, won't we? And the universities aren't getting anywhere near enough in new money now from the government to cover their losses on the stock markets.
You hear all the time about Japan's lost decade, that Japan still hasn't gotten back to where it was in 1990 or whatever--but you see clips of this and that from Japan and it looks like a pretty wealthy place. What would it look like if it had kept growing at 3% a year? I guess it would be made of gold.
A recession or a depression is a really good thing for thinking about what an economy is, and what wealth is. ( An economy is a system for exchanging goods. )
Post-Canada-vs.-US highlight of the World Honkball Thing, Round 1, Pool C: Derek Jeter getting thrown out by a good margin on the back end of a double steal in the 9th with the US down by two to Venezuela. O-ver rate-ed!
You know what happens when you get your newspaper from the interwebs? You look up in spring training and discover that your team has, for some reason, acquired Jason Lane and Michael Barrett. I never know what's on the best-seller lists anymore, either.
Come to think of it, I don't know what Karelis means by "poverty". I doubt he's talking about the living-on-what-you-get-and-not-getting-much kind of poverty as the kind of poverty that comes with a moderate inflow and a bigger outflow, but I don't know. (Then there's the kind of thing that makes you eligible for an appearance on Oprah: middling middle-class income; upper-middle-class expenditures.)
I saw a headline referring to "the Great Recession" in the Globe today. There was a guy on Paikin last night talking about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe--he noted that "hyperinflation" is defined (by whom, I don't know) as inflation of 50% or more per month. (Zimbabwe's is the the first hyperinflation since Milosevic's Yugoslavia.) I wait with interest to see that definition up for grabs, as the definition of "recession" was and of "depression" now is, if the price of oil shoots back up. (What I used to hear was, a recession is two quarters of GDP contraction, and a depression is a year. But, you know, Environment Canada says a "heat wave" is three consecutive days of temperatures breaking 30C. Well, really?)
Speaking of the price of oil: back when oil was $130 a barrell, you used to hear about how that was going to murder the economy because it was killing manufacturing and transportation and it was going to come home to auto sales and so forth. And then the economy was murdered and sub-prime mortgages were summarily arrested, convicted, and executed. What's with that, anyway?
I feel like it felt more like something in the early-'90s recession in Toronto. I think back to Crawfordsville, Indiana, 2004, one of those North American towns with the shut-down downtown--Toronto would have to recede a long way to get that far back. Hard to tell. I was "looking for work" in the early '90s, so it's something I would've noticed. Of course, I'm "looking for work" again now, but in a bubble, it feels like. Hard to know what to think about what's going on and what's coming up for the universities. Tenure-track job postings have been cancelled all over the place, but enrollments aren't going down--the question for poor schmucks like me is, how many of the young stars with senses of entitlement will seek their $70K starting salaries in other lines of work when they can't get them in academia? Somebody came out with a report a few weeks ago saying that Toronto needs another university, concentrating on teaching, since more Ontarians are going to be needing post-secondary educations (in the new economy? Are we still talking about the new economy?) This is, well, interesting, in light of the demographic bomb that's about to hit Canadian universities.
What I keep thinking, though, is, what happens when we declare the recession over and it's time to pay the piper? (I see the idea of out-growing your debt is coming back into play. That's a nice idea, but, you know, what's even nicer is not having to throw 2% or whatever of your budget down the hole of interest payments every year forever.) In an election or two, we'll be getting Super-Harris in Ontario, won't we? And the universities aren't getting anywhere near enough in new money now from the government to cover their losses on the stock markets.
You hear all the time about Japan's lost decade, that Japan still hasn't gotten back to where it was in 1990 or whatever--but you see clips of this and that from Japan and it looks like a pretty wealthy place. What would it look like if it had kept growing at 3% a year? I guess it would be made of gold.
A recession or a depression is a really good thing for thinking about what an economy is, and what wealth is. ( An economy is a system for exchanging goods. )
