EdCone.com

Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges?

Good question.

Last winter, the front-page NYT article about record snowfall in New England was written from Elijah's college town.

An aberration, I told my transplanted North Carolinian. Things will likely be different in your sophomore year.

I was right, but in the wrong direction.

Not that he sounded too bummed about having classes canceled today.

"Journalists want to be able to explain OWS; to declare exactly what it stands for, ideally in terms which can place the movement neatly on a left-right spectrum."

I had missed the report that the awesome sign woman got canned for her efforts.

More:

Journalists love conflict, of course, and so when they cover OWS there’s a tendency to try to gin up the story with imaginary beefs — OWS hates the Jews! Goldman has declared war on OWS’s bankers! Etc. This is not helpful. So let’s celebrate, rather than fire, the people who successfully get the message out. We need to save that ire for the practitioners of all the shoddy OWS journalism out there.

Bonds outperform stocks for the first 30-year period since the Civil War, but, "If you missed the rally in bonds, well, then that’s it."

More: "What the bears failed to anticipate was that Americans would continue to pare debt and boost savings." Low inflation and free money from the Fed contributed, too.

For those middle aged folks who have been contributing steadily over the years to stock-heavy retirement plans and college funds, sorry...but at least you still have the appreciated value of your home to fall back on.

Update 2:49 PM Monday: I walked down to the Green Bean. Nobody was waiting outside the door.  There seemed to be a normal-sized crowd within. I ate a piece of cake and read a flyer folded into four pages, with owner Katie Southard pictured on the front and back, along with large-text verbiage about "The New Jim Crow," "White Supremacists," and calls for a boycott; inside was a mix of relatively thoughtful words about racism and more harsh words for Southard.

I complained to the counter crew that there were no demonstrators, and was directed to three people standing just north of the building. I went outside and listened as Jorge Cornell and two women spoke with a third woman about setting up mediation. When they were done I introduced myself and was greeted warmly.

There was  a description of the incident from Cornell's perspective: A guy bumped a woman who was with the group, Jorge and some other guys approached the bumper and said you should apologize, the guy apologized, all seemed well. Then Southard said harshly that Cornell and crew were intimidating her customers and had to leave. Cops were called. Cornell felt ill-used and discriminated against.

He told me there was no intent to intimidate. I asked if he would not feel that vibe if he was alone and three guys came up to him. He laughed, said it was more like four or five guys, and acknowledged the possibility. I asked how the conciliatory tone of the conversation about mediation could be aligned with the brutal rhetoric of the leaflet. He said he was not responsible for the leaflet.

A guy yelled "race-baiters" and walked into the coffee shop.

A woman who was with Cornell gave a long answer about what a bad boss and unpleasant person Southard is. She said this is also a labor issue.  The leaflet was said to reflect feelings of the moment. Jorge said no more would be printed.

Mediation is planned for this afternoon. Jorge asked me to ask online commenters to dial back their tone.

Good advice all around.

UPDATE 8:34 AM Monday 10/31: There's some back and forth in the comments at the link below here, with Cornell denying the allegations and claiming the whole thing is motivated by racisim, and Calabria sticking to her story; I've contacted Cornell for comment but have not heard back from him.

Looks like a bad situation at the Green Bean, where supporters of Jorge Cornell are picketing after reportedly being asked to stop harassing customers.

I needed to rent a car at the Philly airport and return it 27 hours later. According to the rental-car company calendar, that's two full days.

Had there been some sort of pro rata deal for a quarter day or even half day, I would have just paid whatever they charged, but calling three hours a full day offended my penny wise/pound foolish sensibilities, so I went to Priceline and got two full days at $14 each, which, with significant taxes, came to a total of $48.

Small victories.

The car was a Yaris, which was roughly the size of my kitchen table. Fine, I was just driving up to Haverford and Blue Bell. The instrument cluster -- speedometer, gas gauge, etc -- was in the center of the dashboard, rather than right in front of the driver. I read that this may be a bit of global-market cost-cutting on Toyota's part, but whatever the idea -- and I think this has been discontinued for the newest model --it is not a good one.

Anyway, Syd and I had a nice visit and the tiny bargain rental got us back through the snow to the airport, where we sat for a couple of hours with people -- many of them NASCAR fans headed to Martinsville via GSO -- who had been waiting since 7:00 AM to get out of Philly. Our plane finally arrived, and then the crew, and then we were de-iced and airborne and back home in time for dinner. The dog seemed glad to see us.

Manager's weekly memo consists almost entirely of details of a fuel charge issue about which I know nothing.

Apparently they continue to play the World Series despite the fact I no longer pay much attention to baseball.

I grew up on the great early '70s Orioles teams -- what kid could resist a player named Boog? - and was an Os fan for years. Then Dwight Gooden and I moved to New York the same summer, and watching the Mets on teevee was a default activity on those rare nights when I did not have a date with a supermodel.

Maybe I'd care again if there was a Major League team nearby.

But probably not.

Met reopening galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.

I have a quick biz trip to NY coming up, maybe I can sneak uptown for an hour...

What Americans are spending on now that we're not spending so much.

Initiative 26, which would change the definition of "person" in the Mississippi state Constitution to "include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof," is more than just an absolute ban on abortion and a barely veiled shot at Roe v. Wade — although it is both. By its own logic, the initiative would almost certainly ban common forms of birth control like the IUD and the morning-after pill, call into question the legality of the common birth-control pill...

I don't know enough to say if that "almost certainly" is accurate or not, but this is a bad idea in any case.

Previously: Contra-contraception.

I thought Joe's idea of banning birth control for unmarried couples was extreme -- turns out he was just ahead of the curve.

Say, whatever became of the folks who blew up the economy?

It's a long list, so let's just highlight one of the Where Are They Now? sections:

Gramm has been a vice chairman at UBS since he left Congress in 2002. Greenspan is retired. Summers served as a top economic advisor to Barack Obama until November 2010; since then, he’s been teaching at Harvard. Geithner is currently serving as Treasury Secretary under the Obama administration.

Justice has been served!

"Moynihan is laboring to rebuild the bank’s reputation with customers, employees and investors."

Yeah, but he's not doing it right.

A little humility helps. And if you don't feel that, at least acknowledge that mistakes were made (clip NSFW, although it probably belongs on a lot of company websites).

More here.

Dave Ribar reads a "crisis pregnancy center" website: "If the GPCC really wants women to 'weigh' the risk, why does it only put information on one side of the scale?"

Because it's an advocacy organization, which is fine, but which also should be clear when it comes to public image and funding.

Things have gone very wrong in Oakland.

House of Dues, winners of the recent Piedmont Blues Preservation Society band challenge, will play Zion Bar and Grill in GSO on Friday, 10/28. It's a release party for their new CD, too.

The band heads to Memphis in February for an international competition.

Photo stolen from David Bolton's FB page.

Luna had a tooth removed.

She is fine, thanks.

The vet doped her up pretty good.

Drunk dogs are funny.

Apple to use solar power at NC data center?

Google meanwhile is helping map the potential of geothermal power. GSO sits on a cool green patch of the map, but the American Hebrew Academy still manages to use geothermal energy, so that seems not to be a deterrent.

Looks like we'll not run out of oil quite yet, but that's no excuse for not working on the flux capacitor.

Modern times at the Youth Leadership Greensboro panel on media and politics today...same old same old with Allen Johnson, Robbie Perkins, and me, but the organizers wisely included Joy Cook, who used Twitter so effectively to help organize GSO's big 9/11 commemoration.

Greensboro is mighty proud of being the birthplace of Dolley Madison, so I was surprised to learn that she moved away (or more accurately, was moved) as a one-year-old.

That doesn't make her story meaningless to the history of this place -- in fact, it places the local Quaker population that briefly included her parents in a broader context, and tells us something about the mobility of people and ideas in that era.

But unlike, say, O. Henry, who must have been shaped in some meaningful ways by growing up in GSO (before getting out as soon as he could), the first First Lady was here only in diapers. I know that by Southern custom one is "from" the place of one's birth, but given her brief life here and her peripatetic parents, our claim to Dolley Payne seems pretty weak.

Perry flat-tax not holy, Roman, or an empire.

Our tax code could use some work, but channeling the Steve Forbes campaign is not the way to start.

I haven't written or edited for any of our print mags since 2008, and online operations were running flat-out even before we started prepping our new tablet and mobile editions, so ZDE's move to all-digital publishing -- unthinkable just a few years back -- actually feels a little redundant to me.

It makes sense that an economy so dependent on consumer spending is...dependent on consumer spending.

The paradox of thrift stuff is all well and good, but telling us to unleash our inner grasshoppers is not a real solution.

Many consumers are mired in debt and/or unemployed, and many with the capacity to spend are reluctant to do so, which just shows they're we're paying attention.

Give us a reason to believe that the geniuses in Brussels and DC and New York and Charlotte have finally gotten their act together, and we'll save your damn economy.

Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They're forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.

Dude, just stop complaining and go OWS already.

Piper Aircraft Inc. on Monday announced it will lay off 150 employees and release 55 contract personnel as a result of a decision to indefinitely suspend its Piper Altaire light business jet program...

...While the Altaire program was on schedule and budget, Carlon said "the market for light business jets is not recovering sufficiently enough or quickly enough for us to continue developing the program under the economic conditions we currently face."

Alert reader D sent the link, along with a question: "Good or bad for HondaJet?"

That one's above my pay grade, so I asked an authority.

The only thing less necessary than a Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration is the inevitable Klosterman article about it*, but he does get off some good lines ("Your allusion to Basquiat's middle period was very apt, Lars") and the first footnote is funny and the Tebow kicker is nice too.

*Strangely enough, a blog post about the inessential article about the inessential record is itself essential. It's like multiplying negatives. Also, you get eight minutes of bliss and a video bonus in my favorite style:

Here's the report [PDF] about North Carolina's "crisis pregnancy centers" that's causing such a stir.

HELP: Hidden Work, Hidden Lives is an exhibition about "the common experience of work, and honors those who have worked through hard times or under oppressive systems."

The show opens at A&T in January, 2012.

Got a family story or an artifact you wish to contribute? Have at it.

Thnx to JS for the pointer.

Bought one of these recently at the Super G, which we like to visit after dinner at the excellent Izakaya Sushi Republic. The candy bar was fine but not as great as its name.

"With over almost 25 million members..."

There, fixed that company profile for you, Netflix.

Lesson: Always listen to business advice offered by friends in a hot tub.

As an old person who prefers* CDs DVDs to streaming, I am down with this analysis.

Tough night for the stock, too.

*preference subject to change if US broadband service improves.

UPDATE: It's not good news when your (already horrific) stock chart literally looks like something falling off a cliff:

Groupon may be genuinely difficult to value, but the early cash-out is not encouraging and of course the banks want to pump it up as much as possible.

Don't forget that the dotcom bubble was in some large part a Wall Street phenomenon.

Luddism means an irrational fear of technology but the term derives from a movement based on a rational fear of losing one's job to technology.

This is a little scary.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are big names in my little corner of the world.

But the sad fact is that anything more substantive than this is likely to require Congressional approval, and therefore be a political non-starter between now and November 2012. The government’s done almost nothing to address the housing mess, and will continue to do almost nothing for the foreseeable future. Which, as Dudley says, bodes very ill for the economy as a whole.

Should have done something while they could, didn't.

Can anyone fill me in on what, exactly, is meant by the "gay sociopolitical agenda?"

Bonus points if you can tell me how it would manifest itself in, say, the debate over where Greensboro should put its landfill.

[S]hoppers are talking about "adding water to their milk and taking half the dosage of their prescriptions."

The new normal, according to Wal-Mart CMO Stephen Quinn.

"[T]hings are fundamentally different, and permanently different, with the U.S. economy and the U.S. consumer."

One major change is "the hollowing out of the middle class," he added, which is creating "the hourglass economy where our country is divided between the haves and the have-nots."

Those bleeding hearts at Wal-Mart can be such downers.

Fortunately, there was upbeat news from Visa's Antonio J. Lucio, who said, "'the affluent segment in the United States is growing, growing very fast,' even as economic conditions challenge other groups of consumers."

I was planning to ignore the N&R's inability to distinguish quotes from original material, but yesterday's mistake is now echoing in my inbox, so I guess I'm stuck with it.

RR writes:

So, your advice is to come home from Wall Street and get involved in local politics - that should shake Goldman Sachs right down to its very expensive boots. Getting OWS coopted by the Democrats - I can't see the Repubs being interested - will do no more than ruin the movement much like the Tea Party was morphed into ultra-right Republicans when they were coopted. I don't see OWS as interested in the politics as usual - that's a waste of time. Both parties are beholden to the big financial corporations, and neither has the concerns of average citizens as a priority. I believe that OWS should continue what the original Tea Party started, but failed to do, having been taken over by the likes of Glen Beck, Dick Armey, etc. And that is wreak havoc on the status quo. Make both parties pay attention to us and not the Koch brothers, or BOA or hedge fund managers. Having voted for Obama, I now really would like to see almost all of the politicians ousted. Your call for retreating to become involved in city council elections will just continue to cede national power to the unelected elite who actually run this country. Sometimes a little revolution is a good thing.

The idea is to take the parties back from Wall Street, not to just embrace more of the same. The movement as it stands is drawing attention to some important issues, but what then? If you just ignore the system, the system can ignore you, and then what have you accomplished?

UPDATE: Thanks to Allen Johnson for the post correcting the attribution, if it gets more people thinking about this stuff then it was a happy accident.

I'm so old I remember when people worried about Cam Newton's accuracy.

Cam's so good that talk of his goodness is starting to draw mockery. Bring it on.

EPA plans "national rules for treating wastewater discharged from gas drilling operations."

Touring the ruins:

All in all, the report is a depressingly realistic analysis of Greece’s predicament; anyone who thinks it can grow its way out of its current problems is talking out of their high-hat. The report suggests that even with a 50 per cent haircut by private bondholders, Greece will require further and sustained support by public international lenders.

Gaming the system:

[Volcker] outlined his proposal in a three-page letter to the president...when the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act went to Congress, the Volcker Rule that it contained took up 10 pages...when the proposed regulations for the Volcker Rule finally emerged for public comment, the text had swelled to 298 pages and was accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics...

..Wall Street firms have spent countless millions of dollars trying to water down the original Volcker proposal and have succeeded in inserting numerous exemptions. Now they’re claiming it’s too complex to understand and too costly to adopt.

Volcker assessed the bubble and bust, along with some prescriptions for dealing with the mess, in a recent speech.

I think Glenn Gould is playing a tack piano (aka the harpsipiano) instead of a harpsichord, about which I'm not sure how I feel. More here and here.

Manager's weekly report comes in two parts, heavy on water and sewer info.

Via Twitter instead of an aircraft carrier: "Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of this year."

We are a leader in the national economy: "Payrolls fell in 25 U.S. states in September, led by North Carolina..."

Just got a robocall from Bill Knight, asking for my vote; it came from a 919 number,  but I'm pretty sure he's still running in GSO.

Like this earlier article about the difficulty of attracting Americans to work on farms in Colorado, news from Alabama raises questions about how we pay laborers, and what the real costs of everyday low prices for consumers are for the overall economy (see also: textile industry, death of).

Koch-funded climate change skeptic, last seen becoming less skeptical, submits papers for peer review; press release says "Global warming is real," and, hey, climate scientists have actually been doing their jobs pretty well all along.

The report doesn't address causes of warming, and "the smarter skeptics have already abandoned the idea that warming is a hoax and now focus their fire solely on the contention that it's man-made. (And the even smarter ones have given up on that, too, and now merely argue that it's economically pointless to try to stop it.)"

A good day for Science^TM nonetheless.

Roller Derby double-header, Saturday 10/22, 5:30 PM, Simkins Sports Pavilion at Barber Park, GSO.

Felix Salmon isn't quite ready to declare the End of Days over NCNB's derivatives shuffle, but he is sure that it stinks:

The Fed, in allowing and indeed encouraging this transfer to go ahead, is placing the health of BAC above the health of Bank of America. And that’s just wrong. Holdcos can come and go — it’s the retail-banking subsidiaries which we have to be concerned about. The Fed should not ever let risk get transferred gratuitously from one part of the BAC empire into the retail sub unless there’s a very good reason. And I see no such reason here.

Dr. Weinberger listens to (and also talks with) Yochai Benkler: "The core insight of all of these fields is that the model of uniform self-interest is inadequate."