Clock is ticking

Paul Krugman offered up a column this morning in the NYTimes regarding the slow collapse of American education. Part of it is due of course to the transition of traditional education to more or less trade school education with a heavy emphasis on intense learing and mastering of vertical skill sets - programming, business niches, etc. rather than the broader liberal arts we got when in those ancient times, we went to University.

More troubling is his observation that the less fortunate among us are saddled with woes from this prolonged economic downturn and the university experience, even the community college possibility are foresaken because people can't afford it and these institutions are cutting back.

My point with the clock is that time slips by.  The chances for attendance at a later date just doesn't happen as it is well known that when students leave the lockstep of high school to college, they don't come back later in life to any great degree  unless it is job specific learning.

That is going to cause a gap if prolonged.  Where there has been a steady stream of graduates diverse enough to fuel the need, there is going to be fewer to choose from and a high school education, while once robust, really isn't so hot anymore and these folks are often consigned to working up the hard way if at all.

You may not like what we do in education in this country and there is plenty of oafishness in the system, the fact is that our system is the envy of the world and we probably ought to think about it more.

Your turn

I'm all ears today including a budding ear ache from a sore throat.  ....   So I'm turning this over to you.

What do you want to read? What areas? As this is a blog written in the midst of a very busy trading floor that is knee deep (I avoided up to it's ears) in all things financial, I've stayed away from such subjects pretty much as we all need a little diversity.  So what diversity do you like, if any, and what would areas would you like topics on? 

Sweets to the sweet. New Ads on CNBC and other places

Talk about coincidences.  I watched Rachel Madow last night and she had on some strange person named Berman who has a rash of pseudo-science websites up of which sweetscam.com is one of them.

(sweet and) LOW and behold starting about 5am today on CNBC and MSNBC (and of course our buddies at Faux News) there is a commercial that is part of an ad campaign out saying all sugar is the same yada yada and it directs to sweetscam.com mentioned above.

The science is still "out" on a lot of what they claim and their logic is tortured to say the least.  Corn syrup is used on most soft drinks and one point they make is corn syrup gets a bad rap due to the fattyfat kids drinking too much soda products and gosh its not the syrup that is causing it...

I'm not impressed. I'm not sure the point they are making.  Frankly I don't get where they are going with this or the myriad other sites they run of the same ilk.  I would like to know who is forking over ten grand a spot on CNBC and running this whole thing.

Least impressive is the science presented.  The expert is a Dartmouth music major who according to Berman is really smart.  I don't discount music majors being really smart but that is a long way from a ph.d. and lab experience in molecular science.  Again. I'm not impressed. Read it for youself and look at the blog listings on their main page.  Others seem to agree with me.

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

As kids we played a picture puzzle that you will all remember...the "can you find the hockey stick in this picture". That was fairly easy in that the image (the hockey stick) really was there and simply in the midst of a number of other recognizable objects. The observations posed in the NYTimes piece linked in the title explore this a bit and it is a good read. I'll let you read it or encourage you to do so.

In advertising there is a theory about white space in an ad. The simple truth is that eye/mind doesn’t focus on white spaces and move toward the first identifiable recognizable product. Simply it is somehow reassuring to find something that one can relate to in some way and the brain goes through all sorts of gyrations until it solves the problem or, in an advertising scene, arrives at the message.

As I sit with traders all day long I see this often. Seemingly unrelated materials and events that are really a pattern of sorts fill their screens and therefore mind. A lot of very smart people sitting around trying to find out what is what with what we now know to be their brains lighting up.

If you are intrigued by this you should be a trader...but then you should be a trader anyway.

A stroll down retirement lane

I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker several years back.  The idea of the article was in betting which emerging economy was best positioned population-wise to grow significantly and optimally.Everyone reads this stuff a little differently and as with any well written article, stuff which isn’t apparent to you at the time wanders around in brains and comes back out in a more provocative form. 

The gist of the article was that certain countries have a real advantage based on working population versus “supported” population. The verso side of the folio is that countries with a high number of pensioners in comparison have a really ugly set of circumstances.

An example was given about a major steel company who, in the 1950s was the big dog on the block. A couple things happened to it. Over time their workforce aged and instead of 10+ workers supporting the pension of 1 retiree, the ratio slowly closed. Not horrible but also not sustainable. You need a number of workers to support one pension and when it gets to 1:1, it is a catastrophe for profitability as every spare cent of cash goes to fund a system that gets more out of whack each day.

Compounding this was management’s realization that technology could add efficiency thus lowering product cost and also signaling a reduction in the work force (machines replacing jobs) – a double whammy. Summary: fewer workers supporting more retirees, and, more manufacturing efficiency to lower product costs results in the need for fewer workers…the problem compounds.

The steel company fairly bled money and went belly up. Then, an amazing thing happened. The company reformed into a highly automated workplace and when it hired again the ratio of wage earners/funders v. the retirees was again reduced to favorable numbers and the company was profitable.

The article’s point was that some countries have good ratios and a future not clouded by the pension issue. Countries with the reverse are in for some tough sledding.

Now out there sits a fairly sizeable pool of older folk facing a health care train wreck out there waiting for the tracks to clear. The simple truth is that there may not be enough payers to satisfy the needs of the non-earners.

This is a fine pickle. Ratios that are out of sync do not do well. Just letting you folks living on retirement lane that some stuff may be floating your way.