The Absurdity of Big-time Sports - Rose Bowl Sod Edition

From Grantland's report on the Rose Bowl game:

We'd been told stories of signs in the public parking lots warning patrons who lingered more than 90 minutes past the game's end that their vehicles could be towed. Undaunted, at 7:30 in the evening, Pacific time, stray clumps of fans lingered in opposite corners of the stadium, watching the crisp semicircles and mild dancing of the Spartan band, and the ragged LSJUMB arc and Dollies kick line. Security guards maintained their rope line around the midfield logo, which disappeared long before midnight. The turf, which looked nearly untouched, was pulled up section by section. Entirely new sod will be brought in and laid down for Monday night's Florida State–Auburn BCS title game tilt. This is the Rose Bowl, and immaculate is the only standard.

Seriously?  New sod for one game when the old sod was in great shape?  Nuts.

Browns Have Paid or Owe $49 Million to Fired Coaches

Plain Dealer:

Coach	Yrs. after fired	Sum owed
Chris Palmer	3 years	$3 million
Butch Davis	3 years	$12 million
Romeo Crennel	3 years	Approx. $10 million
Eric Mangini	2 years	$7.8 million
Pat Shurmur	2 years left	About $5.6 million
Rob Chudzinski	3 years left	$10.5 million
Source: Various media reports

 ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported Monday the Browns owed Chudzinski about $10.5 million over the next three years. Shurmur was due roughly $5.6 million at the time of his dismissal.
Since 2001, the Browns have gone through only one season (2008) without compensating a former head coach not to blow a whistle or design a game plan. By the end of 2016, they will have paid for 16 years of non-service from the pink-slipped six.
The most expensive buyout: Butch Davis, who Randy Lerner still owed $12 million at the time of his 2004 firing. The cheapest buyout: Chris Palmer, who the late Al Lerner owed $3 million over three years beginning in 2001. Remember, these figures don't include monies paid to coordinators and assistant coaches.
Since their 1999 return, the Browns have two winning seasons, one playoff appearance and no post-season victories to show for their investment.

That is the most ridiculous aspect of teams firing their coaches after a poor season.  It is bad enough that the team appears rudderless and lacking in any plan on how to improve, but then they have to shell out tons of money for guys they determined weren't good enough to keep around.  Honestly, why do teams give a new coach a 4 year contract?  No offense, but shouldn't Rob Chudzinski be pretty damn happy with getting paid $3 million for less than a year's work?  Why does he need guaranteed nearly $14 million to take the job?  That is obscene.  I guess it is nice work if you can get it.

Bye, Bye Incandescent Bulbs

Hello, energy savings:

The whining about government thugs limiting light bulb choices has mainly disappeared to the libertarian loon fringe, where I found my classmate from high school and Galtian Hero/Postal Worker (I know, wtf?) moaning about not being able to waste massive amounts of heat while lighting his home (and getting to burn his fingers if he grabs the wrong bulb to change after turning off the light).  He also made a comment about not having a Hazmat suit to clean up if the bulb breaks.  I tried to point out the benefits of moving from 130 year-old technology and offered that he still had the option of lighting dollar bills on fire instead of burning them secondhand through outdated illumination methods, but he was still kind of bummed out.  It would seem to me that a political ideology based on "rational" decision-making might lean toward electrical efficiency, but apparently, I would be wrong.  Oh well.

Prairie Suffers as Land Comes Out of CRP

(chart should read million)

Weekend Edition Sunday:

"Goodness, there's thousands of species that live in grasslands, including several hundred species of higher plants," says , an ecologist at South Dakota State University in Brookings, S.D. Plus, permanent grass cover keeps soil from washing away.
"With those deeps roots that grasses have, and thick thatch, the water has a hard time getting a hold of the soil," says Johnson.
So more land in CRP means cleaner streams, less fertilizer runoff and more carbon stored in the soil.
Back when Reynolds was showing me those duck eggs, there were 34 million acres enrolled in the CRP — an area roughly the size of the state of New York.
In recent years, though, the conservation reserve has shrunk by more than 25 percent, including those 1.6 million acres that farmers took out of the program this past year.
It's partly because Congress has cut funding for the program. But there's a more important reason: high grain prices.
Farmers have been making a lot of money recently growing corn, soybeans, and wheat. They're bidding up prices for land, and landowners are cashing in.
In southwestern Iowa, near the town of , the owners of about 60 acres decided to take it out of the CRP. They rented it instead to farmer Mark Peterson. "They felt that it would make more income for them, renting it out, than it would being in the CRP," says Peterson.
Peterson recognizes that "it is fragile ground," so he says he'll be extra careful with that land, which is on a hillside. Some parts are quite steep, and the soil could easily wash away.
He grew soybeans on it this year, but he tried to disturb the soil as little as possible. And he'll plant cover crops in the off season to anchor the soil.
Ecologist Johnson, at South Dakota State University, says the shrinking Conservation Reserve is just one part of a larger trend: Farmers are ripping up other grasslands, too, including native prairie that never was plowed.
"I've seen things that I never thought I'd see here in South Dakota," he says. "With these land prices going up, there actually are people out there with Bobcats and front end loaders, pulling out the rocks in hundreds of acres of land that's been in pasture all these years."

This is one of the worst aspects of the biofuels-driven ag boom economy of the last six years.   Big Picture Agriculture has featured some pictures of some of the worst examples of sensitive land being abused in an effort to cash in on the boom.  Overall, it is tremendously depressing.  As Kay notes in one of the posts, all the additional land contributes to overproduction, which contributes to price deflation, which risks pushing prices below cost of production.  So we are destroying sensitive lands and destroying the ag economy at the same time.  That is not good at all.

Why The Dairy Cliff Won't Materialize

Because it would be a stupid pain in the ass:

U.S. farm law is set by a 1949 act that includes hefty price supports for dairy farmers. Those supports were once needed because dairy prices often weren’t high enough to cover the costs of production. The law directs the federal government to buy milk, butter and cheese, artificially inflating prices to prop up farmers.
But the “permanent law” is superseded by the farm bills Congress is supposed to pass roughly every five years. Not surprisingly, the current Congress has had some trouble reaching an agreement this time around, and the farm bill is now ridiculously late. A one-year extension at the end of last year wasn’t enough, and congressional leaders have said the bill will be taken up in January. Theoretically, that means a reversion to the “permanent law,” which would force the Department of Agriculture to start buying dairy products at (perhaps) about double their current prices on January 1. Hence the headlines warning that a gallon of milk is about to shoot up to anywhere between $6 and $9 a gallon, depending on which account you believe. There were even more scary “dairy cliff” headlines last year, before the extension was passed. We weren’t any close to the edge then than we are now.
Like the debt ceiling, the “permanent law” carries the “threat that it’s such a goofy law that Congress will pass a new one and rewrite the rules and not go back to the old rules,” Kent Olson, a University of Minnesota Extension economist, told Minnpost.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, though, has said that he won’t implement “permanent law” as long as Congress continues debating the farm bill in January, which they will be doing. And even if we were to go over the dairy cliff, Vilsack has any number of options for stalling price supports. It’s not like the federal government can suddenly just start buying (and storing) vast amounts of dairy products.

The Farm Bill is one of the better examples that Congress is full of clowns.  They've had forever to bang out a farm bill, and they are still unable to get anything done.  And the kicker is that the reactionary morons from rural areas in the House decided to hack the food stamps out of the bill, which was the only reason the Congressmen representing areas with sustainable population densities had any interest in passing a Farm Bill.  What a bunch of asshats.

Farmers Hoarding Corn

WSJ, via Big Picture Agriculture:

Faced with the lowest corn prices in more than three years, many U.S. farmers are stashing away their grain in a bet on a rebound.

The strategy is sending ripples through the corn belt—affecting everyone from grain buyers to storage-bin makers—and tempering the price declines in the $27 billion corn-futures market.
By hoarding freshly harvested supplies, farmers are forcing livestock producers, ethanol companies and food makers to pay a premium over futures in some areas to secure corn, helping to buoy prices during what is expected to be a record U.S. harvest, traders and analysts say. But they warn the move could backfire on farmers in coming months if rival producers—such as growers in South America—generate big crops or demand for corn falls.....

Mary Ann Kwiatkowski, an independent grain trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, says she is "a little less bearish" on corn futures because of the farmers' strategy. Because storing corn leads to higher cash prices, it will cause investors to be less willing to bet on declines in corn futures, she says.

"Farmers have had a lot of years of doing very well," says Craig Turner, a senior broker at Daniels Trading in Chicago, "and they can use the bins as a bank account and only sell when they need to. Having the storage has helped with the price not coming down as much as it would have. It helps stabilize the price."

But analysts say corn growers are taking a big risk, noting that favorable weather so far this season for rival farmers in Brazil and Argentina could lead to large crops in the new year, which could further expand global supplies and exert even more downward pressure on prices.

The corn stockpiles also act as an overhang on the market. Farmers eventually will have to sell their grain, Mr. Turner says, and when they do, the added supplies will weigh on prices.

The USDA estimated in November that U.S. corn production will total 13.989 billion bushels this year, easily surpassing 2009's crop, the largest so far. The massive harvest comes just a year after the worst U.S. drought in decades curtailed output and vaulted corn futures to a record-high closing price of $8.3125 a bushel.

I don't see this ending well, and this is one of the biggest reasons I'm pretty bearish about the next couple years' corn crops.  I just don't see anything to drive prices higher for a while.  Also from Big Picture Ag are a couple of farmland price stories.  The fact that a big pension fund is buying a huge parcel of farmland is a contrarian indicator in my opinion.  As for Iowa, I don't know what's going on there:

WTF?  Has anybody out there tried to make those numbers work with corn under $4?

Bitcoin Chart of the Day

Daily number of Bitcoin transactions versus Bitcoin market capitalization in dollars:

This chart shows a dramatic reduction in the total number of transactions, irrespective of size, per dollar of bitcoin’s market cap, from December 2012 – December 2013. In absolute terms, market cap has generally gone up, and the number of transactions has mostly just bounced around a lot. The total value of bitcoin is going up, but it’s mostly getting parked rather than being put to work. Apparently there just aren’t a lot of appealing ways to spend bitcoin, anecdotal news stories to the contrary notwithstanding.
Instead, an increasing amount of bitcoin’s putative value (as measured in USD) is being squirreled away by larger and larger miner-investors. It’s not fueling a diversifying, all-bitcoin economy: if it were, transactions would be keeping up with or even outpacing market cap, particularly if bitcoiners came to rely increasingly on bitcoins and decreasingly on dollars for day-to-day purchases. That’s very clearly not happening.
Instead, people are mining additional bitcoin, and speculators are buying in – and thus both of them are growing bitcoin’s notional market cap – but these folks simply aren’t adding all that much to the number of daily transactions. Even a bitcoin mining pool would only disburse its proceeds once, and if the individuals in the pool mostly just held their bitcoin, you’d get a graph a lot like the one above.

 Yes, it is a speculative bubble.  People are hording the things.  They won't hold their value.

In Which I Agree With Alan Greenspan

I know, it sounds crazy, but:

Greenspan Says Bitcoin a Bubble Without Intrinsic Currency Value

I think this is pretty accurate:

 Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Bitcoin prices are unsustainably high after surging 89-fold in a year and that the virtual money isn’t currency. “It’s a bubble,” Greenspan, 87, said today in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. “It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.”

The worst part about it is that computers are just burning up electricity doing useless calculations to mine Bitcoins.  You may as well get them for collecting your own shit.  People are stupid.

What is Sea Level?

Geodesy makes my head hurt.

Sharpeneing Pencils for a Living?

Apparently (not that I understand it):

HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS from Pricefilms on Vimeo.

Indiana Police Chief Gets Tasered For Fundraiser

AP:

Knightstown police Chief Danny Baker has used pig roasts and golf tournaments to augment his department's shrinking budget, but badly in need of $9,000 for a new squad car, he's reprising his most shocking fundraising approach to date: getting shot by a stun gun.
The jocular 63-year-old chief and another Knightstown official were planning to have a detective shoot them with a Taser at a free event Wednesday night in the middle school gym in their small eastern Indiana town. Spectators — who Baker hopes feel compelled to donate — will get a firsthand look at how 50,000 volts of low-amp electricity affects the human body.
"It's a shame we have to go to the extent of having fundraisers and getting electrified and so forth, but with small-town budgets you have to do something to get by," said Baker, a lifelong Knightstown resident who has been in law enforcement for 35 years.
Many rural communities like Knightstown, a mile-square town of 2,100 about 25 miles east of Indianapolis, are having to become inventive to fund needed services, said Brian Depew, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs, an advocacy group based in Lyons, Neb.
Depew said federal farm bill funding for rural development has fallen by a third since 2003, leaving less money for police cars and other necessities in an era of shrinking rural populations and tax bases.
Some communities have taken to putting ads on cruisers, while others, like Knightstown, are relying on donations for help.

Why is their funding drying up?  For that, they can thank the Republicans they keep voting in office.  Anyway, here's what he raised:

 A police chief of a small eastern Indiana town who was shot by a stun gun at fundraising event to buy a new squad car says he raised about $800 in cash and received a $25,000 pledge from a Texas company.
Knightstown Police Chief Danny Baker says he's been receiving calls from all over the country and expects to collect more money. His goal was to raise $9,000 so the town of about 2,100 people about 25 miles east of Indianapolis could lease a new squad car. He says he might be able to get a second car.

This isn't the way to run a country.

Investment Bubble Chart of the Day

Here you go:

 You know, I don't know about much, but Bitcoin is a joke.

Purdue's Drum Ain't That Large

A Big Lie Written on a Drum

The Boilermakers exaggerate massively (besides when they claim to be the best engineering school in Indiana):

They parade it proudly through the campus on football Saturdays, roll it out during every halftime performance at Ross-Ade Stadium and thump it throughout each game — the giant percussion instrument that boldly proclaims, right on its face, that it is the "World's Largest Drum."
But is Purdue University's Big Bass Drum truly the biggest?
I scoured the Internet, figuring the drum's dimensions likely were buried on some obscure blog, as most pieces of trivia usually are, only to come up empty. There were lots of estimates for the diameter, but they were decidedly less than precise, ranging from 8 feet to 10 feet.
What I did discover right away was that there's a lot of competition for the title of "World's Largest Drum," which probably explains why Purdue keeps the actual dimensions under its hat, er, shiny steel helmet.
A few drums in Asia and Europe easily tower over the Boilermakers' drum, with the Guinness World Record holder in South Korea measuring in at a diameter of 18 feet 2 inches. Even the naked eye can see Purdue's drum doesn't come close.
What's less clear is whether Purdue's drum beats the competition closer to home.
The University of Texas has Big Bertha, which is 8 feet tall and 44 inches wide, and the University of Missouri boasts Big Mo, which measures in at 9 feet tall and 4 feet, 6 inches wide.....
Inside an aging metal cabinet on the first floor was a square paper boxed labeled "Lafayette Journal & Courier — No. 474." We gently placed the roll of microfilm in a nearby reader.
Smith quickly scrolled through the film, slowing down when he reached the 1921 newspapers — the year the drum was built by Leedy Manufacturing Co. We glanced through Journal & Courier issues from May, June and July before coming to Aug. 6, the day after the Big Bass Drum was unveiled.
And there were the drum's dimensions, right on the front page: "Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide."

Never trust somebody from Indiana.  One of the things I was going to do if I won the lottery was commission the construction of a bigger drum than the one Purdue has, just to stick it to them.  But since the Universities of Texas and Missouri already have, I won't bother if I hit it big.  Seriously, who lies about the size of their drum?

Health Care Cost Vs. Life Expectancy

This is American Exceptionalism:

Ridiculous.  We have typically used about 20-25% of all the electricity and oil produced in the world, I wonder what percentage of developed world heath care expenditures we make?  About the same amount?

Another Chicago Privatization Disaster?

This time, it is fare cards for CTA:

But while these privatization debacles have been hard to stomach, Ventra — the new, privatized fare collection system for transit in Chicago — has been nothing short of a complete disaster.
Unlike the old magnetic strip fare card system, Ventra requires riders to purchase a prepaid debit/credit card that doubles as a transit pass. Whereas fare collection has been under public control for the entire lifespan of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), officials recently signed a $454 million deal to turn over fare collection to Cubic Corporation, a multinational firm which, in addition to causing transit fare headaches all over the world, is also a major player in military equipment manufacturing.
Since Ventra went live this fall, nearly every aspect of the new system has been a fiasco. Transit riders are routinely double- and triple-charged for fares, only to find that the process of sorting things out — waiting more than 30 minutes (on average) in the hopes of speaking with an overworked out-of-state employee in a call center — is often worse than throwing in the towel and moving on. A few weeks back, news broke that bus riders were being charged not only for boarding buses, but for exiting them as well.
While some are lucky enough to avoid being overcharged, others can’t get charged even when they want to. In theory, all you need do to board a bus or move through the turnstiles is tap your Ventra card once against a card-reader. But, in practice, it’s never quite clear what’s in store for you—or for all those similarly anxious folks waiting in line ahead of you.
Will it take four or fives taps before have the green light to board? Will it say “processing” indefinitely, as you wait awkwardly at the front of the bus? Will it stubbornly bark “Stop!” when you tap it, even though you just loaded money onto it? Or, miraculously, will you be able to stroll through the turnstiles in seconds and go about your business? With Ventra in place, its a gamble every time Chicagoans try to board a train or bus—a gamble that, as a quick glance at tweets tagged with #VentraVents confirms, much of the city is losing.

Other than further enriching those who don't need it, I've never understood the push for privatization.  It is pretty obvious that ANY cost savings in privatization (which never seem to materialize) are made by cutting pay for workers, who are generally working-class or middle-class, and turned into profits for shareholders and massive pay packages for executives.  I generally don't have much trouble at the BMV, so I'm not sure why private companies assume they can be so inefficient in setting up privatized operations.  It is pretty clear that privatized services almost always end up with fee increases and greater costs to end users, but without benefiting workers who live in the neighborhoods that are served.  Hopefully, such privatization failures like this curb the trend, but that wouldn't benefit our corporate masters.

Find the Money

Apparently, all of the customer money at MF Global was recovered.  If somebody asks me how it happened, I have no idea.  See if you can figure it out:

Trustee Giddens -- who was also the court-appointed trustee in charge of liquidating Lehman Brothers -- will certainly oppose those motions, however. He, for one, does not share Corzine's belief that recovery of the shortfall implies exoneration of Corzine or any other MF Global officer and director. "The reduction [in the customer account shortfall] that resulted from the Trustee's efforts should not obscure the fact," wrote one of Giddens's staffers in a court filing last month, "that a very real shortfall in the amount of $1.5 billion existed at the time the Trustee began the liquidation process, and it was mainly through litigation and negotiation with affiliates and other third parties that the gap has been reduced."
Last week another attorney working with Giddens stressed in an updated court submission that at least $560 million would still be missing from those customer accounts to this day were it not for the fact that Giddens has plugged that void with "advances" from the general estate, moneys that would otherwise have been available for paying general creditors, such as vendors, suppliers, and service-providers. The last of these was the $233 million injection just approved on Nov. 6 by Bankruptcy Judge Glenn. (The total amount advanced, however, is expected to shrink to somewhere between $435 million and $460 million after one additional expected transfer from the U.K. lands in the kitty in the coming months.)
These advances, in turn, were conditioned on a deal -- whose legality is hotly contested by Corzine and his co-defendants -- that allows trustee Giddens to step into the shoes of the class-action customer claimants and continue litigating their claims against the individual defendants. (The case would actually still be litigated by the class-action attorneys who brought it, though Giddens, as trustee for the general creditors, would now be the beneficiary.)
Giddens is also not backing away from any of the fundamental findings of a 275-page investigative report he issued in June 2012. There he found that there was a basis for asserting "breach of fiduciary duty and negligence" claims against Corzine and other officers, charges that have in fact been leveled against Corzine in the class actions as well as in an enforcement action filed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission this past June.

I really don't understand how Corzine doesn't face charges.  However, I find it hard to believe that a prosecutor could convince somebody that he committed a crime.  This is the most confusing story I've ever heard.

A Week at the Listowel Races

Charles Pierce goes to the land of his grandmother to experience an event which her stories had made so real that it was like he'd been there numerous times before he'd ever gone.  It is a wonderful story of farm life, traditional Irish life, family lines and life in general, with horse races, booze and gambling thrown in:

Up and down the round, green-quilted hillsides near Listowel in north Kerry in Ireland, the seven sisters of the Lynch family once tended their sheep. They worked in the summer sun and in the soft rain of the spring and the fall, and in the harder, snow-mixed sleet of midwinter. And every autumn, right around when the harvest came in, they would drive their sheep up the hillsides and down, and straight into Listowel, where their flock would join cows and goats and chickens and ducks, and the sheep of a hundred other families, all milling around with each other and filling the town square with an amazing cacophony of lowing, bleating, squawking, and quacking that nearly, but not quite, drowned out the increasingly lubricated haggling of the farmers and craftsmen and merchants who had come to sell enough of what they'd raised and grown and manufactured to get them through the hard winter to come, with a little left over to spend in the pubs on William Street, or to bet on the horses out at the track tucked into the bend of the river. The sisters never went to the races. Only the men went to the races. The sisters stayed in town and listened to the fiddlers and the people who played the pipes, and they danced with each other after the day's business was done.
Listowel was a farm town, a market town. It was a little less polished than Tralee to the west and the south, or Limerick to the north and east. It was louder. It was rougher. One of the Lynch sisters, Mary Ellen, would talk in her later years of a rally in support of Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the split in the Irish Party over Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. The rally turned into an all-out brawl, the clack of hurleys on skulls ringing louder than the oratory. Called "faction fights," these were come-all-ye bloodlettings, exhibitions of what the Irish called the bataireacht, a form of stick-fighting that rose to an art. These would erupt at weddings or at funerals, or at virtually any public occasion at which a longstanding grievance might detonate at the smallest provocation.

Ok, harvest fair.  Sounds about like the origins of county fairs.  Discussing with his guide how he felt like he knew the place and was a part of it because of his grandmother's stories, he gives a good insight into the importance of narrative, in this case, sports as narrative, in our lives:

I am of this place, because my grandmother was of this place, and she told me about it, and so it became part of what I am...
"When you come right down to it," Pat told me, "running a racetrack is like running a farm. That's why the races here have survived. It was the last thing the farmers had for the year. Once the races ended, there was only the long, cold winter."
What are sports, anyway, at their best, but stories played out in real time? Each of them has a distant beginning, a middle, and an end, all three connected by the slender, powerful tendrils of memories recited. They are part of the collective memory of the tribe. They are how we explain ourselves to each other, down through the generations. Once upon a time, there were five sisters on the hills around Listowel, and one of them had a son, who gave her a grandson. From her, I had imagined hearing the muffled power of the hooves pounding into the turf. I had imagined the soft-running river. I never had been to the Listowel Races, but I had been there all my life.

The whole story is wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Ireland or horse racing, or having fun in general.  On this day of the Bengals-Browns game, his description of his grandmother's stories and the recognition of sports as narrative, I think his story explains every western Ohio Browns fan (and there's a lot of them, way too many, actually) I have ever met.  The reason that is is because they are only Browns fans because their fathers, and most likely, their grandfathers were.  Their grandfathers told the stories about Paul Brown and Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Marion Motley.  They were told the glorious tales of the Browns when the Browns won the NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL, after winning four AAFC titles.  Their fathers probably remember the last championship in 1964, with Jim Brown running over opponents.  I understand how they became Browns fans, I just don't understand why they remained Browns fans after Art Modell packed up the Browns and moved to Baltimore.  I would have expected them to remain fans of the Ravens (ok, probably not) or to have become fans of some other team.  Why would folks in Western Ohio choose to wait 3 years to follow an expansion team almost 3 hours from where they live?  That I don't understand.

Fast Food Workers and Social Welfare Programs

The Wall Street Journal looks at the issue (h/t Ritholtz):

One point that isn't disputed: $7 billion isn't much, in the context of the U.S. fast-food industry and of government benefits. It is about one-fifth or one-quarter as much as fast-food restaurants pay their front-line workers in wages and benefits. And it is less than 2% of the total benefits paid out by the four programs studied by the researchers.

Why, then, focus on fast food? "$7 billion is $7 billion. You have to start somewhere," Dr. Allegretto said, adding that the proportion of fast-food workers who receive benefits from those programs—52%—is larger than in other major industry categories she and her colleagues studied.

Dr. Allegretto said the figure is an underestimate, for several reasons. First, there is no ready-made data set of fast-food workers, so researchers used three different sources and several assumptions. "We always erred on the side of being conservative," she said. The researchers also omitted many other benefits programs.

Some economists praised the research, which hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. "They produced the best estimates available using sound methods and data," said Aaron J. Sojourner, a labor economist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

I find it interesting that the two industries with the highest percentage of employees who had family members on social welfare programs were both food production or provision industries.  So does that have something to do with the government subsidizing cheap food?  I don't see how, when profits for the companies have increased over time.  I think this does have to do with the half-assed employer-based health care system we have, and the fact that the restaurant industry has long used part-time help that they stiffed on health insurance.  I would be curious to know what would happen if we got an increased minimum wage combined with a tax on large businesses that don't provide health insurance based on their total number of part-time and full-time workers.  I would expect they might cut part-time employees, but dramatically increase full-time workers.  In the end, an employer-based system doesn't work if an increasing number of employers don't provide insurance.  Since we are there, we need to work out a different system.

The Unknown Known

Rumsfeld and Cheney, the Gerald Ford boys, were such a driving force, and so in error.

The Record Breaker

The Record Breaker from Brian McGinn on Vimeo.