A tale of two teams

Slipstream-Chipolte is a cycling team that looks, on the face of it, like they are trying to seriously combat doping in cycling, to the point where they are explicitly stating that they'd like to win races, but they are not all about winning. The feeling is, by doing so they are removing some of the pressure on their riders to dope. Slipstream is also implementing a state of the art rider monitoring system to, to the degree they can, ensure that their riders don't dope. They are going to be my team to root for in 2008.

On the other side, Astana may have a rival, Rock Racing. In fact, I'm betting that this team implodes completely in 2008. It doesn't hurt my prediction that they just signed Tyler Hamilton to race for them in '08. He joins Santi Botero who hasn't really raced since rumors started flowing about him while Phonak was blowing up. Cycling doesn't need Rock Racing right now.

Circuit City

I posted on Circuit City here. How are they doing now? Not so well:

Circuit City Stores Inc., the second-largest U.S. consumer-electronics retailer, reported a fifth straight loss and said it won't make money this quarter, when it typically generates most of its annual profit. The chain dropped 32 percent in early New York trading.

Buh-bye.

I LOVE the WSJ Editorial Page

Since the Weekly World News is out of print. Today's Op-Ed:

[Obama] skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.
This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."
Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable." We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.
It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.

My goodness that's a good piece. In one piece they imply that Obama may not wear ties out of some fealty to Khomeni (perhaps his bare neckedness is supposed to be to Muslims what Bush's "Don't put a period on the sentence..." bullshit is to fundamentalist Christians?), but also equate Ron Paul with Kucinich. That is professionalism. That is efficiency. My one critique is that they never got Obama's middle name into the piece, but perhaps they thought it would be too obvious?

This is an embarrassment, even by the low standards of the WSJ editorial page.

Charlie Wilson's War

I read the book a few years ago and was appalled. For those of you who didn't read it, Charlie Wilson was a Congressman who secretly funded the Afghans in their battle against the Soviets during the 80's and 90's. He did it through his control of defense spending, particularly black box spending that he was able to allocate without oversight or approval.

I assume the movie is going to cast Wilson as a swashbuckling, larger-than-life, go-it-alone American misfit does good character. If so, and if that sort of story appeal to you, please keep the following in mind:

1. Wilson was funding the Taliban when they were fighting the Soviets. Money that he secretly sent to them was used to purchase weapons that are likely killing American soldiers today.
2. Since this was all done secretly, nobody within the policy arm of the government could comment on whether this was, or was not, a good idea.
3. This was done at a time when there still was government oversight - imagine what similar black box ops are being funded right now. Look for some of these to blow up in the coming decades as well.

I don't understand the appeal of Charlie Wilson. Check that, I get it (rule breaker, love maker, drug taker) he's a prototypical American hero, I just don't understand why more people don't look at his rule breaking with utter revulsion.

Thoughts?

Different take on e-paper

It's not a reader, but a writer:

So long as the user writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. "We're starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and functional," says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.

The idea and the product have been around for a few years in a number of iterations and form factors. The thing I like about this one is the recording ability - you can retain both the spoken words and your written notes and pair them up. In fact, it could change note-taking altogether since you will no longer have to capture the words spoken, but can instead riff on the ideas.

I'm a pen and paper guy, so the feel of the paper and the pen are going to be issues for me, but it seems like it could be a really cool thing.

Question of the Day

Do Bonds and/or Clemens get into the Hall of Fame?

Baseball and Steriods

Suppose I should say something about this. I've been saying for a while that in aerobic sports (running, cycling) there are no longer any legitimate superhuman efforts. It just can't happen. Looks like the same applies to non-aerobic sports as well.

Any thoughts on whether the players' association will agree to blood testing for HGH? I'm going with a solid "no" because I'm not sure how much people really care about athletes cheating and as long as the union can dig in its heels, I don't see much substantive change.

Hilliary and Message Discipline

Boy, there sure are a bunch of Hilliary staffers releasing unapproved messages these days. A positively alarming amount of freelancing. I really hope she can corral those bad eggs.

End of year time again

Yes, it's approaching, and with the end of the year comes the inevitable lists and quizzes. So far, this has been my favorite quiz. I scored an 89% (16/18). Good luck.

Rate freeze

Well, it doesn't really look like anyone has a really solid understanding of what's going to happen. On a quick read around, I think that the actual number of people that will be eligible and participate in this program is far lower than the 1-1.5 million I keep seeing quoted.

I don't think that this is really going to do all that much for the economy or the housing crisis - at best it avoids some foreclosures (which is a good thing). At worst, it's lots of activity with little impact.

It's cold and flu season

I got my flu shot today. You should too.

Mortgage Workout

Still trying to work through it, I'll have something tomorrow. Right now I'm trying to figure out who is left holding the bag, and it seems like it may be the bondholders. I can't see how that happens though. More tomorrow.

What the hell is wrong with Martin Feldstein?

He has an amazing Op-Ed in today's WSJ called "How to Avert Recession". I'm not sure he gives a way to avert recession in the piece, but he sure does give a few ways to completely fuck the country.

When you read it, you'll likely be lulled into a false sense of security. He starts out sounding very reasonable and reasoned, making one sound non-controversial statement after another. Then this happens:

What's really needed is a fiscal stimulus, enacted now and triggered to take effect if the economy deteriorates substantially in 2008. There are many possible forms of stimulus, including a uniform tax rebate per taxpayer or a percentage reduction in each taxpayer's liability. There are also a variety of possible triggering events. The most suitable of these would be a three-month cumulative decline in payroll employment. The fiscal stimulus would automatically end when employment began to rise or when it reached its pre-downturn level.

Are you kidding me? He wants to reduce tax rates at precisely the same time that the government is going to realize falling tax revenues (falling corportate profits, personal incomes, investment gains)? What would that do to the dollar? Falling interest rates and massive amounts of borrowing to close a spiraling deficit due to increased fiscal expenditures and decreasing revenues would kill the dollar, reserve currency or not, this would be a dollar bloodbath.

Later:

Even if the Fed decides that it should not cut rates further at the present time, (HA! Good luck with that. - Jim) it would not raise rates to offset the stimulus effect of the fiscal change. From the Fed's point of view, the tax cuts can provide a desirable short-run stimulus without the inflationary impact that would result from a lower interest rate and an increase in the stock of money. Some reliance now on a fiscal stimulus rather than easier money would also take pressure off the exchange-rate adjustment. While further declines of the dollar are necessary to shrink the massive U.S. trade deficit, continued rapid declines might lead to counterproductive retaliatory actions by some of our trading partners.

"[T]he tax cuts can provide a desirable short-run stimulus without the inflationary impact that would result from a lower interest rate and an increase in the stock of money." Is he serious? A plunging dollar would again make oil prices surge and that would flow through to the rest of the economy. And for those of you who still insist on looking at "core inflation" only (for whatever reason), $200/barrel oil would flow through the entire economy. Lower interest rates with massive borrowing is an economic disaster in the making.

And the final part of the quote above makes no sense to me either. Announcing this would lead to "counterproductive retaliatory actions" by some of our trading partners who would be forced to start and reallocate foreign exchange portfolios away from dollars.

It seems like we are currently playing a global game of chicken with the world saying, in effect, we don't think that you will move away from dollars in the near future because doing so would seriously impact the value of of your own reserves, that is, you can't afford to move away from dollars. I wouldn't be so sure. If our trading partners become convinced that the dollar is going to continue its decline, why wouldn't they start to get out now while they can? It's a dangerous game we're playing.