Year: 2015

As long-time readers know, I suffer from enthusiasm.

It’s the happy gene, I think.

(Apparently, you may be able to buy it over the counter — 5-HTP — but do your own research.)

All the happier when the enthusiasm proves justified:

Remember Honest Tea?  Its co-founder took a prototype bottle out of his briefcase and asked me to try it.  It was awful (who drinks room-temperature “iced” tea out of a briefcase?) but I invested anyway.  It’s now everywhere!  Coke bought it!  Moroccan Mint, in their glass bottle, served really, really cold, is the best.

Remember Google?  I’ve been super-enthusiastic about Google.  Although in that case, far from investing, I led a bunch of us off a cliff buying puts.  “Google is just the most wonderful company that ever was,” I wrote a decade ago, arguing that its stock was, nonetheless, potentially ripe for a fall.  Wrong about the stock, right about the company.

Remember silt?  I’ve been enthusiastic about Great Lakes Dredge & Dock because it — silt — just continues to accumulate and GLDD seems to be in a good position to proifit form that.  So far, it’s been neither a big winner or a loser, but this Seeking Alpha analysis yesterday helps to keep me hopeful.

I’ve been enthusiastic about beets.

Yesterday I was enthusiastic about the best jukebox EVER.  (And free!)

SETH SINGS!

And for months now, I’ve been enthusiastic about my pal Seth, who was more than a little nervous when he debuted at 54 Below last year — which showed — but boy has he ever found his stride.  Among the many reviews of his most recent encore was this one from the New York Arts Review.  (“Sikes may well be one of the saviors of the Great American Songbook as we continue into the 21st century. … I can’t wait to see what [he] does next.  I’ll certainly be there and so should you!”)

Is he the next Frank Sinatra?  No.  Am I having fun reading his reviews?  Yes.

2016

Of rather more consequence is my enthusiasm for Democrats.  And this reason to be optimistic, from the National Journal:

. . . But what has to be deeply unsettling to Republicans is what has happened with party affiliation over the past seven years. . . . From 1990, when Pew began aggregating its monthly surveys each year, through 2006, an average of 29 percent of adults identified themselves as Republicans, 4 percentage points below the Democrats’ 33 percent. From 2007 through the end of last year, the average for Republican identification was 5 points lower at 24 percent. Democrats, by contrast, held steady at 33 percent. That means Republicans have gone from 4 points behind during that 1990–2006 period to 9 points behind in the years since.

Reason to be cautiously optimistic.  I will never get over the lost opportunity I think we had in 2014 to up-end the truism that “turn-out is always terrible in a mid-term.”  But 2016 is no mid-term: 2016 is going to be the mother (or possibly the grandmother) of all presidential elections, where turnout works in our favor.

DR. SEUSS

And speaking of optimism, I love this upbeat excerpt from Brian Grazer’s A Curious Mind:

Being determined in the face of obstacles is vital. Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is a great example of that himself. Many of his forty-four books remain wild bestsellers. . . . selling 11,000 Dr. Seuss books every day of the year, in the United States alone, twenty-four years after he died. He has sold 600 million books worldwide since his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was . . . rejected by twenty-seven publishers before being accepted by Vanguard Press. . . .

Geisel says he was walking home, stinging from [that] twenty-seventh rejection, with the manuscript and drawings for Mulberry Street under his arm, when an acquaintance from his student days at Dartmouth College bumped into him on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue in New York City. Mike McClintock asked what Geisel was carrying. “That’s a book no one will publish,” said Geisel. “I’m lugging it home to burn.” McClintock had just that morning been made editor of children’s books at Vanguard; he invited Geisel up to his office, and McClintock and his publisher bought Mulberry Street that day. When the book came out, the legendary book reviewer for the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman, captured it in a single sentence: “They say it’s for children, but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss’s impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well.” Geisel would later say of meeting McClintock on the street, “[I]f I’d been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business today. …”

Hurray for beets, Democrats, socially responsible iced tea, optimism, enthusiasm, nosewheel motors, rectal applicators, brain training — and summer!

I actually have one in my living room that I bought 35 years ago when they used real records.  A Rock-ola.  (Hey: no plane, no boat, no car — I bought a juke box.  Sue me.)

This one, with music from the 40’s and 50’s and 60’s and 70’s, is now in your living room (or wherever) — free.  Enjoy.

Thanks, Mel!

First you may want to spend 87 seconds with these baby pandas.  How can you not?  (Thanks, Mel!)

And now, here’s Paul Krugman on Jeb’s voodoo economics.  (His Florida economic miracle was built on the housing bubble — which burst just after he left office.)

And Pope Francis on climate change.  (“The vision Francis outlined in a 184-page papal encyclical is sweeping in ambition and scope: He describes relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment and says apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness are to blame.  The most vulnerable victims, he declares, are the world’s poorest people . . .“)

Does it strike you as ironic that the chairs of the relevant House and Senate committees believe climate change is a hoax, while virtually the entire scientific community — and the Pope! — recognize it as an urgent, epic problem?  (Jeb, a Catholic, seems conflicted on this score.  “Speaking at a town hall campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Bush, who converted to Catholicism 20 years ago, all but dismissed the pope’s new encyclical on the environment . . .”)

YOUR CHIN

Suggested two years ago at $22.70 because of its promising therapy for double chins, Kythera is being bought out at $75 a share.  It’s so nice when one of these works.  Thanks, Guru!

YOUR BRAIN

A privately-held company I have an interest in has peer-reviewed studies showing that its exercises sharpen acuity, where crossword puzzles and such do not.

(“Researchers found participants who did just 10 hours of the exercise, with no further training, had gains of 1.5 to 6.6 years across several standard measures of cognition that persisted even a year later. No gains were seen from doing crosswords. . . .“)

Here’s their latest offer:

Thousands of BrainHQ users are powering up their brains with the Daily Spark. Join them this week and invite your friends to join, too! It’s free for everyone—and a great way to sample BrainHQ’s clinically proven brain training.

What is the Daily Spark?
Every weekday, the Daily Spark opens one level of a BrainHQ exercise to all visitors. Play it once to get the feel of it – then again to do your best. Come back the next day for a new level in a different exercise!

Something to pass on to your parents?  Your grandparents?  (A) They will appreciate your thinking of them.  (B) They may be less likely to lose their keys or crash their cars.

Even you might benefit, though I’ve never noticed you to be anything but razor sharp.

(“The study also showed that participants aged 50-64 had gains just as large as those 65 and older. “This suggests that as with physical exercise, anyone can improve at any age,” said Dr. Wolinsky. “And, as with physical exercise, why would you wait until you are old to get into better shape? . . .“)

Have a great weekend!

And by “him” I mean Him.

This son of a nun thinks not.  Two minutes.  (Thanks, Mel!)

Yesterday’s clip was only two minutes.  This one is 18.  But time flies when you’re having fun — who can fail to have fun watching John Oliver? — and I cannot help noting that, even if you have never heard Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur or Congressman Steve Womack, it will be immediately obvious to you from the context which political party each belongs to.

And to me, that says something.

I am not at the Paris Air Show, but if I were I would be at the double-decker WheelTug booth watching people gawk.

There’s a nosewheel spinning with the LED-lighted WheelTug hubcab to catch attention (and so ground personnel, someday, will instantly know when a jet is being powered by WheelTug rather than by jet exhaust).

There’s an elaborate airport model, at 1/72 scale, kind of like a kid’s model train layout, only with a plane instead of a train moving around.  Who can resist stopping to look at that?

And, for those sufficiently intrigued to stay and watch a 6-minute video, there’s this simulation that you can watch without having to go to Paris.

It shows how WheelTug — we hope — will save between 8 and 20 minutes each time a plane unloads and loads passengers.

Every extra minute on the ground costs airlines a good chunk of money — I’ve seen estimates from $30 a minute to upwards of $100 — so that could mean anywhere from $518,000 in savings per year for a plane that makes 6 flights a day ($30 times 8 minutes times 7 flights for each of 360 days) to $4.3 million ($100 times 20 minutes times 6 flights for each of 360 days) . . . before figuring any savings on fuel, engine maintenance, and foreign object damage . . . and before assigning any value to the environmental benefits (less fuel, fumes, and noise), the increased passenger satisfaction, or the increased airport capacity (more flights without having to build more terminals).

Multiply these benefits over 5,000 short-haul jets (say), and you have annual savings on the order of $3 billion to $25 billion a year.

Will WheelTug ever actually pull this off and realize some share of those savings?  Will all commercial jets, not just 5,000 of them, someday have the capability to maneuver independently without having to wait for a tug?  (And without violating WheelTug patents?)  This is what shareholders in WheelTug grandparent Borealis, currently valued at $40 million or so, are patiently waiting to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54P0_W42SDE&feature=player_embedded

This is Monday’s post to give you extra time to . . .

File your second quarterly estimated tax payment, if you have substantial income from which tax is not already withheld.

Watch Hillary’s kick-off.  I am enthusiastically neutral among all of our fine Democratic candidates, but that doesn’t mean I’m not elated and uplifted when one of them hits it out of the ballpark, as Hillary did at Four Freedoms Park this morning.  It’s a speech of real significance, as we citizens plot our collective course forward, that every American should the take the time to hear.

Urge your Representative, if he or she is not on board with the President’s trade agenda, to reconsider.  How so many of his traditional allies could be on the other side of this is something that I tried to fathom and explain Thursday.

It would be a tragedy if we fell into the trap of sticking with status quo — which shafts workers and the environment — rather than improve it, as the TransPacific Partnership would surely do.  Friday’s vote in the House to kill what’s been 10 years in the making just has to be reversed.

(A true lemon-from-lemonade solution would be for the Republicans to “give” Democrats some of the job-creating infrastructure spending that they’ve been blocking and/or an economy-boosting hike in the minimum wage: a face-saving way for current TPP opponents to declare partial victory for workers, even as, in fact it would be total victory for everyone . . . because we need all three:  TPP, infrastructure, and a higher minimum wage.)

#

Two items I’ve not previously addressed in those two TPP links:

* Secrecy.  There’ve been 1,700 briefings on Capitol Hill and with labor leaders.  But as one administration official explained it to me, “What we haven’t done – and what we shouldn’t do – is publicly announce our bottom-lines to the negotiators on the other side of the table.  And there’s a very good reason we won’t do that.  We’re trying to drive a hard bargain, so we can get the best deal possible for the American people, and we won’t be able to do that by undermining our own position at the negotiating table with our foreign counterparts by showing the other players our cards.”

Once the deal is done, Congress and the American people will have months and months to scrutinize every word before it is voted up or down.

* ISDS.  Investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, around for decades, can be found in over 3,000 agreements worldwide, of which the US is party to 50.  Some have been poorly conceived.  The adminsitration is working to keep the ISDS mechanism in this trade agreement from being one of those.  But I’m told that despite our being party to 50 such agreements already, “the United States has faced only 17 ISDS cases and we haven’t lost any of them.”

#

Despite the current crappy status quo — where Fords and Chevy’s made in Detroit are hit with a 30% import duty but Fords and Chevy’s made in Mexico enter the same Asian countries duty-free — U.S. exports supported 11.7 million American jobs in 2014.  And those jobs an average pay better than non-export jobs.

If we succeed in leveling the playing field, we’ll create more high-paying American jobs.  This is a big deal.  As is moving the uneforceable labor and environmental “side agreements” of NAFTA into the enforceable trade agreement itself.

Will it be perfect?  No.  Will it be better than what we have today?  Much.  Read those two links and, if you agree, call your Congressman — and have a great weekend, what’s left of it!

MY BIG INSIGHT

Which I’m sure is not original with me, and doubtless bears the name of some 1920’s economist or social scientist — “Mannheimer’s Paradox” “Hoffa’s Conundrum” — but I don’t care, I think it’s really relevant.  Here it is:

Imagine you are a labor leader and that, somehow, you have divine powers of prognostication.  These powers tell you for a certainty that the TransPacific Partnership will, by generally boosting U.S. exports and the economy as a whole, add a million new good jobs over five years at the same time as it will cost a hundred thousand good jobs.  Net gain: nine hundred thousand good jobs.  What do you do?

It seems to me that you have little choice but to oppose the deal.

Why?

Because those million hired will be at best vaguely aware of the connection between the trade deal and their employment, whereas those hundred thousand fired will — understandably — be in great, vocal pain looking for someone to blame.  And they will blame you.  Better to have the first million remain unemployed, but no one blaming you.  (Better still: blaming NAFTA.)

Now, obviously, neither you nor I have divine powers of prognostication.  And it could conceivably be that any new trade deal the President signs off on will cost a million jobs and create only 100,000 (I will shortly argue why this makes no sense).  But just before we get to that, I want to cement the point:

It’s completely plausible that if  there were a trade deal that would, on balance, be greatly beneficial to American workers . . . (and to business owners and, for that matter, to others around the world, as it called for higher labor and environmental standards and imposed enforcement mechanisms that NAFTA lacked) . . . a rational labor leader who wanted to keep his job would oppose it.  And that the progressive groups and politicians that (quite properly) generally support labor would not want to take the other side.

And so you could quite plausibly have the situation I think we have today: a trade deal that on balance will be a really important improvement to the status quo, good for America and its workers — as argued here a few weeks ago — but that finds labor and its allies largely opposed.

Why should we stick with NAFTA “as is” when the TransPacific Partnership (whose 12 nations will include Canada and Mexico) improves on its two most objectionable features: the non-enforceability of its labor and environmental protections?

Why should we stick with a situation where Fords and Chevy’s made in America face a 30% import duty in countries that allow those same Fords or Chevy’s — if made in Mexico — to enter duty free?  How can that possibly help union members in Detroit?

FAST TRACK

One objection to the TPP (TransPacific Partnership) is the TPA (Trade Promotion Authority) — known as fast track.  It’s all being done in secret, to be rushed through via an unprecedented abrogation of power by the President, apparently at the behest of his corporate overlords.  (But wait?  I thought he was a pro-labor community organizer?)

In fact, reported the New York Times a couple of months ago:

The bill would make any final trade agreement open to public comment for 60 days before the president signs it, and up to four months before Congress votes. If the agreement, negotiated by the United States trade representative, fails to meet the objectives laid out by Congress — on labor, environmental and human rights standards — a 60-vote majority in the Senate could shut off “fast-track” trade rules and open the deal to amendment.

“We got assurances that U.S.T.R. and the president will be negotiating within the parameters defined by Congress,” said Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. “And if those parameters are somehow or in some way violated during the negotiations, if we get a product that’s not adhering to the T.P.A. agreement, than we have switches where we can cut it off.”

To further sweeten the deal for Democrats, the package includes expanding trade adjustment assistance — aid to workers whose jobs are displaced by global trade — to service workers, not just manufacturing workers. Mr. Wyden also insisted on a four-year extension of a tax credit to help displaced workers purchase health insurance.

And as for being unprecedented?  Every president since FDR, with the exception of Nixon, has been granted this authority.

Tomorrow:  More Facts and Misconceptions (Or Maybe a Puppy Video: You Never Know.)

BOREF

I know.  Quiet.  But WheelTug should have a good presence at the Paris Air Show in a couple of weeks; hope springs eternal; and in the meantime, this bit of a recent interview with Boeing’s CEO caught my eye:

Q. It seems what airlines want is still a bit beyond the realm of physics.

A. We live in a more-for-less world, and our customers challenge us. Some innovation will be required, because that market will want something that can fly a long distance and be able to load and unload passengers in 15 min.

Now, let’s see.  How would you be able to load and unload 200 passengers that fast?  Within the realm of physics, you’d probably need to load and unload from both the front AND the back doors, cutting the time in half.  But you can’t do that unless you can park the plane parallel to the gate (instead of nose in) and run jet bridges to both doors.  And you can’t do that if you taxi in with an engine on, because the exhaust, as you turn the plane sideways, would occasionally knock over other planes or people or vehicles.  So you need “e-taxi.”  So — one might argue — you need WheelTug.  The beat goes on.

THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE

It’s coming, at least in high-cost cities (there being considerable logic to its being higher in Los Angeles, CA than in Lumber City, GA) and that is a good thing for all most everybody.

From a Bloomberg opinion post:

What we know about the minimum wage is that modest increases have a negligible effect on employment, and usually work as a net economic positive to the region that passes them. The groundbreaking research by economists David Card and Alan Krueger has been confirmed by lots of subsequent research. This has become a pet subject for me, discussed many times before (see this, this and this) . . .

Taxpayers would benefit, because right now we’re subsidizing employers who pay poverty wages.  (Read the Bloomberg piece for the fascinating  economics of a McDonald’s franchise.)

And the economy as a whole would get a boost — which begins a virtuous cycle of rising sales, profits, and tax revenues; shrinking unemployment, poverty, and deficits.  (I.e., the Clinton and Obama years.)

And if, yes, hamburger prices went up a bit and business-owner profits shrank a bit (at first) as the pendulum swung back a bit from record-wide inequality, that would be a price worth paying.  In the long run, the more robust middle class and higher economic growth rate would more than make up for any short-term hit to burger buyers and business owners.