Jon McNeill, Lyft’s Chief Operating Officer, has unexpectedly left the company, according to Bloomberg.
Lyft is having so much trouble retaining a COO that the company has said it won’t hire a replacement for McNeill. The company has struggled to keep top lieutenants in past years, with McNeill’s predecessor, former Amazon executive Rex Tibbens, lasting less than three years.
Prior to working at Lyft, McNeill spent two and half years working at Tesla, directly under Elon Musk. His title at Tesla was president of global sales and service. Upon his hiring at Lyft, the company touted his experience and welcomed him to the “Lyft family”. Since then, of course, the company has gone public and seen its stock trade about 10% lower than its IPO price.
Lyft founders Logan Green and John Zimmer said in a email that McNeill’s role and responsibilities will be reassigned to other employees, while crediting him with establishing new businesses, including car repair shops for Lyft drivers.
The e-mail stated: “As JMac moves on to his next chapter, we wish him the very best.”
Shares of Lyft fell nearly 4% in mid-day Monday trading on the news, before paring their losses.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2K0qRKG Tyler Durden
“American exceptionalism has led to a country that is exceptionally un-self-aware.” – Peter Thiel
The economic contraction ahead will put this borderline psychotic country through some interesting ch-ch-ch-changes. Mr. Trump now fully owns the Potemkin status quo of record stock markets poised against a withering rot of human capital at the core of an industrial society in sunset mode. Leadership at every corner of American life – politics, business, media – expects an ever-higher tech magical updraft of fortune from an increasingly holographic economy of mere fugitive appearances in which everybody can get more of something for nothing. The disappointment over how all this works out will be epic.
Globalism is wobbling badly. It was never what it was cracked up to be: a permanent new plateau of exquisitely-tuned international economic cooperation engineered to perfection. It was just a set of provisional relations based on transient advantage. As it turned out, every move that advantaged US-based corporations blew back ferociously on the American public and the long-term integrity of the social order. Sinister as it seems, the process was simply emergent: a self-organizing evolution of forces previously set in motion. And, like a lot of things in history, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Off-shoring” US industry jacked up corporate profits while it decimated working class livelihoods. In return, that large demographic got “bargain shopping” at Walmart, a life of ever-upward revolving debt, and dead downtowns. The country got gigantic trade deficits and government debt loads. In effect, globalism compelled America to borrow as much as possible from the future to keep running things the way they were set up to run. Now, there is just suspicion that we’ve reached the limits of borrowing. Soon it will be a fact and that fact will upend everything we’ve been doing.
You can see how this is playing out in politics, especially the proposed government-enforced redistribution of whatever wealth is supposed to be left. Of course, much of that wealth is a figment, represented in abstract financial instruments pegged to “money” that may have a lot less value than presumed. The Democratic Party detects opportunity in the gross imbalances of this notional capital and so they are promising every conceivable form of grift to voters from a guaranteed basic income and free medical care and college education to reparations for the descendants of slaves.
They certainly might win the 2020 election on the basis of that proffer, but good luck scaring up the actual financial mojo to make it happen without destroying whatever value remains in the US dollar. The predicament may be aggravated by foreign capital seeking refuge in US financial markets as the banking systems in China and Euroland unwind, giving politicians the false impression that other people’s money belongs to Americans. And anyway, what will these foreigners actually be investing in here? Collateralized loan obligations based on seven-year used-car payment schemes?
The American Left just can’t grok the fact that we missed the window of opportunity for setting up a national health system. That was a mid-twentieth century thang: cheap oil and industrial growth. Please note: it was the Democratic Party under Mr. Obama that turned the college loan industry (and Higher Ed with it) into the appalling racket it’s become, because it fit the template of a society pretending to prosper by racking up debt. That demographic of debtors will be seeking magical debt relief. If they get it, it will be at the expense of the government that took on the guaranteed backing of all that debt, now well over a trillion dollars.
Industrial growth is over, and with it the expectation that all the old debts can be paid back. A few economic commentators are predicting “stag-flation.” We’d be lucky if that’s all it turned out to be. But we’re unlikely to get a re-play of the 1970s. That was an era of geo-financial disturbance that resolved for a while with new oil from Alaska and the North Sea. That’s not going to happen again this time. Stag-flation was just a matter of going nowhere for a decade. The contraction ahead will be brutal, not going nowhere but rather going down hard to a lower and harsher standard of living.
It’s also hard to calculate how disturbing and disruptive the prosecution of the RussiaGate perps will be. If the Democratic Party is acting batshit crazy about it now after the Mueller testimony fiasco, how will they react when dozens of their partisans are marched into court to face charges of sedition. That ugly business looks on-track to collide with the coming financial distress. The result will be much more severe political turbulence than the thinking class expects.
It’s easy to imagine circumstances in which normal institutions get suspended and the old major parties are superseded by “emergency” seizures of power by other parties as yet unknown.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZjOh2O Tyler Durden
One of the many virtues of markets is their ability to turn seemingly intractable conflicts into mutually beneficial trades. For evidence, look no further than a real estate deal in New York City that has managed to make peace between a housing developer and some would-be NIMBYs.
Last week, The New York Timespublished a story about the residents of a 12-story loft building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood who, faced with the prospect of a new condo building that would block their view of the Empire State Building, decided to bargain rather than litigate.
The building’s inhabitants offered to buy the air rights from their neighborhood developer for $11 million. Residents on the upper floors paid up to $1 million, people on the lower floors paid less, and those on the bottom floor paid nothing at all. People who didn’t have the cash to pay their full share relied on loans from their neighbors.
In return, developer Gary Barnett ceded his right to build anything other than a three- or four-story structure on his property.
“It’s not common,” Barnett told the Times. “Most of the time, they sue you and try and stop you somehow. These people stepped up to the plate and paid market value for the building rights.”
It’s true that conflicts over new developments are rarely worked out so harmoniously. Often, view-conscious property owners resort to legal or administrative action in order to either stop an unwanted project from going forward or delay things long enough to force a developer into making concessions.
One reason for this is that it’s often much cheaper to weaponize the planning process and the legal system than to work out a voluntary agreement. The stricter a city’s land-use regulations and the more discretion its planning process gives bureaucrats, the more appealing the former option becomes.
In San Francisco, for example, the planning process heavily favors community input over property rights, and planning officials have a lot of power to layer conditions on new developments beyond the city’s already exacting zoning code requires. In addition, California environmental laws make it possible to slow things down with administrative appeals and lawsuits that can take months, if not years, to recolve. With this setup, it’s no surprise that NIMBYs there rely on courts and bureaucracies rather than negotiating like the Chelsea residents.
Reason has covered a number of cases of NIMBY strong-arming in San Francisco, including when a totally zone-compliant single-family home was delayed for more than a year because neighbors resented the loss of a garden that the new house would replace. There have also been multiple cases where apartment projects were delayed because the new buildings would cast shadows.
In each case, project opponents could have tried to buy the land the offending project was to be built on. Or, like the Chelsea residents, they could have offered the developer cash compensation to build a smaller building that would cast fewer shadows.
One benefit of market arrangements like the one described in the Times story is that people have to actually put a price on these competing uses. The relative costs and benefits of building new housing over preserving a great view can be hashed out, and a mutually beneficial outcome can be reached. But when land use regulations stop these normal market mechanisms from functioning, competing interests are funneled into bureaucratic systems where the process is driven by politics and decisions have clear winners and losers. The result is an incessant conflict.
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Following China’s crude imports from Iran plunging this summer, sinking almost 60% in June compared to a year earlier – which corresponded to Washington shutting down the waiver program in May – leaders in Tehran are urging China to buy more Iranian oil.
China’s crude shipments from Iran totaled 855,638 tons last month, which averages to 208,205 barrels per day (bpd), compared with 254,016 bpd in May, according figures from the General Administration of Customs, cited in a recent Reuters report.
Iran’s Vice President Jahangiri made the appeal to Beijing and “friendly” countries to up their Iranian crude purchases in statements Monday. “Even though we are aware that friendly countries such as China are facing some restrictions, we expect them to be more active in buying Iranian oil,” Jahangiri reportedly told visiting senior Chinese diplomat Song Tao.
Image via Asia News
He said this while also on Monday issuing a statement saying Iran stood ready to “confront” American aggression in the region and that multilateralism must be upheld.
“The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to protect multilateralism and confront American hegemony,”Jahangiri said, according to the IRIB news agency.
He added that Iran’s recent move to breach uranium enrichment caps could be reversed should other parties return to upholding their side of the nuclear agreement.
Simultaneously, China’s oil purchases from Iran’s rival Saudi Arabia have soared to record volume, totaling 1.89 million barrels a day last month, according to numbers cited in Bloomberg.
“Shipments from the OPEC producer made up almost a fifth of its total oil purchases in June and was 64% higher than the previous month,” while at the same time “Imports from Iran fell to the lowest since May 2010,” according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, in a crucial development related to Iran’s trying to weather the severe US-led sanctions storm, a long anticipated plan for gasoline export has begun with an inaugural shipment to neighboring Afghanistan.
The Fars news agency said on Monday that a first consignment of export gasoline will start trading in Iran’s Energy Exchange (IRENEX) later this week.
It said some 10,000 tons of gasoline with octane number of 91 will be available for sale to Afghanistan through IRENEX on Wednesday, adding that the trade will take place both in the Iranian rial and in major international currencies.
Iran’s refining capacity has grown significantly over the past years as the country slashed fuel imports while also coping with increased domestic demand.
Officials have expressed hope that Iraq along with Afghanistan, as well as Caspian Sea countries would become main destinations for gasoline export.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GAKQxb Tyler Durden
I recently wrote about the “F.I.R.E.” movement and how it is a byproduct of late-stage bull market cycle. It isn’t just the “can’t lose” ideas which are symptomatic of bullish cycles, but also the actual activities of investors as well. Not surprisingly, the deviation of growth over value has become one of the largest in history.
This divergence of the “performance chase” should be a reminder of Benjamin Graham’s immortal warning:
“The investor’s chief problem, and even his worst enemy, is likely to be himself.”
With valuations elevated, prices at record highs, and the current bull market the longest in U.S. history, it seems like a good time to review the 5-most dangerous psychological biases of investing.
The 5 Most Dangerous Biases
Every year Dalbar releases their annual “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior” study which continues to show just how poorly investors perform relative to market benchmarks over time. More importantly, they discuss many of the reasons for that underperformance which are all directly attributable to your brain.
From Dalbar’s 2018 study:
“In 2018 the average investor underperformed the S&P 500 in both good times and bad, lagging behind the S&P by more than 100 basis points in two different months.”
Cognitive biases are a curse to portfolio management as they impair our ability to remain emotionally disconnected from our money. As history all too clearly shows, investors always do the “opposite” of what they should when it comes to investing their own money.
Here are the top-5 of the most insidious biases investors are falling into RIGHT NOW!
1) Confirmation Bias
As individuals, we tend to seek out information that conforms to our current beliefs. If one believes that the stock market is going to rise, they tend only to seek out news and information that supports that position. This confirmation bias is a primary driver of the psychological investing cycle of individuals as shown below. I discussed this just recently in why “Media Headlines Will Lead You To Ruin.”
As individuals, we want “affirmation” our current thought processes are correct. As human beings, we hate to be told we are wrong, so we tend to seek out sources which tell us we are “right.”
Currently, individual investors are “fully” back in the market despite a fairly decent bruising in 2018. Historically, this has not turned out well for individuals, but given that “optimism sells,” it is not surprising to see the majority of the mainstream meeting touting a continuation of the bull market.
This is why it is always important to consider both sides of every debate equally and analyze the data accordingly. Being right and making money are not mutually exclusive.
2) Gambler’s Fallacy
The “Gambler’s Fallacy” is one of the bigger issues faced by individuals when investing. As emotionally driven human beings, we tend to put a tremendous amount of weight on previous events believing that future outcomes will somehow be the same.
The bias is clearly addressed at the bottom of every piece of financial literature.
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
However, despite that statement being plastered everywhere in the financial universe, individuals consistently dismiss the warning and focus on past returns expecting similar results in the future.
This is one of the key issues that affect an investor’s long-term returns. Performance chasing has a high propensity to fail, continually causing investors to jump from one late cycle strategy to the next. This is shown in the periodic table of returns below. “Hot hands” only tend to last on average 2-3 years before going “cold.”
I traced out the returns of large capitalization stocks (S&P 500) and U.S. Fixed Income (Barclay’s Aggregate Bond Index) for illustrative purposes. Importantly, you should notice that whatever is at the top of the list in some years tends to fall to the bottom in subsequent years.“Performance chasing” is a major detraction from investor’s long-term investment returns.
Currently, money is chasing Technology, Discretionary, and Communications, with Energy, Healthcare, and Bonds lagging. From a contrarian viewpoint, with “Value” dramatically underperforming “Growth” at this juncture of the investment cycle, there may be a generational opportunity soon approaching.
3) Probability Neglect
When it comes to “risk-taking” there are two ways to assess the potential outcome. There are “possibilities” and “probabilities.”As individuals, we tend to lean toward what is possible such as playing the “lottery.”
The statistical probabilities of winning the lottery are astronomical. In fact, you are more likely to die on the way to purchase the ticket than actually winning the lottery. However, it is the “possibility” of instant wealth that makes the lottery such a successful “tax on poor people.”
As humans, we tend to neglect the “probabilities,” or rather the statistical measures of “risk,” undertaken with any given investment, in exchange for the “possibility” of gaining wealth. Our bias is to “chase”stocks, or markets, which already have large gains as it is “possible” they could move higher. However, the “probability” is that a corrective action will likely occur first.
With markets currently well deviated above long-term historical means, and valuations elevated, the possibility is greatly outweighed by the probability of a mean-reverting event first. The following chart is derived from Dr. Robert Shiller’s inflation-adjusted price data and is plotted on a QUARTERLY basis. From that quarterly data is calculated:
The 12-period (3-year) Relative Strength Index (RSI),
Bollinger Bands (2 and 3 standard deviations of the 3-year average),
CAPE Ratio, and;
The percentage deviation above and below the 3-year moving average.
The vertical RED lines denote points where all measures have aligned
Over the next several weeks, or even months, the markets could certainly extend the current deviations from long-term mean even further drive by the psychology of the “herd.”But such is the nature of every bull market peak, and bubble, throughout history as the seeming impervious advance lures the last of the stock market “holdouts” back into the markets.
Probability neglect is another major component to why investors consistently “buy high and sell low.”
4) Herd Bias
Though we are often unconscious of the action, humans tend to “go with the crowd.” Much of this behavior relates back to “confirmation” of our decisions, but also the need for acceptance. The thought process is rooted in the belief that if “everyone else” is doing something, then if I want to be accepted, I need to do it too.
“If all your friends jump off a cliff, are you going to do it too?” – said by every Mother in history.
In life, “conforming” to the norm is socially accepted and in many ways expected. However, in the financial markets the “herding” behavior is what drives market excesses during advances and declines.
As noted above, the “momentum chase” currently is good example of “herding” behavior. As Michael Lebowitz noted recently:
“The graph below charts ten year annualized total returns (dividends included) for value stocks versus growth stocks. The most recent data indicates value stocks have underperformed growth stocks by 2.86% on average in each of the last ten years.”
“There have only been eight ten-year periods over the last 90 years (total of 90 ten-year periods) when value stocks underperformed growth stocks. Two of these occurred during the Great Depression and one spanned the 1990s leading into the Tech bust of 2001. The other five are recent, representing the years 2014 through 2018.
When the cycle turns, we have little doubt the value-growth relationship will revert. In such a case value would outperform growth by nearly 30% in just two years. Anything beyond the average would increase the outperformance even more.”
Moving against the “herd” is where investors have generated the most profits over the long term. The difficulty for most individuals, unfortunately, is knowing when to “bet” against the stampede.
5) Recency Bias
Recency bias occurs when people more prominently recall, and extrapolate, recent events and believe that the same will continue indefinitely into the future. This phenomenon frequently occurs in with investing. Humans have short memories in general, but memories are especially short when it comes to investing cycles.
As Morningstar once penned:
“During a bull market, people tend to forget about bear markets. As far as human recent memory is concerned, the market should keep going up since it has been going up recently. Investors therefore keep buying stocks, feeling good about their prospects. Investors thereby increase risk taking and may not think about diversification or portfolio management prudence. Then a bear market hits, and rather than be prepared for it with shock absorbers in their portfolios, investors instead suffer a massive drop in their net worths and may sell out of stocks when the market is low.Selling low is, of course, not a good long-term investing strategy.”
This bias in action looks a lot like the chart below.
During bull markets, investors believe that markets can only go up – so “buy the dip” becomes a “can’t lose” investment strategy. This bias also works in reverse during bear markets. Investors become convinced the market will only go lower which eventually leads them to “panic selling” the lows.
Recency bias is the primary driver behind the “Buy High/Sell Low” syndrome.
Everyone’s A Genius
The last point brings me to something Michael Sincere once penned:
“At market tops, it is common to see what I call the ‘high-five effect’ — that is, investors giving high-fives to each other because they are making so much paper money. It is happening now. I am also suspicious when amateurs come out of the woodwork to insult other investors.”
Michael’s point is very apropos, particularly today, it’s currently “high-fives and pats on the back.”
The market’s ability to seemingly recover from every setback, and to ignore fundamental issues, has led investors to feel “bulletproof” as investment success breeds overconfidence.
The reality is that strongly rising asset prices, particularly when driven by emotional exuberance, “hides” investment mistakes in the short term. Poor, or deteriorating, fundamentals, excessive valuations, and/or rising credit risk is often ignored as prices increase. Unfortunately, it is only after the damage is done the realization of those “risks” occurs.
For investors, it is crucially important to understand that markets run in full cycles (up and down). While the bullish “up” cycle lasts twice as long as the bearish “down” cycle, the majority of the previous gainsare repeatedly destroyed.
The damage to investors is not a result of lagging markets as they rise, but in capturing the inevitable reversion. This is something I discussed in “Bulls And Bears Are Both Broken Clocks:”
“In the end, it does not matter IF you are ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish.’ The reality is that both ‘bulls’ and ‘bears’ are owned by the ‘broken clock’ syndrome during the full-market cycle. However, what is grossly important in achieving long-term investment success is not necessarily being ‘right’ during the first half of the cycle, but by not being ‘wrong’ during the second half.”
We are only human, and despite the best of our intentions, it is nearly impossible for an individual to be devoid of the emotional biases which inevitably leads to poor decision making over time. This is why all great investors have strict investment disciplines they follow to reduce the impact of their emotions.
At market peaks – everyone’s a “Genius.”
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A Pennsylvania college student is suing Harrisburg police and Dauphin County correctional officers following a severe and unprovoked beating behind bars.
Leticia C. Chavez-Freed, who is representing Jarrett Leaman, 24, shared a copy of the lawsuit with Reason. According to the suit, Leaman and his friends were drinking at bars around town on June 29. Leaman was arrested at the end of the night for public drunkeness, as he was “visibly intoxicated and not communicative.”
He was taken into custody without incident. Once he was inside the Dauphin County Judicial Center’s booking facility, however, police and guards felt the impaired prisoner was moving too slowly. The suit says he was then “pummeled” on the cement ground. Further abuse reportedly followed, including a 250-pound officer putting his knees on Leaman’s neck and back for more than two minutes, an officer punching Leaman’s upper body, and officers punching him while his hands were handcuffed behind his back. One officer allegedly took a picture of Leaman’s injuries “as if he were photographing a prized catch.”
According to the lawsuit, Leaman stayed in a state of submission and did not resist at any point. After the beating, he was reportedly outfitted with a spit mask to hide his injuries from cameras.
The suit also says the medical attention administered to Leaman was less than satisfactory. At one point, a nurse allegedly entered Leaman’s cell, looked at his face without removing the spit mask, and then exited. During another observation, a nurse placed the spit mask in his mouth while observing his swollen eye.
Leaman was released before 5:30 the next morning, and he then went to a hospital. Among his confirmed injuries was a fractured orbital bone.
Leaman filed his suit last week in the U.S. Middle Pennsylvania District Court. It accuses the city, the county, the police department, the facility, and several individual officers of violating Leaman’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The suit seeks compensation for damages, plus attorney fees and other forms of relief.
“The unpunished violence at the hands of those who have an absolute duty to protect pretrial detainees is a serious crime. Federal law was broken, as was Pennsylvania state law,” Chavez-Freed said in a statement. “If it were my client who behaved as they had, he would be on his way to prison.”
Neither the Harrisburg Police Department nor the commissioner’s office over the Dauphin County Judicial Center Booking Facility Prison responded immediately to requests for comment.
This is the same center where 21-year-old Ty’rique Riley suffered fatal injuries earlier this month. Riley’s family learned the prison was on life support in an intensive care unit when he missed a preliminary hearing. They had not been notified before then of his hospitalization, and they still don’t know the nature of the incident that led to it. Riley died of his injuries on July 1.
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A Pennsylvania college student is suing Harrisburg police and Dauphin County correctional officers following a severe and unprovoked beating behind bars.
Leticia C. Chavez-Freed, who is representing Jarrett Leaman, 24, shared a copy of the lawsuit with Reason. According to the suit, Leaman and his friends were drinking at bars around town on June 29. Leaman was arrested at the end of the night for public drunkeness, as he was “visibly intoxicated and not communicative.”
He was taken into custody without incident. Once he was inside the Dauphin County Judicial Center’s booking facility, however, police and guards felt the impaired prisoner was moving too slowly. The suit says he was then “pummeled” on the cement ground. Further abuse reportedly followed, including a 250-pound officer putting his knees on Leaman’s neck and back for more than two minutes, an officer punching Leaman’s upper body, and officers punching him while his hands were handcuffed behind his back. One officer allegedly took a picture of Leaman’s injuries “as if he were photographing a prized catch.”
According to the lawsuit, Leaman stayed in a state of submission and did not resist at any point. After the beating, he was reportedly outfitted with a spit mask to hide his injuries from cameras.
The suit also says the medical attention administered to Leaman was less than satisfactory. At one point, a nurse allegedly entered Leaman’s cell, looked at his face without removing the spit mask, and then exited. During another observation, a nurse placed the spit mask in his mouth while observing his swollen eye.
Leaman was released before 5:30 the next morning, and he then went to a hospital. Among his confirmed injuries was a fractured orbital bone.
Leaman filed his suit last week in the U.S. Middle Pennsylvania District Court. It accuses the city, the county, the police department, the facility, and several individual officers of violating Leaman’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The suit seeks compensation for damages, plus attorney fees and other forms of relief.
“The unpunished violence at the hands of those who have an absolute duty to protect pretrial detainees is a serious crime. Federal law was broken, as was Pennsylvania state law,” Chavez-Freed said in a statement. “If it were my client who behaved as they had, he would be on his way to prison.”
Neither the Harrisburg Police Department nor the commissioner’s office over the Dauphin County Judicial Center Booking Facility Prison responded immediately to requests for comment.
This is the same center where 21-year-old Ty’rique Riley suffered fatal injuries earlier this month. Riley’s family learned the prison was on life support in an intensive care unit when he missed a preliminary hearing. They had not been notified before then of his hospitalization, and they still don’t know the nature of the incident that led to it. Riley died of his injuries on July 1.
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A presidential candidate hopes to break out from the back of the pack and into America’s hearts by promising to force America’s high school graduates to spend a year working for the government, whether they want to or not.
John Delaney has made it into the Democratic Primary debates this week, despite polling between 0 and 1 percent recently and looking and sounding like a character invented by Will Ferrell. Over the weekend he attempted to grab some attention by rolling out a plan for mandatory national service:
It's time to bring the country together, to restore our sense of shared purpose and rebuild a common and inclusive national destiny. That's why we need mandatory national service. pic.twitter.com/f4d6zjshEc
Under his plan, he explains on his site, “all Americans would be required to serve their country for at least one year, with an option to serve for two. This requirement would apply to everyone upon turning 18, no exceptions.”
What if they haven’t yet graduated high school? Is there an exception for that? It would seem like there would have to be. Does Delaney even grasp that birthdays don’t always line up with high school graduations?
But the stupidity doesn’t stop with the “no exceptions.” The whole program is dumb. He says that participants will be paid and will get two free years at a public college or university. If they serve two years, they’ll get three free years of college.
These new adults will have four options. They can join the military; they can join a new community service organization, similar to AmeriCorps, that will tutor disadvantaged children or whatever social programs the government decides to emphasize; they can take on a proposed “infrastructure apprenticeship” that would use public/private partnerships to do things like improving parks and upgrading federal buildings; or they can join a new Climate Corps, which “would assist in clean energy projects, including solar installation, improving building efficiency, developing community gardens, and increasing awareness about sustainable practices.”
Remarkably, Delaney insists that forcing 18-year-olds to serve government agencies and contractors against their will would “restore our sense of shared purpose and a common and inclusive national destiny.”
But we’re Americans. We shouldn’t have a “sense of shared purpose” and we don’t have a common “national destiny,” whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean. Part of being an American is claiming the right to choose your own adventure and to draw your own map of your future.
This is flat-out forced labor, and paying the laborers doesn’t change the fact that you are stealing a year of young people’s lives. It’s comically absurd to think that compelling them to do whatever tasks are currently on officials’ agendas is going to unify them in any way. Just the assumption that these projects match the values of all or even most Americans is itself galling. Forcing an entire younger generation to do an oler generation’s bidding will not bring a “sense of shared purpose,” any more than drafting them to fight in Vietnam did.
The vast majority of these kids have had 12 years of mandated government schooling. If that has failed to create a sense of unity among them, another year of paving streets and digging gardens isn’t going to do it.
And it shouldn’t. The American government belongs to the citizens, not the other way around. America’s 18-year-olds are not Delaney’s property to decide how to best deploy across the country.
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Small liberal arts colleges in the U.S. simply refuse to die, despite a torrent of bad news about the U.S. higher education marketplace and the increasing uselessness of their degrees.
Bennington College in Vermont is one such example, according to Bloomberg. It sports famous alumni like Donna Tartt and
Bret Easton Ellis and charges $73,000 per year for admission. Located at the foot of Vermont’s green mountains, it nearly went out of business in the 1990’s and was still under duress at the beginning of this decade.
But the school – and its 700 undergraduates – have hung on. It’s a microcosm of how these types of schools continue to defy the odds nationwide. Massachusetts’ Hampshire College was another institution known for its artisiness than has somehow still hung on.
David Bergeron, a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education who specialized in higher education said:
“They’ve survived because they’ve been able to exploit what they’re good at, and that has enabled them to continue to attract students and retain faculty. The threat of closure has brought a new level of energy.”
The environment of pressure on these colleges has been helped along by the $1.6 trillion in student loans outstanding, discouraging many from even attending colleges at all. The hot-button issue is surely going to be center stage for the 2020 Presidential race and the number of high school graduates is also declining, especially in the Northeast and Midwest.
Meanwhile, immigration restrictions have slowed down the supply of tuition paying students from places like China. Last year, about 33% of colleges saw a decline in revenue from tuition, up 15% from five years ago. The Council of Independent Colleges now estimates that 2% of its roughly 650 members are “struggling financially.” About 12 of these colleges have closed or merged in the last 4 years, including Vermont’s Marlboro College and the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, who have agreed to merge.
But the U.S. Department of Education says there is about 750 colleges with 1,000 or fewer students, compared with about 790 a decade ago, which is hardly a major falloff. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen had predicted that half of all U.S. colleges would go bankrupt in 15 years back in 2013, when online colleges were starting to take off.
Sweet Briar College
Colleges such as Williams and Amherst, a selective liberal arts school, still rank among the country’s most sought out education destinations and wealthiest institutions relative to size. But again, even colleges like Virginia’s Sweet Briar College, which has been under financial stress, have found a way to keep operating. In 2015, this college announced it was shutting down and its alumnae, who hired a law firm to prevent the plan, raised $30 million to save the school.
After a restructuring, the school cut its tuition nearly in half, to $21,000 and reduced majors to 18, from 40, and emphasized programs in science, technology and math. It has balanced its budget and raised $64 million since then. Enrollment is expected to grow this fall by 20%. They’re even come up with some “creative” revenue streams: “raising bees, crops and perhaps
later livestock, drawing on its 3,200 acres that were once a working farm.”
Nathan Kluger, director of agricultural enterprise said: “We’re driving interest, driving agriculture, driving an experience, which is really selling tuition dollars.”
Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts looked like it could be the most recent college casualty. It announced that it might not enroll freshman and that it was laying off 24 staffers. But alumni, including Ken Burns, are busy raising money for the school.
Bennington College
Interim President Ken Rosenthal said:
“We have to look in places for students that we may not have looked before. We’ll see where our alumni are living and go there and get their help to try to take the message of Hampshire College into their communities.”
Hampshire is now expecting to enroll 600 to 700 students this year and is saving money allowing students to take classes at neighboring schools. The college has hired 35 year old Mariko Silver, who helped turn around Bennington College in 2013. After Silver’s onboarding, the college saw its endowment triple to $51 million and it saw applications rise 20%.
Michael Hecht, who worked as the accountant to influential painter and Bennington alumna Helen Frankenthaler, also helped. He stated: “We’re being aware and taking advantage of opportunities that are out there. It was all there. We’re really connecting the dots.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32YG4Dl Tyler Durden
A presidential candidate hopes to break out from the back of the pack and into America’s hearts by promising to force America’s high school graduates to spend a year working for the government, whether they want to or not.
John Delaney has made it into the Democratic Primary debates this week, despite polling between 0 and 1 percent recently and looking and sounding like a character invented by Will Ferrell. Over the weekend he attempted to grab some attention by rolling out a plan for mandatory national service:
It's time to bring the country together, to restore our sense of shared purpose and rebuild a common and inclusive national destiny. That's why we need mandatory national service. pic.twitter.com/f4d6zjshEc
Under his plan, he explains on his site, “all Americans would be required to serve their country for at least one year, with an option to serve for two. This requirement would apply to everyone upon turning 18, no exceptions.”
What if they haven’t yet graduated high school? Is there an exception for that? It would seem like there would have to be. Does Delaney even grasp that birthdays don’t always line up with high school graduations?
But the stupidity doesn’t stop with the “no exceptions.” The whole program is dumb. He says that participants will be paid and will get two free years at a public college or university. If they serve two years, they’ll get three free years of college.
These new adults will have four options. They can join the military; they can join a new community service organization, similar to AmeriCorps, that will tutor disadvantaged children or whatever social programs the government decides to emphasize; they can take on a proposed “infrastructure apprenticeship” that would use public/private partnerships to do things like improving parks and upgrading federal buildings; or they can join a new Climate Corps, which “would assist in clean energy projects, including solar installation, improving building efficiency, developing community gardens, and increasing awareness about sustainable practices.”
Remarkably, Delaney insists that forcing 18-year-olds to serve government agencies and contractors against their will would “restore our sense of shared purpose and a common and inclusive national destiny.”
But we’re Americans. We shouldn’t have a “sense of shared purpose” and we don’t have a common “national destiny,” whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean. Part of being an American is claiming the right to choose your own adventure and to draw your own map of your future.
This is flat-out forced labor, and paying the laborers doesn’t change the fact that you are stealing a year of young people’s lives. It’s comically absurd to think that compelling them to do whatever tasks are currently on officials’ agendas is going to unify them in any way. Just the assumption that these projects match the values of all or even most Americans is itself galling. Forcing an entire younger generation to do an oler generation’s bidding will not bring a “sense of shared purpose,” any more than drafting them to fight in Vietnam did.
The vast majority of these kids have had 12 years of mandated government schooling. If that has failed to create a sense of unity among them, another year of paving streets and digging gardens isn’t going to do it.
And it shouldn’t. The American government belongs to the citizens, not the other way around. America’s 18-year-olds are not Delaney’s property to decide how to best deploy across the country.
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