This story caught my attention yesterday evening. From ABC 7 Chicago:

Authorities are looking into how marijuana worth $1 million was hidden in the trunks of brand new, Mexican-made Ford Fusions at a dealership in Ohio, according to Silverio Balzano, agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Youngstown office.

The cars were manufactured at the Ford plant in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, and were shipped by rail into a CSX yard in Lordstown, Ohio, Balzano said.

Now, investigators are trying to discover where along the supply line the marijuana was packed into the cars — and who failed to retrieve it.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops. I see no way this can have happened without some sort of conspiracy. The question will be how widely spread the conspiracy is.

If I were a top level manager sitting in Dearborn right about now I would have already dispatched an investigation team to Mexico.

Scott Galloway considers the signs we’re approaching a financial crisis. This one caught my eye

I spend more time thinking about softer metrics that, in my view, signal we’re about to get rocked. Some signals that feel so 99:

— Mediocrity + two years tech experience = six figures. Kids who can code and are two years out of school, who are mediocre, are making 100K+ in the market. What’s worse is they believe they’re worth it. If you can code, yay for you. But if you have no real hard skills or management ability, not recognizing you’re overpaid means you won’t have the funds to avoid your parents’ basement when shit gets real.

I think that must be highly localized both geographically and in terms of industry. I don’t see anything like that here except in the financial sector. I think that this is his most telling warning indicator:

A lot of articles explaining why “this time is different”

I think I see the events of the last ten years a little differently than Cullen Roche does:

My general theory on this era has been simple – we had a big consumer credit crash which left corporations as the strong hands in the economy leading this recovery to look a lot more like the corporate boom of the 90’s than anything we’ve seen in the last 50 years. Yes, I know – the past rhymes and doesn’t repeat, but there are a lot of similarities between now and the late 90’s.

I’d tell the story this way. The federal government’s response to the financial crisis of 2007 was almost entirely to prop up big companies. Big banks. Big automobile companies. There have been no antitrust actions or prosecutions of the CEOs of major businesses. All have received enormous subsidies, both positive and negative subsidies.

What in the world would one expect? Subsidizing big companies has given them the whip hand. We should be surprised at that?

Consider this paragraph from Michael Gonzalez’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on the rebranding of La Raza, the Hispanic advocacy group:

The nation’s “Hispanics” are undergoing a radical shift that most politicians are missing: A white majority is likely to persist in America. “Many children growing up today in mixed families are integrating into a still largely white mainstream society,” sociologist Richard Alba noted in American Prospect last year. These children are “likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it.”

The name La Raza—“the race” in Spanish—flies in the face of this reality. It is off-putting to many “Hispanics,” an artificial Census category comprising many razas. The organization’s CEO, Janet Murguia, admitted as much in a video announcing the name change: “We must make sure that our name and our organization evolves along with and remains relevant to our ever changing Hispanic community.”

which is exactly what I’ve been predicting for some time. The United States is likely to remain a majority white country for the foreseeable future. The definition of whiteness will change over time to accommodate that majority, just as it changed between 1820 and 1870 and again between 1900 and 1960. In the 19th century the Irish weren’t considered white; in the early 20th century neither Jews nor Italians were. There are still a few Anglo holdouts these days but for most Americans the definition of whiteness has changed. Political parties take note.

This snippet of Andy Kessler’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye:

The U.S. is falling behind. In 2014 England made computing a part of its national primary curriculum. Estonia had already started coding in its schools as early as first grade. The Netherlands, Belgium and Finland also have national programs.

Maybe the U.S. can start the ball rolling by requiring colleges and high schools to allow computer languages to count as foreign languages. A handful of high schools already teach the Java computer language using a free tool called BlueJ. Nonprofit Code.org exposes students to a visual programming language called Blockly. To compete in this dog-eat-dog world, America should offer Python and Ruby on Rails instead of French and Spanish.

Let’s start with natural languages. The average American high school student takes two years of a language other than English (generally Spanish). Of Americans who say they speak a foreign language well 7% say they learned it in school. 7%. The reality is that you can’t learn to speak any language fluently in 2 years and you’ll quickly lose anything you learned. In other words that Mandarin your primary school child is learning is probably a waste of time.

Now onwards to programming languages. IMO it takes about three years of full-time software development experience to become really fluent in any programming language. The second takes less time than the first, the third less tim than the second, etc. In other words the only high school kids that will become fluent in any programming language are those who take it up as a pastime. They’ll work obsessively at it and, honestly, that’s what it takes to achieve fluency.

The first version of Ruby came out about 11 years ago. The framework Rails a little after that. Usage of both is declining now.

The first version of Python came out about 25 years ago. It’s catching on now because of its use in artificial intelligence. It’s a fad. Will knowledge of Python be useful in five years? Ten years? Who knows?

IMO teaching kids either Ruby or Python is about as useful as teaching them Morse code. Unlike natural languages programming languages go in and out of fashion rapidly. There’s a simple reason for that. Programming languages tend to be closely associated with software development companies and software companies (like Microsoft) are in the planned obsolescence business.

What would really be useful is teaching kids problem solving using algorithms. That will never go out of fashion.

While I’m in an autobiographical frame of mind, I studied French in grade school from third through eighth grade as did my siblings. I’m the only one of us that emerged from the experience able to speak or read French. I studied Latin and Russian in high school and Russian and Chinese in college. I picked up a smattering of other foreign languages along the way.

I know several programming languages fluently including some like Fortran (required in college) that are mostly of historic interest now. IMO very few programmers these days know any programming language fluently.

I remain unconvinced by Robert Samuelson’s attempted refutation in his latest Washington Post column of Richard Reeves’s and David Brooks’s claim that the upper middle class is increasingly becoming a closed club that uses its income and attendant influence to maintain its position:

All this is self-perpetuating, Reeves says. Class structure is becoming frozen. Downward mobility from the top is limited. Upper-middle-class parents are obsessed with supporting their children, from helping with homework to teaching bike-riding. The story seems so compelling that it could become conventional wisdom. Parents are destiny. Just recently, David Brooks, the influential New York Times columnist, bought into most of Reeves’s theory.

“Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents,” he wrote. He also excoriated “the structural ways the well-educated rig the system” — mainly restrictive zoning and easier college admissions, including legacy preferences.

But the facts don’t fit the theory. Reeves defines the upper middle class as households with pretax income from $117,000 to $355,000, representing the richest 20 percent of Americans excluding the top 1 percent (whose status he considers a separate problem). It’s doubtful whether families at the bottom of this range feel rich. For example, a household with two teachers earning average salaries ($56,000 in 2013) would nearly make the cutoff. (Disclosure: Reeves acknowledges belonging to the upper middle class, as do I.)

By Reeves’s arithmetic, the upper middle class — again, a fifth of the population minus the top 1 percent — accounted for 39 percent of income gains from 1979 to 2013, only slightly lower than the 43 percent share of the bottom 80 percent. (The top 1 percent’s share was 18 percent.) This growing income gap is worrisome, because it implies dramatically different life experiences among Americans. The differences “can be seen in education, family structure, health and longevity,” writes Reeves.

But these undesirable trends aren’t caused by a rigid upper-middle-class oligarchy that’s hoarding opportunities for itself. Contrary to Reeves’s argument — but included in his book — is one study finding that among children born into the richest fifth, only 37 percent remained there as adults. Roughly two-thirds dropped out. How much more downward mobility does Reeves want? He doesn’t say.

The problem is that incomes are not evenly distributed among the top income quintile any more than they are among the population at large and what Mr. Samuelson is pointed out could be explained entirely by churn among the lower end of that top 20%. And that’s what I see.

I’ve mentioned my rather peculiar biography in the past. My dad’s family was upper middle class but my mom’s family was solidly of the working poor. I spent my first ten years in a tough working class neighborhood. My parents were struggling a bit. It had taken my dad ten years after law school to get a job as a lawyer—jobs as a lawyer could be tough to get during the Depression. When the law firm he worked for collapsed in scandal he set out to practice on his own and brought in a little extra money by teaching law. My mom was a schoolteacher.

When I was ten we moved to a decidedly upper middle class neighborhood: physicians, lawyers, owners of smallish businesses, executives of larger companies. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that we went from being the richest people in a poor neighborhood to being the poorest people in a rich neighborhood. That’s certainly the way my siblings saw it and they were much more ensconced in it than I was. The high school I attended was very diverse from a socio-economic viewpoint. There were students from very wealthy families, a few from upper middle class families, most were solidly middle class, and some were from working class or even working poor families. My siblings attended the local high school and most of their fellow students came from backgrounds much like theirs.

My wife and I remain upper middle class although with some struggle every now and again. Of my siblings only one is upper middle class—the others middle class although one of my siblings has struggled to remain middle class. Of my nieces and nephews I can be confident that those in health care or what are referred to as the “caring professions” will be upper middle class. Except for one that remainder are likely to remain in the middle class although that one is likely to struggle to remain middle class. As a family I’d say we’re downwardly mobile.

The model I’d suggest as comporting with the facts is a top 1% of income earners that is pretty stable. Very few children of the working poor go on to enter that rarified group and relatively few children of the rich go on to be genuinely poor. The top 10% of income earners are slightly less stable, the next decile less stable than that and so on.

Increasingly stratified patterns of housing and education and narrowing job opportunities will keep the peasants in their places.

I wanted to pass along the story of a woman who took the most awful, embarrassing, humiliating day of her life and turned it into something beautiful. From ABC 7 Chicago:

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana woman didn’t want her canceled $30,000 wedding to go to waste, so she threw a dinner party for the homeless.

A bus pulled up to the swanky event center on Saturday that Sarah Cummins had booked for the reception in Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis. About a dozen veterans from a local organization were among the guests who dined on bourbon-glazed meatballs, roasted garlic bruschetta and wedding cake.

Cummins told the Indianapolis Star that she and her fiance called off the wedding a week ago. She declined to give a reason, but she said they were left with a nonrefundable contract for the Ritz Charles in Carmel and a plated dinner for 170 guests.

“For me, it was an opportunity to let these people know they deserved to be at a place like this just as much as everyone else does,” Cummins said.

Cummins said she decided that rather than throw away the food she would bring some purpose to the event and contacted area homeless shelters. She cheerfully greeted and welcomed her guests when they arrived Saturday.

Several local businesses and residents donated suits, dresses and other items for the guests to wear.

Charlie Allen, who’s spent three months at a homeless mission, received a donated jacket.

“I didn’t have a sport coat,” he said, tugging gently at the lapels. “I think I look pretty nice in it.”

Like other guests, Allen said he was grateful for the invitation.

“For a lot of us, this is a good time to show us what we can have,” he said. “Or to remind us what we had.”

Three of Cummins’ seven bridesmaids, along with her mother and aunts, came to support her at the event. Guests also dined on chicken breast with artichokes and Chardonnay cream sauce and wedding cake.

What a decent thing to do. Good on her.

At the Boston Globe Thanassis Cambianis makes a point that I really believe in and that I’ve been making for some time around here. The real problem in the Middle EaSt isn’t DAESH or Al Qaeda. It’s weak states:

The collapse this month of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has been greeted with joy and relief in many quarters, especially among the millions of civilians who directly suffered the extremist group’s rule. Much of the predictable analysis has focused on long-term trends that will continue to trouble the world: the resonance of extremist jihadi messaging, the persistence of sectarian conflict, the difficulty of holding together disparate coalitions like the clumsy behemoth that ousted ISIS from its strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul.

But jihadis and sectarians are not, contrary to popular belief, the most important engines of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar groups. Nor are foreign spy services the primary author of these apocalyptic movements — as many around the world wrongly believe.

No, the most critical factor feeding jihadi movements is the collapse of effective central governments — a trend in which the West, especially the United States, has been complicit.

Islam is a major contributing factor to that weakness. If you take its teaching on the Ummah and the caliphate seriously no government apart from the caliphate is legitimate. But the United States is a major contributing factor, too.

For decades we’ve been allergic to strong states (except here). Despite President Trump’s complaints about our European allies not bearing their share of the burden for their own defense, we’d be horrified if they did. When they say “leadership” in the context of the U. S.’s role on the world stage too many of our elite mean “hegemony”. When other countries whether Russia or China or North Korea or even Germany or the United Kingdom pursue their own interests we react with alarm.

We’ve knocked down two of the strongest states in the Middle East (Iraq and Libya) and are doing our darnedest short of sending large masses of troops to knock down more. In that light Somalia and Sudan don’t point out the failures of U. S. policy. They’re its success stories.

As should surprise no one all but one of the states (New Mexico) in CNBC’s list of worst states to live in are Red States:

10. Kentucky

9. (tie) New Mexico

9. (tie) Tennessee

7. Mississippi

6. Indiana

5. Missouri

4. Arkansas

3. Oklahoma

2. Louisiana

1. Alabama

Five of the best overall states for business according to CNBC’s reckoning are also Red States, including one (Tennessee) on the live of worst states in which to live.