Ha Ha Not So Funny

I have a friend who replies to my texts with her own humorless Ha Code.

A single “ha” conveys zero joviality. It’s basically a put-down. I write: “You really gobbled up that second dessert,” and she replies, “ha.” A double ha—“haha”—makes it seem as if she’s at least mildly amused, but she’s not. When she gets to triples and quads—“Hahahaha”—we’re into heavy sarcasm.

“Haha” and its keyboard counterparts shouldn’t be mistaken as substitutes for actual laughter. Ha Code is as empty of humor as “LOL”—which is the last thing you would say or write if you actually found yourself laughing out loud.

And what about “:)”? That’s at least a smile, right? Not really. It functions as a plea for sympathetic understanding of what might be an overly harsh communiqué. Pre-digital, when someone disagrees they used to say the meanest things to me, preceded by the phrase, “No offense, but . . .” Now, they just puts thoughts in an email with :) at the end.

Genuine laughter can’t really be written out, just as you can’t spell the sound of a sneeze, which is why writers settle for “achoo.” You could try “ah, ha,” but that’s an announcement of discovery, best delivered emphatically: “Aha!”

Is our current lifestyle slowly sapping our sense of humor? Or at least our likelihood of having a hearty, endorphin-releasing belly laugh? I picture sad souls typing “hahaha” or “LOL” while sitting alone in office cubicles, or in dreary dorm rooms, or surrounded by solemn strangers on the subway.

Life comes with its own laugh track. All you have to do is tap into it rather than type into it.

Laughter is contagious, which is why smart promoters hire a few good laughers to sit in the audience to get things rolling. It’s why TV producers use laugh tracks—“sweetening,” as it’s known—signaling viewers to stop texting long enough to laugh.

I don’t have research to back me up, but I’m convinced that the millions of people now streaming movies at home are laughing a lot less than folks in theaters.

I used to think the only people incapable of laughing out loud were TV network executives and enrollment managers. Many times I bet they sit in a room as they screened the funniest material, and they would not so much as grin. The best you’ll get from a TV exec when the lights come up is a vacant expression, an almost imperceptible elevating of one eyebrow, and the words, delivered in a monotone, “That’s funny. That’s really funny.”

I guess we all becoming TV execs or enrollment managers? :(

THE LATEST FROM SHUTDOWNVILLE - The Senate will vote at noon Monday on a bill to reopen the government through Feb. 8, though passage is not assured. Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are continuing to negotiate on a deal to reopen the government and begin legislative work on protecting some young immigrants, but Schumer said 'we have yet to reach a path forward.' ...

Senators took a proposal to ... McConnell and ... Schumer after a 90-minute meeting Sunday afternoon. It would reopen the government through Feb. 8 and have McConnell commit on the Senate floor to holding an immigration vote before that date. McConnell and Schumer then met privately for more than 30 minutes.

Each week of shutdown would reduce real GDP growth in Q1 by 0.2pp, qoq annualized. The effects would be reversed the next quarter however. Shutdowns have also tended to have modest effects on financial markets.

Most of the notable shutdowns over the last few decades coincided with debt limit deadlines. Even so, those led to only modest and temporary declines in equities and even smaller effects in Treasury yields and the dollar. With the debt limit deadline farther away, we would expect a muted initial reaction in financial markets to a shutdown.

COLLEGE CHRONICLES – The following piece is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, January 12, 2018 –

“Sometimes it takes the innocence of a child to point out the obvious, but occasionally the anger of an academic will do. This past week Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, exclaimed that American higher education is drowning in BS. "The manure has piled up so deep," he wrote, "that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity."

Mr. Smith proceeded to list more than 20 distinct varieties of BS — academic jargon, the obsession with metrics, and the ascendant "culture of offense," to name a few — that he says are hurting higher ed and corroding society.

California State University turned away more qualified applicants than ever last year — 1 in 10 students, or 31,000 people — even though the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education says they should be admitted.

Now, as CSU prepares for disappointment at the 3 percent funding increase Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to propose this week for the university’s 2018-19 budget, university officials say that while money is critical, even a higher allocation would not immediately give the 23-campus system enough room for all the students who qualify.

“The last thing we want to do is admit students who we can’t provide with classes and services,” CSU spokesman Mike Uhlenkamp said.

Only six of the 23 CSU campuses have enough room to accommodate all qualified freshmen, while just seven can take all qualified transfer students. Meanwhile, state Education Department records show that the number of high school graduates who qualify for CSU has more than doubled in the past 20 years, to 194,689 students from 96,879. CSU applications are also on the rise.

The state’s higher education master plan directs CSU to admit the top one-third of all graduating high school seniors. But figuring out where to put everyone — and making sure they get a good education, said Uhlenkamp — is a math problem that goes beyond money and gets to where students are willing to live and how many years it takes them to graduate.”

FAIR WAGE FOR ADJUNCTS – A hot topic again these days is the impending negotiations between the City University of New York’s faculty union and administration may come down to a fundamental question: How much is adjunct labor worth?

The union’s answer is $7,000. That’s the minimum pay per three-credit course that it’s seeking for the roughly 14,000 adjuncts it represents — about double the minimum that adjuncts there now earn per course.

The current pay rate is "insulting to adjunct faculty and not commensurate with their experience," said Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 faculty and staff members at CUNY. Increasing the pay for adjuncts, who teach more than half of the courses in the nation’s largest urban university system, would, she said, send an important message to students and the part-time faculty.

Efforts to win substantial pay raises for adjuncts have met with uneven success in academe. Even at CUNY, where adjuncts might celebrate workplace improvements in recent years, the union has, since 2000, repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed for pay parity, Ms. Bowen says. This time, the union is organizing its advocacy around adjunct pay, calling it a campaign for "7K."

The union arrived at the $7,000 figure for adjuncts by reverse-engineering from the wage of a different group of contingent faculty — full-time lecturers. The salary of full-time lecturers at CUNY for a full teaching load of eight courses a year is about $60,000. A part-time adjunct teaching the same number of courses would earn only about $25,000 at the current minimum per-course rate of about $3,200.

Levels of per-course pay that are in line with what CUNY’s union is seeking have cropped up in recent years in cities with similar costs of living — but they have been at private institutions. Three years ago, Tufts University agreed to pay part-time faculty members at least $7,300 per course, and a new contract promises further pay raises.

And in New York, newly unionized adjuncts at Barnard College can now count on making $7,000 per three-credit course — a 3-percent increase. By the fall of 2021 that figure will increase to $10,000. Barnard makes a point of touting the pay on its human-resource department’s web page, calling the wages "among the best in New York City, and among elite, urban colleges and universities nationally."

Public institutions, however, have weathered years of austerity as state appropriations continue to supply less and less of their operating budgets. With such financial pressures, is the timing right for such an effort at CUNY?

CAR SALES DROP FOR FIRST TIME SINCE FINANCIAL CRISIS - The U.S. auto industry suffered its first annual sales decline since the financial crisis eight years ago, but a streak of strong profits is expected to overshadow a slowdown in dealership traffic.

Though sales fell 1.8% last year as pent-up demand declined and interest faded in sedans and compact cars, auto makers still sold 17.2 million vehicles in 2017, the first time the industry has cleared the 17-million mark three consecutive years, according to IHS Markit. Buyers took advantage of low gasoline prices and loan rates, flocking to pickups and sport utilities—a trend that delivers much higher margins to Detroit and its foreign rivals.

Vehicles now routinely sell for above $32,000, even with average incentives of $4,000 factored in, according to J.D. Power. That is 10% higher than what car buyers were dishing out when the industry’s rally began in 2010.

Still, industry executives remain concerned that last year’s decline could prove more than a modest blip.

Rising interest rates, less pent-up demand and a potential decline in the value of used cars—which buyers often trade in when buying a new vehicle—could further pressure sales. That could prompt car makers to scale back production even more and ratchet up discounts and rebates.

IHS expects sales to slip to 16.9 million vehicles this year, which is still historically strong for an industry long exposed to far more volatile boom-and-bust cycles.

GM and Ford, the two largest sellers in the U.S., are trying to manage a balancing act of maintaining strong margins while slowing production and spending big to offer bargains. GM, for instance, is offsetting incentive costs by selling a higher concentration of more-expensive models. The average price paid for a GM vehicle in December exceeded $38,000, a record for any month, the company said.

TOYOTA “WE MAKE IT EASY” - Toyota's announcement this past week of Alabama as the home for a shared factory with Mazda puts foreign car makers on pace to pass Detroit in U.S. production, per Wall Street Journal front page:

The stat: "In the first quarter of 2018, foreign makers are expected to produce 1.4 million vehicles in the U.S., WardsAuto.com projects, equaling their American rivals for the first time."

Why it matters: GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler "are likely see their dominance in vehicle production entirely evaporate as rivals such as Toyota and Mercedes-Benz boost their American workforces and add new factories."

"Already, the Big 3 are being outsold by non-U.S. rivals, as their share of American sales dwindled to 44% in 2017."

BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK – Birthday wishes and thoughts this week to Nick Clooney (84) Columbus, Ohio;  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (64) Malibu, CA.; Jack Nicklaus (78) Palm Beach, FL.; Bill Plante (80) New York, NY.; Howard Stern (64) Darien CT.

POTUS HAPPY ANNIVERSARY - For the best commentary on President Trump’s first year in office, look no further than what people say he’s like in person. A president who is abrupt and even blunt when called for, persuadable on topics when tactfully approached, and ardently unapologetic. Year one saw an upending of foreign-policy norms, a reimagining of rules and regulations on business, roaring U.S. stock markets amid a rebound in global economic growth, and a series of initiatives on taxes and regulation welcomed by the corporate world. In the year since the president took office, Mr. Trump has shown that he simply isn’t bound by what had been seen as the previous conventions of the job. While other presidents have sought to tamp down controversy, Mr. Trump is as likely to stir it up or embrace it head-on, seeing it as a tool in effecting change. While past presidents have spoken off-the-cuff infrequently and carefully, Mr. Trump does it every day on a social-media platform never before deployed this way. While earlier presidents strained to show consistency lest they appear feckless and unprincipled, Mr. Trump shifts positions frequently and effortlessly and boasts that keeping foes guessing that way is an asset. But that attitude and governing style has yet to pan out in terms of positive public perception: He is the first president on record whose net approval rating—the percentage who approve minus those who disapprove—was in negative territory his entire first year.

MARKET WEEK - The market is floating on air right now.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 26000 for the first time ever last Wednesday. On the same day, the Nasdaq Composite passed its inflation-adjusted peak from the dot-com boom for the first time. And the S&P 500 closed above 2800, another fresh milestone in a market that's been full of them.

Despite a series of would-be landmines, like the government shutdown of this past week or the possibility of escalating tensions between North Korea and the U.S., there's very little pushing the market lower. In fact, by one measure, the last time there was this little downward pressure on the stock market was more than 50 years ago.

The economy accelerates in the U.S. and globally, corporate earnings grow for the sixth straight quarter, and rates stay low. That's all supported the stock market's rise and could continue doing so.

But it's also led to increasing talk of a so-called melt-up, in which stocks rise sharply as rapid-fire gains pull wary investors into the market. Those periods have often-times ended with sharp reversals.

As the lack of drag on the market shows, stocks are rarely as calm as they are right now. Enjoy it while it lasts.

APPLE TAX - Apple announced it would pay a one-time tax of $38 billion on its overseas cash holdings and ramp up spending in the U.S. to emphasize its contributions to the American economy and counter criticism it outsourced manufacturing to China. The tech giant said it would invest $30 billion in the country over five years. It plans to build a new campus and create more than 20,000 jobs, as well as expand investment in advanced manufacturing in the country. The tax-code overhaul signed into law late last year by President Trump included an incentive for U.S. companies to bring home offshore holdings, with companies required to pay a one-time tax of 15.5% on overseas profits held in cash and other liquid assets. Apple didn’t say how much of its $252.3 billion offshore cash pile it plans to bring home. The tax payment by the world’s most valuable company may signal a tipping point for U.S. corporate offshore cash hoards and set off a trend.

GOOD READ - - N.Y. Times Magazine (Sunday Jan. 21) cover story walks through where the cryptocurrency conversation began, and where it's going ...

"Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble ... Yes, it’s driven by greed — but the mania for cryptocurrency could wind up building something much more important than wealth," by Steven Johnson:

"Like the original internet itself, the blockchain is an idea with radical — almost communitarian — possibilities that at the same time has attracted some of the most frivolous and regressive appetites of capitalism."

"We have learned enough from this history to support the hypothesis that open works better than closed, ... But we don’t have an easy route back to the open-protocol era."

"Right now, the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain."

ADMIRED CORPORATIONS - Apple is the world's most admired company, as ranked by Fortune, for the 11th year in a row.

The editors write: "Everyone looks up to Apple. With a market value that recently sat around $900 billion, the iPhone maker is the world’s most valuable company. And for the 11th year in a row, it also ranks No. 1 on FORTUNE's annual list of corporate reputation — followed at No. 2, for a second straight year, by fellow tech giant Amazon."

"In less auspicious news, GE plunged from No. 7 to No. 30, as its stock plummeted 45% in 2017. But on the positive side, Adidas and Lockheed Martin made their debuts among the 50 All-Stars.

US 101 - This satellite image from last week shows U.S. Route 101 (the second ribbon from the ocean) after storms caused mudslides and flooding in Montecito, Calif.

L.A. Times: "As the search continued for more victims of the Montecito mudslides, officials said they hoped to have the 101 Freeway opened by today Jan. 22. "

"Officials have spent the last six days trying to remove tons of mud and debris from the roadway. ... [Last week's] heavy rains and mudslides .... left at least 20 people dead and destroyed dozens of homes."

NHL HALF YEAR REVIEW – We are half way through the 2017-18 National Hockey League season here are Rink Rats Top Five and Bottom Five teams through 42 games:

1). Tampa Bay Lightning (31-12-3) The deepest talent.

2). Las Vegas Golden Knights (30-11-4) By far the biggest surprise of the 2017-18 season, an expansion with this record, unheard of.

3). Nashville Predators (28-11-6) P.K. Subban on defense leads the way.

4). Washington Capitals (29-15-4) Always play well during the season, but wait until the Playoffs.

5). Winnipeg Jets (27-13-7) The NHL’s fastest team.

27). Detroit Red Wings (18-20-7) Time for a rebuild in Motown.

28). Vancouver Canucks (18-22-6) Injuries, injuries, and getting old.

29). Ottawa Senators (15-20-9) CBOT Ottawa is off the air.

30). Arizona Coyotes (11-28-9) Desert rats.

31). Buffalo Sabres (11-26-9) Hapless again.

OUT AND ABOUT – Congrats to Rink Rats friend Alexis Schiff (Univ. of La Verne ’17) for her good luck at the Santa Anita thoroughbred race track this past week. The $3 exacta bet proved good fortune.

SWAMI’S WEEK TOP PICKS –

NFL Football Pick of the Week – We await the Super Bowl. (Season to date 13-8).

College Football Pick of the Week – Congrats to the Alabama Crimson Tide on another National Championship and Cindy K. (Apple Valley, CA.) for winning the prestigious BCA Football Challenge.  (Season to date 11-7)

College Hockey Pick of the Week – Saturday 1/27, 7:05 PM CT HGTV: #5 University of Denver Pioneers (14-6-4) at #7 North Dakota Fighting Hawks (12-8-6). It will be chilly in Grand Forks this coming weekend as the Hawks upend the Pioneers 5 – 4.  Season to date (7-5)

NHL Pick of the Week – Thursday 1/26, 7:00 PM EDT, TSN: Winnipeg Jets (28-13-7) vs. Anaheim Ducks (22-17-9), the streaking Ducks head into the All-Star break with a win over the Jets, 3 – 2. Season to date (9-3).

NBA Pick of the Week – Saturday 1/27 10:00 PM EDT, ABC: Boston Celtics (34-13) vs. Golden State Warriors (37-10), Warriors win big 105 – 90. (season to date 2-1)

Season to Date (4 - 3)

DRIVING THE WEEK - How long will the shutdown go? ... Davos kicks off on Tuesday and Trump is scheduled to speak Thursday ... Senate Banking Committee has a nominations hearing scheduled for Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. ... Index of leading indicators Thursday at 10:00 a.m. expected to rise 0.5 percent. ...

First read on Q4 GDP on Friday at 8:30 a.m. expected to show a gain of 3.0 percent, which would give Trump bragging rights for three quarter of 3 percent growth in a row (unless it later gets revised lower).

Next Blog: Dear Rink Rats

Until next time, Adios

Claremont, California

January 22, 2018

#VIII-23-365

CARTOON OF THE WEEK – Kaamran Hafeez, The New Yorker