Copied unedited from Grantland. When I read it to my wife, she thought I wrote it -since she knows its is what's in my heart.

For an entertainment venture, baseball really isn’t all that escapist. Baseball is an ordeal. The players spend most of a given game needing to pay strict attention on every single pitch, but only have to react a couple of times per game. The sport requires constant mental focus, the overwhelming majority of which is wasted. And even when a player gets involved, he has relatively little control over what results from his actions. Bloopers turn into triples, while scalded line drives can turn into double plays.

Consider the two great axioms about hitting, both of which are true: “Even the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time” and “The difference between an average hitter and a great hitter is two hits a month.” This is a game for nihilists, and it’s played six days a week.

It’s an endeavor that requires unceasing effort every day, but in which most of that effort goes to waste, and the bit that doesn’t is set adrift in a sea of uncontrollable and often inexplicable factors, ending in failure most of the time. That sounds like real life to me, and this inexorable, beautiful conveyor belt of failure appeals to me the way the novels of Richard Ford and Graham Greene do. Baseball is like having your soul crushed slowly by a steamroller made of platinum and diamonds. (The sunshine and the smell of fresh-cut grass are nice, too.)

You’d think that something so relentlessly awful wouldn’t be worth such a great investment of time and emotional capital. But it’s precisely because baseball is so torturous when it’s bad that it can be so intoxicating when it’s good.

And that brings us to the Toronto Blue Jays. Consider what the past two months have been like for the average Blue Jays fan. Or better yet, consider the past two months in comparison to the past two decades.

The Blue Jays haven’t made the playoffs in 22 years, the longest drought in North American professional sports, and in the intervening years they haven’t even been conspicuously interesting. Already ghettoized by being MLB’s only Canadian team, the Blue Jays have often been the least interesting team in a crowded AL East. Plus, the Blue Jays play in a wretched, Mulroney-administration-vintage ballpark with hellacious artificial turf. The SkyDome was built with the intention of seeming futuristic, and we’ve all seen Zardoz enough to know that futurism isn’t always a look that holds up too well over time.

And it’s not like the rest of the city’s sports landscape has been much better. The Raptors have been — at the risk of being redundant — a middling Eastern Conference team more or less since their inception, and I’m not a good enough writer to adequately capture how embarrassing the Maple Leafs have been over the past decade. The only relief has been the CFL’s Argonauts, and you have to be truly desperate to take solace in Canada’s bizarre, minor league socialist pidgin football.

That’s the context of this team, which has chased down the Yankees and turned into an imperious offensive force. They’ve won 18 of their past 22 games, and their plus-170 run differential is the best in baseball by 42 runs. Being in first place a week before Labor Day is reason enough for excitement, but trading for David Price and Troy Tulowitzki was in a way even bigger news, because it was a statement from the team that after years of being an also-ran, Toronto was willing to go out and make the biggest moves for the biggest stars. For some reason, there’s nothing quite like an ascendant contender going out and getting a Cy Young winner midseason. Remember what Randy Johnson did for the Astros in 1998, or CC Sabathia did for the Brewers in 2008, or Cliff Lee did for the Phillies in 2009. In a way, winning isn’t real unless you get to play with the cool toys as well.


And when all those factors come together, here’s what happens: After years of just trudging through the motions because you don’t have a better idea, life gets actively fun. There’s a huge difference between living because you have to and living because you want to, between waking up expecting something good to happen and hoping nothing bad happens.

You don’t get that feeling in sports when your team plays only once a week, and you only sort of get it when your team plays three times a week. But right now, Torontonians can turn on the TV every night and expect to witness something exceptional, because that’s what happens when you hit Tulowitzki, Josh Donaldson, and Jose Bautista back-to-back-to-back in the lineup.

We’ve seen those heightened moments already: Tulowitzki’s 12-pitch battle with Andrew Miller two Fridays ago, or Tuesday night’s come-from-behind win in Texas, just to name two. Those are moments that pay back dividends on the unwavering, daily attention baseball demands, and the value in those little snippets of drama adds up and compounds.

My favorite in-person baseball experience of the past few years came last summer. I was passing through Kansas City and managed to catch a game in Kauffman Stadium, with James Shields on the mound and the Royals having just come home from a road trip that included the back half of a 10-game winning streak. The atmosphere in that park, with some 38,000 fans cheering like they hadn’t in 30 years, was like what you’d expect from the student section at a college football game.

My favorite televised baseball moment of the past few years, meanwhile, was the 2013 NL wild-card game, in which the partisan crowd at PNC Park — itself experiencing playoff baseball for the first time in more than 20 years — was so loud it rattled the center-field camera along with Reds starter Johnny Cueto’s confidence.

That’s the kind of climax the Blue Jays are building toward right now, and I’m not positive that the summit itself is actually better than the journey up the mountain. In fact, I’d argue that the moment after a championship is won — and make no mistake, even division leaders still have only a remote chance of winning it all — isn’t as fun as the road there. Because baseball is so relentless and so unpredictable, a run of success like this has the capacity to thrill over and over, and, particularly in the age of modern technology, bind together not only a city, but the members of its diaspora around the world.

This is a phenomenon that not everyone gets to experience: The team has to be good, but it’s also only a matter of time before winning stops being novel and starts being routine, and the primary sensation is no longer the joy of gaining something you’ve long coveted, but the fear of losing something you already have. It happens to some fan base or other every year, but when you consider the number of teams (even taking out the ones who are good pretty much all the time), it’s a sensation that happens to a particular fan base only once in a generation.

So if you’re a Blue Jays fan (or a Mets or Astros fan, for that matter), go out of your way to enjoy what you’re experiencing right now. There’s no greater feeling than being a fan of a baseball team that just got good, and you never know when the wins will either stop coming or become routine. Wash your favorite shirsey twice a week so you can wear it as often as possible. Buy the local paper and hang up the front page of the sports section after a big win. Get to the ballpark if you can, and if you can’t do that, go watch the game at a bar or a friend’s house — anything that makes the experience communal.

Whatever you do, don’t waste this moment. Nothing like it will happen again for another 20 years. But when it does, it will have been worth the wait.

one from BOC   one post from Vox, Two posts from Krugman, one from Thoma , one from Robert Johnson 

"Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”"


In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

“I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

Via Bill Moyers
BILL MOYERS: Listening to, watching the State of Union address and when the camera would cut to the chamber in the House there, everyone in that chamber: well paid, health benefits, pension plan, a staff to serve their needs, corporations throwing money at them to make sure they get reelected. And I wonder if people that far removed from where you were can even imagine the horrors of the America you describe.

DAVID SIMON: You know, I've had the sensation over the last twenty -- and before “The Wire” even, I mean, when I was just a police reporter in Baltimore -- of hearing people inside the beltway speak about the American city or about urban issues or about things that I actually knew a little bit about. And they would talk about it you know, I'd be listening to, you know, a Gingrich or even some well-meaning liberal.

And I would think, I would love to have these guys in my Volkswagen Passat and just kick them out on the corner at Monroe and Fayette and you know, and just leave them there for a month, you know, and just see if they can you stop them from saying this stuff with just a little bit of aware--

BILL MOYERS: What would they see?

DAVID SIMON: They're not going to--

BILL MOYERS: What would they see at the corner?

DAVID SIMON: Well, they'd see human beings for one thing. They'd see the America that they've left behind and have left behind for generations. And now increasingly it's not all just people of color. Now the economy has shrugged again and again and we're leaving white people behind.

And so all of a sudden, it's encroaching in a way that people are getting a little bit more frantic. And it's making some people more inclined to reflect on what the system has wrought. And it's making other people more inclined to just dig the trenches deeper.

BILL MOYERS: The best analysis of Obama's speech that I read came from the writer Matt Miller who worked for Bill Clinton in the White House when Clinton laid out, Miller says, about the same vision that Obama did this week. Here's what Miller wrote, quote, "Yet in the years since, on virtually every metric progressives care about … the measures of a good society have gone in the wrong direction."

DAVID SIMON: Wrong direction.

BILL MOYERS: “Wages are stagnant or shrinking. School rankings have sagged. College and health costs have soared. Our rates of child poverty lead the developed world. Decent jobs remain scarce. The accident of birth weighs more heavily in dictating one's destiny. All the compelling anecdotes or special guests in the chamber don't change that."

DAVID SIMON: That's right. That's right. And you know, not to critique only the conservative logic and the supply-side logic, you know, Bill Clinton in maneuvering to the center, he signed all those crime bills. He made the American gulag as vast as it is with a lot of his legislation against the drug war. And he made it so that these disposable people could become grist for that horrible mill.

I am so aware of what-- at this point of having covered it for so many years of what the drug war means in terms of being effectively a war on the poor. That's all it is. It has no meaning in terms of narcotics or anything like that. That’s the shell game.

BILL MOYERS: But you wouldn't, you wouldn't connect that, would you, to the power of capital to buy the legislation.

DAVID SIMON: It's the power of capitalism--I don't know if I think it's that much of a plan, I'm not that much of a conspiracist. I think there are a lot of extra people left over when the factories all go to the cheapest labor. And you know, if you're going to move to the manufacturing base to the Pacific Rim and to Mexico and wherever else-- you're going to have a lot of extra people. And that's going to make you nervous. And those people are not going to have-- well, you're either going to have to pay them to be extra, which we don't have-- we're not that selfless. We're cutting back on welfare.

You're either going to have to pay them to be useless, you're going to have to find a way to completely reorient them and place them in the service economy in ways that they are not now relevant for. And that's a lot of money, we don't want to spend that money. Or you're going to have to hunt them, hunt them down. And that's what the drug war became. You know, we left one last industry in places like West Baltimore and North Philadelphia and East St. Louis; we left one last factory standing. We left the drug corner. And it was very lucrative and very destructive. And then we made that legal and then we made the laws against that so draconian that we could basically destroy lives.

And then to make it even more laughable as a capitalist enterprise, we started turning over the prisons to private companies. And so they can, certain people with the contracts can find a profit metric in destroying these lives.

BILL MOYERS: President Obama has said he wants a higher minimum age and he'll sign an executive order to do it in contracts that will come along down the road.

DAVID SIMON: And some jurisdictions will do the same thing. But why can't Congress look at this and say, "You know what? This is what we say we want these people working, we say we don't want welfare cheats, we say we don't want to welfare to grow. Here are people who are willing to work full time to be part of our service economy. Let's give them some discretionary income. They're probably going to spend it buying American product."

BILL MOYERS: It makes such sense, David, but at the same time, the federal minimum wage is $7.25. If it had been adjusted for productivity gains and inflation, today it would be $21.72.

DAVID SIMON: I know.

BILL MOYERS: Something like that.

Consider this and this (thanks Michael Lim for Bloomberg link)

Bloomberg

Bakken oil production in North Dakota has fallen less than 2 percent from its peak in December, while the number of oil rigs in the state has fallen by 60 percent. EOG Resources Inc., the largest shale driller, says it can make a 30 percent after-tax return on $50 oil in its best plays. Whiting Petroleum Corp., the largest Bakken producer, said it’s preparing to be able to grow production at $40 to $50 prices.

“A single break-even price doesn’t actually exist,” Foiles said in a presentation. “Rather, what the model indicates is that at a realized oil price of $29.42, half of wells will generate returns exceeding 10%. This price is considerably lower than the $70 breakeven estimated by industry watchers at the start of the oil price slump.”

Bloomberg  Capital outflows via FT Thanks to Michael Lim
How has the Chinese currency done against its major trading partners. ?
Trilemma 
Currency War? Float? Capital Outflow

David Stockman (hat tip Michael Lim)

The Telegraph
If the oil futures market is correct, Saudi Arabia will start running into trouble within two years. It will be in existential crisis by the end of the decade.


The contract price of US crude oil for delivery in December 2020 is currently $62.05, implying a drastic change in the economic landscape for the Middle East and the petro-rentier states.


The Saudis took a huge gamble last November when they stopped supporting prices and opted instead to flood the market and drive out rivals, boosting their own output to 10.6m barrels a day (b/d) into the teeth of the downturn.


Bank of America says OPEC is now "effectively dissolved". The cartel might as well shut down its offices in Vienna to save money.
The problem for the Saudis is that US shale frackers are not high-cost. They are mostly mid-cost, and as I reported from the CERAWeek energy forum in Houston, experts at IHS think shale companies may be able to shave those costs by 45pc this year - and not only by switching tactically to high-yielding wells.

Advanced pad drilling techniques allow frackers to launch five or ten wells in different directions from the same site. Smart drill-bits with computer chips can seek out cracks in the rock. New dissolvable plugs promise to save $300,000 a well. "We've driven down drilling costs by 50pc, and we can see another 30pc ahead," said John Hess, head of the Hess Corporation.

It was the same story from Scott Sheffield, head of Pioneer Natural Resources. "We have just drilled an 18,000 ft well in 16 days in the Permian Basin. Last year it took 30 days," he said.

He said the resilience of the sister industry of shale gas should be a cautionary warning to those reading too much into the rig-count. Gas prices have collapsed from $8 to $2.78 since 2009, and the number of gas rigs has dropped 1,200 to 209. Yet output has risen by 30pc over that period.

Until now, shale drillers have been cushioned by hedging contracts. The stress test will come over coming months as these expire. But even if scores of over-leveraged wild-catters go bankrupt as funding dries up, it will not do OPEC any good.

The wells will still be there. The technology and infrastructure will still there. Stronger companies will mop up on the cheap, taking over the operations. Once oil climbs back to $60 or even $55 - since the threshold keeps falling - they will crank up production almost instantly.

Mr Sheffield said the Permian Basin in Texas could alone produce 5-6m b/d in the long-term, more than Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar field, the biggest in the world.

Saudi Arabia is effectively beached. It relies on oil for 90pc of its budget revenues. There is no other industry to speak of, a full fifty years after the oil bonanza began.


In hindsight, it was a strategic error to hold prices so high, for so long, allowing shale frackers - and the solar industry - to come of age. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.