Sorry this isn't a better picture, but I'd like to introduce you to my Time Machine.
It rocks.
March 2009 Archives
I'm new to this whole sponsorship thing, so I'm totally blown away by what it offers. Let's review:
First, I was able to obtain a BMC TT03 bike frame. It is so sweet. The way the carbon is shaped makes looks fast just sitting on the stand. Strapped into the front fork is a ZIPP 404. In the rear dropouts is a ZIPP 808 around a CycleOps SLC+ PowerMeter. Both wheels have the trademarked dimples that cut through the wind like a golf ball. Strapped to the back wheel is a 10-speed SRAM Force derailleur system, powered by ZIPP VumaQuad compact cranks. The flight deck is controlled by ZIPP VukaAero bars. Of course, all of this will sit in transition waiting for me to get out of the water, wiggling out of my 2XU Elite wetsuit.
Sadly, I have yet to try out any of the new gear above. I'm waiting on tires and a saddle for the bike. And the ice hasn't melted on the lakes, so no wetsuit swimming yet. But, the tires are on the way, and I'll get a saddle when I get fit on my bike next week at CronoMetro.
Hopefully the weather holds and I'll get a few rides in before we leave on our road trip to New Orleans, which is only two weeks away!
The New York Times looks at the deomographics of "The Great Recession" and the three inputs on how the economy will be redistributed:
All of these trends will serve to increase inequality. Yet I still think the Great Recession will eventually end up compressing the rungs on the nation's economic ladder. Why? For the same three fundamental reasons that the Great Depression did.The first is the stock market crash. Clearly, it has hurt wealthy and upper middle-class families, who own the bulk of stock, more than others. In addition, thousands of high-paying Wall Street jobs -- jobs that have helped the share of income flowing to the top 1 percent of earners soar in recent decades -- will disappear.
Hard as it may be to believe, the crash will also help a lot of young families. The stocks that they buy in coming years are likely to appreciate far more than they would have if the Dow were still above 14,000. The same is true of future house purchases for the one in three families still renting a home.
The second reason is government policy. The Obama administration plans to raise taxes on the affluent, cut them for everyone else (so long as the government can afford it, that is) and take other steps to reduce inequality. Franklin D. Roosevelt did something similar and it had a huge effect.
Of course, these two factors both boil down to redistribution. One group is benefiting at the expense of another. Yes, many of the people on the losing end of that shift have done quite well in recent years, far better than most Americans. Still, the shift isn't making the economic pie any bigger. It is simply being divided differently.
Which is why the third factor -- education -- is the most important of all. It can make the pie larger and divide it more evenly.
That was the legacy of the great surge in school enrollment during the Great Depression. Teenagers who once would have dropped out to do factory work instead stayed in high school, notes Claudia Goldin, an economist who recently wrote a history of education with Mr. Katz.
I got witness one of the freakiest weather events in Wisconsin yesterday.
I had business in downtown Milwaukee. On my drive eastward into the city, I could see a large wall of clouds hovering over the lake, but it's perfectly sunny and clear everywhere else. As I got closer, more and more cars traveling in the opposite direction were covered in new snow; some had upwards of six inches. It was still sunny where I was driving. As I get closer to the lake, there's snow everywhere, a respectable covering of 3-4 inches. Cars in the parking lot were covered, some nearly 12 inches.
Then, for lunch, we go a bit further into downtown -- say about four blocks -- and it's a literal blizzard. Snow falling at a rate that would put several inches on the ground in an hour. We get our lunch to go and drive back to the office. Not a flake in the sky. During the next hour during a meeting, it would alternate between blizzard and sun, depending on the wind. At the end of the day, I had no snow on my car, but I'm sure that several inches had fallen upon it.