firehose

Elizabeth Warren, the firebrand critic of the financial industry in the US Senate, may be regretting that time she showed president Barack Obama how to get around obstructive senators.

Obama wanted to appoint Antonio Weiss, a Lazard investment banker, to be his top Treasury official managing domestic financial markets. Left-wing Democrats led by Warren criticized the nominee as too inexperienced and too close to the financial industry; he worked at a major bank and played a tangential role advising Burger King on a merger that would relocate it to Canada. Yesterday (Jan. 12), Weiss withdrew his name.

It will worry Wall Street that even the most liberal financial executives, from firms that didn’t receive bailouts, can’t count on waltzing into a senior job in Washington under a Democratic president. But Weiss will still be working in the Treasury Department. Instead of under-secretary for domestic finance, he will be taking a job as a counselor to Treasury secretary Jack Lew.

That’ll be awkward when the actual under-secretary for domestic finance is eventually confirmed. “Avoiding the public Senate confirmation process but nevertheless installing Mr. Weiss in a very senior position at the Treasury Department is unfortunate for the American people,” Dennis Kelleher, head of the financial reform organization Better Markets, said. “The country would have benefited from an open, public debate about the Wall Street-centric view that what is good for Wall Street is really good for America.”

But we know this trick well, because Warren once pulled it herself. In 2010, Obama was deciding who would lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new financial regulator created after the 2008 financial crisis. The CFPB was in many ways Warren’s brainchild, and she was the popular choice among progressives to lead the new agency, but Republican lawmakers who saw the CFPB as unnecessary and Warren as too much of a populist effectively blocked her.

So Obama gave Warren a job as a White House aide and senior advisor to the Treasury secretary for the CFPB, a position where she effectively set up the new organization without Senate confirmation. Republican lawmakers were not pleased, even after a nominee they could accept—Richard Cordray, the former Ohio attorney general—took over the CFPB, and Warren went to Massachusetts to run for the Senate.

Now that she’s there, Warren is deploying the traps once used against her—like blocking a president’s preferred nominees in search of concessions. The only trouble is, she already taught Obama how to dodge them. The difference is, this time it’s the finance industry’s preferred nominee, rather than a populist critic of it, whom the president is trying to sneak into a Treasury job—which gives some sense of how the 2008 crisis, and Warren herself, have changed Washington.

The owners of Big-Ass Sandwiches, in years past one of the shinier stars in Portland's fast spinning food cart firmament, say it looks like they're going to be pushed from their Central Eastside location due to development.

Now the cart, known for absurdly portioned, french-fry stuffed sandwiches, is casting about for a new home.

"They're demolishing the building behind us," co-founder Lisa Wood says, adding that her landlord, Craig Sweitzer, said the cart "should plan to be out by spring." Wood and her husband Brian took to Twitter earlier today to announce the move, and solicit ideas for a new location.

(1/2) Looks like we're getting kicked out of our spot to make way for new development...seems to be a theme in Portland these days.
— Big-Ass Sandwiches (@bigasssandwich) January 13, 2015

(2/2) After the year we had, this is quite possibly the worst news. We're going over all of our options and will keep you posted, as always.
— Big-Ass Sandwiches (@bigasssandwich) January 13, 2015

It's unclear what project is in the works at the property, a warehouse at 304 SE 2nd. Sweitzer tells the Mercury a deal is in the works, but isn't ready to be announced yet. He says he just gave the Woods a heads up that something might happen, and that their announcement is premature.

"We’ve got a project we’re working on, and it's not time to comment on it at all," Sweitzer says. "I’m surprised they're saying anything."

Wood, though she doesn't know specifics, says the development is a bar or restaurant, and that "we're going to be in the way of their beer garden."

Opened downtown in 2009, Big-Ass Sandwiches quickly became a gleeful obsession for the Portland masses, attracting a good deal of local and national press. In 2012, the Woods moved the cart across the river, citing ongoing issues with their landlord, City Center Parking.

"We just liked the neighborhood and hoped we’d be able to stay," Wood says. And they will stay, if they're allowed. There are no hard plans to close, and the cart is on a month-to-month lease with Sweitzer's company.

The tough year the Woods alluded to in their tweets references a second Big-Ass cart they opened last year on N Mississippi. It proved unprofitable, and had to close.

"It sucked our summer dry," Wood says.

The great thing about situations like this, of course, is they lack the necessary permanence of some of the tough closures Portland's seen in the last year. But Lisa Wood says moving a cart is tricky. It can be costly, and whoever the new landlord is will probably want first and last month's rent.

"We would like to consider any options that come up," she says.

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January: Sasha Frere-Jones leaves to annotate lyrics for Genius.

February: WebMD begins offering a service where you can have your illness diagnosed by Atul Gawande.

March: Roz Chast unveils her first Google Doodle.

April: Netflix replaces all film descriptions with new descriptions written by David Denby.

May: Janet Malcolm becomes longform editor at Twitter.

June: Jonathan Franzen debuts his new novel on a Seamless receipt.

July: James Surowiecki joins Clinkle as UNDISCLOSED POSITION.

August: John McPhee becomes an Uber driver and Roger Angell launches AngellList, an early-stage VC fund for startups focusing on memory and regret.

September: David Grann publishes a deeply-reported, 7,000 word description of a scarf on Etsy.

October: Jeffrey Toobin named Reddit mod of r/legaladvice.

November: David Remnick appears at Shingy’s doorstep, begging for an internship.

December: The New Yorker pivots to become a six-second video of a wiener dog twerking to a Beyoncé song.

An odd series of events led to Seneca, New York playing host to the world's largest herd of white deer. There's actually an evolutionary reason why one particular set of genes for these unusual deer came to be favored in Seneca.

Read more...

One of the things that makes Blade Runner so great is its cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles, a mishmash of architecture, language, and culture. This fascinating video essay takes us through the various components that make up this futuristic noir city and what they suggest about the history of Blade Runner's world.

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When we listed Archie Vs. Predator as one of 2015's most anticipated comics, that was before we say these two amazing comic covers. Now? Now we're going to have to hunt them down like the Predator hunted Dutch and his fellow soldiers, meaning these comics will have to bury themselves in mud to hide from our sight.

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Read on Ars Technica | Comments

The Super Gorone Desk is a laptop stand created by Japanese gadget company Thanko that makes it possible to work on a computer while lying down in bed. The desk is adjustable, features built-in hooks for securing different size laptops, and has a USB-powered fan that cools the CPU while in use.

images via Japan Trend Shop

via HUH, The World’s Best Ever

The 2002 TV movie It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie features the twin towers in an alternate reality where an angel shows Kermit the Frog what the world would be like had he never been born.

Rumors are swirling that the British Beagle 2 lander — missing since Christmas Day in 2003 — has been spotted on the surface of the Red Planet by NASA's Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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omgthatdress:

Ball Gown

Jacques Doucet, 1890s

The Mint Museum

More than 220k, apparently:

The gang allegedly numbered 18-20 people and spent $220,798 on the attack, including $4,000 on two sniper “Barret” .50 calibre rifles that the accountant who compiled their expenses said were “not really necessary, but could be very useful”. Each man had $4,000 to cover costs while they were in Gambia.

But the coup attempt failed and this week, US federal prosecutors charged a Texas businessman with conspiring with a former US Army sergeant and others to orchestrate an attack in Gambia on the last two days of 2014.

There is more here in the FT.  And here is a tidbit of note:

US authorities accuse Cherno Njie, a 57-year-old US citizen of Gambian descent who made a small fortune in the housing industry in Texas, of bankrolling the coup.

The article is interesting throughout, there was at least the ostensible motive of restoring democracy to the country.  I wonder to what extent he viewed this as a philanthropic rather than selfish venture.

David Leonhardt writes:

The plan — which would require congressional approval — would apply to students attending a two-year college, including part time, so long as the college offered credits that could transfer to a four-year college or provided training that led to jobs.

David’s article is excellent and has much useful information:

As Reihan Salam of National Review notes, community college tuition is already low. In fact, it’s zero, on average, for lower-income families, after taking financial aid into account. Vox’s Libby Nelson wrote, “Community college tuition for poorer students is often entirely covered by the need-based Pell Grant.”

One potential implication is that by making community college universally free, the government is mostly reducing the cost for higher-income families.

Calculating the completion rate at community colleges is difficult, this estimate does some work to get it up to 38 percent.  What would the completion rate be for the marginal students encouraged under the Obama plan?  We don’t know, but I’ll guess at 20-30%, no more.  That’s the real problem.

Furthermore some of the value of education is signaling to the labor market that you are able to finish college.  I do think the learning component of education is generally more important, but for “marginally not attending community college individuals” — who are often regarded with suspicion by employers — I would not be surprised if the signaling component were one third or more of the value of a degree.  To that extent, pushing more marginals into the degree funnel lowers the value of the degree for the others who were getting it already by lowering the average productivity of the pool of finishers.  That would lower the efficiency gains from the program and also partially offset some of the intended distributional consequences.

Mike Konczal likes the idea, and believes it may lower higher education prices more generally.  Libby Nelson at Vox considers it to be a middle class benefit.  Neil McCluskey at Cato is negative.  Carrie Sheffield is critical.  Here is a look at potential winners and losers in the higher education sector.  The plan could lead to federal money replacing state money, rather than leveraging it.

Citing the growing economy and improving labor market, Andrew Flowers noted:

…college enrollment is declining for recent high school graduates (those 16 to 24 years old). And it’s falling fastest for community colleges.

Overall my take is that the significant gains are to be had at the family level and at the primary education level, and that the price of community college is not a major bottleneck under the status quo.