Quotulatiousness

July 27, 2013

Plan your travels so you’re always close to good beer

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

While I haven’t been travelling much in the last few years, I always appreciate the chance to sample the local wines and beers in the regions I visit. Wired Mapland looks at some mapping projects to make that even easier (for craft beer, anyway):

Researching a recent business trip to San Diego (okay, not entirely business), I checked out two of them: The Beer Mapping Project, and Brewery Map. Both utilize Google’s map API (short for application programming interface, the set of programming instructions that enables developers to build new websites and apps that tap into an existing website’s data and functions), and they’re both easy to use: type in a location, and a map and list appear telling you what’s nearby. Brewery Map has Android and iPhone apps; several independent apps use the Beer Mapping Project’s API.

“The big reason we do what we do is we think it’s important, especially with the craft beer culture that’s growing, that people get out there and connect with the beer they like to drink, and help promote small businesses making craft beer, and meet the people who are making the kind of beer they like,” said Jason Austin, one of the trio of beer-loving developers behind Pint Labs, which created Brewery Map and the database behind it, BreweryDB.com.

Both sites rely on users to enter data, from plugging in the addresses and hours of existing brewpubs to adding new ones as they crop up. That means the sites are more useful in areas with more craft beer drinkers and can be a bit spotty elsewhere. It also means the more people who use them, the better they’ll get.

Here’s a brief review of their relative strengths and weaknesses:

The Beer Mapping Project. WIRED: Lets you filter search results by type, making it easy to distinguish breweries from brewpubs, bars, and stores that sell microbrew. Click on a pin, and a window pops up with the official website, as well as links to reviews on BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. You can also look up homebrew stores. There are international maps too. TIRED: Beer trip planner isn’t very intuitive. Or maybe it doesn’t work. I got tired of trying to figure it out.

Brewery Map: WIRED: Great beer trip planner. Plug in two destinations and use a pulldown menu to indicate how far out of your way you’re willing to go for microbrew (see map above). TIRED: Designated driver not included. All the pins look the same, so if you want to find, say, a brewpub that serves food, you’ll have to do some extra Googling.

Should I decide to drive all the way to Minneapolis to catch a Vikings home game, here’s the high-level view of my trip according to BreweryMap:

BreweryMap - Brooklin to Minneapolis

If I’d already arrived at my destination, the Beer Mapping Project comes to my thirsty aid:

BeerMapping - Minneapolis area

Jiangsu might as well be the Chinese name for Detroit

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

The South China Morning Post on the economic troubles of the provincial, municipal and local authorities in Jiangsu:

The nightmare scenario for China’s leaders as they try to wean the country off a diet of easy credit and breakneck expansion is a local government buckling under the weight of its own debt. Few provinces fit that bill quite like Jiangsu, home to China’s most indebted local government.

Hefty borrowings through banks, investment trusts and the bond market by Jiangsu’s provincial, city and county governments have saddled the province north of Shanghai with debt far higher than its peers, public records show.

Many of the province’s mainstay industries, including shipbuilding and the manufacturer of solar panels, are drowning in overcapacity. Profits are dwindling, and the government’s tax growth is braking hard.

[…]

Little public information is available on the total debt of Chinese local governments. Indeed, earlier this month China’s Vice-Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said Beijing did not know the precise level of their debts either.

But from what ratings agencies and think-tanks can piece together, Jiangsu may be the standout debt risk among China’s 31 provinces.

Looking at bank loan books, they can see that China’s eastern provinces including Jiangsu have the highest concentration of government debt. Jiangsu then looms large because of its reliance on costlier and alternative forms of financing, which they said suggested that cheaper bank loans and land sales are not giving the authorities the funding they need.

The risk that Jiangsu might pose to the Chinese economy in a crisis is clear. On its own, the province would be a top 20 global economy with GDP greater than G20 member Turkey. Its 79 million population tops that of most European countries.

Municipal bonds and the economic law of gravity

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

In the US, municipal bonds — bonds issued by city or other municipal governments — have been widely viewed as “safe” investments. Detroit may cause that view to change drastically. Reggie Middleton has been sounding the alarm for a few years:

Following up on my timely post “Here Come Those Municipal Defaults That Everyone Said Couldn’t Happen, Pt 2“, I comment on Meredith Whitney’s OpEd in the Financial Times. If you remember, she — like I — warned of municipal defaults years ago and was ridiculed for such. Ms. Whitney is quoted as saying:

    “As jarring as the reality may be to accept, Detroit’s decision last week to declare bankruptcy should not be regarded as a one-off in the U.S. municipal market.” she said.

    “There are five more towns like Detroit in Michigan alone. There are many more municipalities across the country in similar positions.”

    “The bill for promises past is now so large for some cities and towns that it is crowding out money for the most basic of services — in the case of Detroit, it could not even afford to run its traffic lights,” she said.

    “Will [lawmakers] side with taxpayers, unions or the municipal bondholders? If they back residents, money will be directed to underfunded public services at the expense of pensions and bondholders. If they side with the unions, social services will continue to be cut and the risk to bondholders will increase considerably. If they side with bondholders, social services and pensions are at risk.”

    In the case of Detroit, elected officials, for the first time in a very long time, are siding with residents, Whitney said. This is a new precedent that boils down to the straightforward reality of the survival and sustainability of a town or city, she said.

    “After decades of near-third-world conditions in the richest country in the world, the city finally stood up and said enough was enough,”

Well, this is the problem. Defaulting on revenue bonds where the underlying asset (ex. a housing project, utility, or infrastructure project) is not generating the sufficient cash flows is part and parcel of the risk of investing in said class of bonds. This is widely accepted and understood, which is likely why those bonds have a slightly higher yield.

For some obscene reason, defaulting on the general obligation bonds which purportedly carry the “full faith and credit’ of the municipality as a back stop is deemed as wholly different affair. The reason? Who the hell knows? This is a point I tried to drive home in the original “Here Come Those Municipal Defaults That Everyone Said Couldn’t Happen” article in 2011. Backing by the full faith and credit of a public entity does not make an investment risk free. To the contrary, if said entity is fundamentally insolvent, the investment is actually “riskful” as opposed to risk free.

Treating these bonds as unsecured in the bankruptcy is essentially the way to go. If you don’t want to do that, well you can still consider them backed by the full faith and credit of the insolvent municipality, which is essentially unsecured — and move on anyway — particularly as many potential collateral assets of value would have likely been encumbered by agreements with a little more prejudicial foresight.

The brief, glorious career of the libertarian sheep

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:15

An amusing tale in Modern Farmer:

Shrek the sheep 1

Take a moment to drink in the glory of Shrek the Sheep. Shrek really, really, really did not like getting his hair cut. So for six years, this New Zealand libertarian managed to avoid spring shearings by hiding in a cave.

By the time he was found in 2004, his owners couldn’t even tell he was a sheep. “He looked like some biblical creature,” John Perriam told the BBC. Or, to quote a member of Modern Farmer‘s editorial team, “Someone help that sheep, he is being eaten by some kind of dirty monster.”

When Shrek was eventually sheared (because man always triumphs over sheep), there was enough wool to produce 20 men’s suits. Just an abnormal, excessive, downright insane amount of wool. Which led us to some basic questions: If a sheep is left unshorn, will its wool grow forever? Is that healthy? Is this a glitch in the (wooly) fabric of evolution?

Shrek the sheep 2

That’s Shrek mid-shearing, and not very happy about it. This is a fairly old story, as Shrek died a couple of years ago.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

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