Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2010

California’s version of the Greek public service problem

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

David Crane shows why California’s public pension scheme has much in common with the Greek pension scheme, in the sense of a mind-boggling disconnect from economic reality:

In 1999 then California Governor Gray Davis signed into law a bill that represented the largest issuance of non-voter-approved debt in the state’s history. The bill SB 400 granted billions of dollars in retroactive pension boosts to state employees, allowing retirements as young as age 50 with lifetime pensions of up to 90% of final year salaries. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System sold the pension boost to the state legislature by promising that “no increase over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit improvements” and that Calpers would “remain fully funded.” They also claimed that enhanced pensions would not cost taxpayers “a dime” because investment bets would cover the expense.

What Calpers failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars, (4) Calpers’s own employees would benefit from the pension increases and (5) members of Calpers’s board had received contributions from the public employee unions who would benefit from the legislation. Had such a flagrant case of non-disclosure occurred in the private sector, even a sleepy SEC and US Attorney would have noticed.

Until very recently, public service pension schemes might as well have been listed in the dictionary under “soporific” — except for the beneficiaries, nobody paid much attention. Even so, you’d think that the breathtaking assumptions in the Calpers bill would have woken up at least a few politicians and reporters. Of course, no political body has an effective “Office of Realistic Assumptions” to run proposed legislation past (although it wouldn’t be a bad idea), so it might well be that nobody bothered to check the sums before the bill was passed.

Or, more likely, that nobody voting that day expected to be held accountable for the outcome.

Update: Good news! The state legislature just passed new regulations! That’s bound to fix the problem, right?

Oh, wait . . .

California’s public pension funds would have to report the ethnicity and gender of some of the outside investment managers they hire under a bill that passed the state Assembly on Thursday.

The bill states that businesses owned by women and minorities are not adequately represented in the state’s pension fund portfolios, compared to their proportion of California’s population. It passed on a 41-22 vote and now moves to the state Senate.

Well, that will certainly fix the funding issues in no time, won’t it? Your California state legislature, constantly working for you!

May 20, 2010

The root of the Greek economic crisis

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

No, it’s not the evil banks, the evil insurance companies, the evil oil companies, or even the evil manufacturing sector (take it as read that most media types think every corporation is, by definition, evil). No, in this case the reports are starting to identify the real culprit: the civil service. Mark Steyn summarizes handily:

They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of 14 monthly paycheques per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere 12 monthly paycheques per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims — a man and two women — were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

We’ve already seen that employees in the public sector have been outpacing their private sector equivalents handsomely, but the Greek civil service has it even better than most:

Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their “working” lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death.

Nice. I wonder how they got into that interesting arrangement? No matter, the private sector will ride to the rescue, right? Not likely:

According to the World Bank, when it comes to the ease of doing business, Greece ranks 109th out of 183 countries. If they were dramatically to liberate their business-killing economy, they might overtake Lebanon at big hit position 108, and Ethiopia at 107, and maybe Papua New Guinea at 102. And who knows? With even more radical reform, they might crack the Hot One Hundred and be bubbling under such favourable business environments as Yemen (99) and Moldova (94). Greece ranks 140th when it comes to starting a business, and 154th when it comes to protecting investors.

If it’s that difficult to start a new business, is it any wonder that so much of the Greek economy is in the underground/unreported/untaxed sector? Many media reports say that anywhere from 10% to 25% of Greek economic activity is “off the books”. A quick Google search will show a much higher range of estimates going up to 60% . . . and that might be an optimistic under-estimate.

If more than half of the nation’s economic activity is in the black market, it will take much more than adding a few auditors and inspectors to the tax department to fix the problem: an absolute majority of Greeks are actively hiding their business from the government, and any serious attempt to crack down on them will bring down the government. And that’s not even the biggest danger — the Greek government isn’t the most stable entity to start with. The government falling might be a safety valve, because the other alternative is literally revolution.

Talk about your destabilization!

May 19, 2010

Haute stoner cuisine

Filed under: Economics, Food, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

There are so many restaurants now that some of them can even specialize to serve tiny demographics . . . like “restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.”

Even preschool teachers unwind with a round of drinks now and then. But in professional kitchens, where the hours are long, the pace intense and the goal is to deliver pleasure, the need to blow off steam has long involved substances that are mind-altering and, often enough, illegal.

“Everybody smokes dope after work,” said Anthony Bourdain, the author and chef who made his name chronicling drugs and debauchery in professional kitchens. “People you would never imagine.”

So while it should not come as a surprise that some chefs get high, it’s less often noted that drug use in the kitchen can change the experience in the dining room.

In the 1980s, cocaine helped fuel the frenetic open kitchens and boisterous dining rooms that were the incubators of celebrity chef culture. Today, a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested.

May 18, 2010

QotD: Time to kill the “information wants to be free” meme

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

“Information wants to be free” (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

This is a chunky, chewy little koan, and as these go, it’s an elegant statement of the main contradiction of life in the “information age”. It means, fundamentally, that the increase in information’s role as an accelerant and source of value is accompanied by a paradoxical increase in the cost of preventing the spread of information. That is, the more IT you have, the more IT generates value, and the more information becomes the centre of your world. But the more IT (and IT expertise) you have, the easier it is for information to spread and escape any proprietary barrier. As an oracular utterance predicting the next 40 years’ worth of policy, business and political fights, you can hardly do better.

But it’s time for it to die.

Cory Doctorow, “Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good”, The Guardian, 2010-05-18

May 11, 2010

Android alert!

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Apple fanboi faithful must be having mass cases of the vapours with the news that Android sales are eating everyone’s lunch:

I’ve written before that I think Google has been running a long game aimed against the telecomms carriers’ preferred strategy of customer lock-in, and executing on that game very well. Against the iPhone, its strategy has been a classic example of what the economist Clayton Christensen called “disruption from below” in his classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. With the G-1, Google initially competed on price, winning customers who didn’t want to pay Apple/AT&T’s premium and were willing to trade away Apple’s perceived superiority in “user experience” for a better price. Just as importantly, Android offered a near-irresistible deal to the carriers: months, even years slashed off time-to-market for a state-of-the-art cellphone; a huge advantage in licensing costs; and the illusion (now disintegrating) that said carriers would be able to retain enough control of Android-powered devices to practice their habitual screw-the-customer tactics.

In Christensen’s model, a market being disrupted from below features two products, sustaining and disrupter, both improving over time but with the disruptor at a lower price point and lesser capabilities. Typically, the sustaining company will be focused on control of its customers and business partners to extract maximum margins; on the other hand, the disruptor will be playing a ubiquity game, sacrificing margin to gain share. The sustaining company will gold-plate its product in order to chase high-end price-insenstive customers; the disruptor will seek out price-sensitive low-end customers.

I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming . . . I thought Google was mistaken to put so much development effort into the mobile phone market. I was clearly wrong about that.

In the smartphone market I have been expecting a disruptive break that would body-slam Apple’s market share, but I expected it to be several quarters in the future and with a really fast drop-off when it happened. Instead, it looks like Apple took a bruising in 4Q 2009 and has failed to regain share in 1Q 2010 while Android sales continued to rocket. Android hammered market-leader Blackberry just as badly, a fact which has gooten far less play than it probably should because the trade-press loves the drama of the Apple-vs.-Google catfight so much.

What actually seems to be going on here is that Android is successfully disrupting both Apple and Blackberry from below; together they’ve lost about 25% of market share, not enough to put Android on top but close enough that another quarter like the last will certainly do that.

I’ve heard several comments from folks that Apple’s iPhone sales are probably lower because of the widespread interest in the “next” iPhone model, which is likely to be announced in the next few weeks. Apple has followed this pattern since introducing the original iPhone, but there’s no rule saying they can’t break the pattern.

I’ll be interested in the announcement, as I’ll have a year left in my Rogers contract, so if the next iPhone isn’t a block-buster, I’ll be considering other options for when I’m out of contract.

A trillion dollars doesn’t buy as much as you’d expect

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

It doesn’t, for example, buy exemption from the laws of economics:

European Union President Herman Van Rompuy said European governments need to consider pooling their national powers and create a joint economic government.

“We can’t have a monetary union without some form of economic and political union and that is our big task for the coming weeks and the coming months,” he said.

He said he would draft tougher rules for EU leaders to discuss in October that go beyond current EU limits on debt and deficit.

The core problem is near-zero economic growth, high unemployment and governments unwilling to take painful steps to get people to work more and longer.

Simon Tilford, an economist at the Center for European Reform think tank, warned that EU governments so far haven’t come up with anything “game changing.”

“What Europe needs is a growth pact because without growth, public finances aren’t going to be sustainable,” Tilford said. “The bond markets are going to be forcing them to make those kind of changes.”

Even EU president Van Rompuy warned that the bloc risks irrelevance and the end of its expensive welfare programs if it can’t speed up economic growth, forecast to expand by just 1 percent this year.

“With 1 percent growth we can’t finance our social model any more. With 1 percent structural growth we can’t play a role in the world,” he told the World Economic Forum in Brussels. “We need to double the economic growth potential that we now have.”

So even with a trillion dollar injection, you still can’t spend more than you make, year after year, and hope to carry on as if there wasn’t a problem. Who knew?

May 7, 2010

QotD: The HST only looks good on paper

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:47

I know all the reasons why sales taxes — i.e. consumption taxes — are to be preferred to income taxes. Every economist I respect believes consumption taxes are better because they let the taxpayer control the amount of tax he pays. Don’t want to pay as much? Don’t buy as much.

But to an ordinary person, this is a silly argument. Everyone has to buy stuff — school clothes for the kids, a new car, a laptop. If your washing machine breaks down, you have to buy a new one or pay for repairs. There is no alternative but to pay the sales tax.

To consumers, a sales tax looks like the least avoidable kind of tax. For most people, the only true way around a consumption tax is to hid their spending by switching to cash, barter or the black market.

On paper, I agree with my economist buds. And if we lived on paper, I might try to convince you to learn to love the HST.

Lorne Gunter, “The HST is fine on paper. It’s only painful in real life”, National Post, 2010-05-07

May 3, 2010

The end of a monopoly

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Science, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Wine bottles have been sealed with natural cork for hundreds of years. It is an extremely good, natural product that has been used by almost all wine producers because it was better than every other economic sealant available. But cork has a problem that, as a natural product, it is subject to certain risks, the worst of which from a wine viewpoint was contamination with the chemical compound called 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole (usually abbreviated as TCA).

It only takes a tiny amount of TCA to ruin a bottle of wine: and it occurs naturally in the trees from which the cork is harvested. Wine producers and consumers were demanding a solution (wine writers have estimated that between 10% and 15% of all wines suffer from TCA tainting). As monopoly suppliers, however, the cork producers did very little — where else were wineries going to get their bottle closures?

Enter the competition:

By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. “No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase —and that’s what happened to us,” says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim.

The outcry was just the opening needed by Mr. Noel, a Belgian immigrant who in 1998 began making what he calls “corcs,” he says in part to avoid lawsuits from cork producers, in his North Carolina plastics factory.

Mr. Noel, whose company had specialized in extruded plastics such as pool noodles, named the new business Nomacorc LLC. He eventually built a new, highly automated factory that does nothing but churn out the plastic stoppers, 157 million a month.

The business took off as wineries, desperate for closures that wouldn’t cause cork taint, lined up to buy his product. Nomacorc now has plants on three continents, which produce 2 billion corks a year.

I’m not a big fan of plastic corks — I’m starting to prefer modern Stelvin twist-off closures — but at least with a plastic cork, there’s almost no chance of TCA contamination. I don’t buy very expensive wines, so the most expensive wine I’ve lost to cork taint was only about $60, but that’s still more money wasted than I’m willing to put up with.

If you’ve ever had a glass of wine that smelled of mouldy cardboard, you’ve had TCA-contaminated wine.

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

QotD: A notable unintended consequence

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Brian Micklethwait, “On the unintended consequences of President Obama”, Samizdata, 2010-04-28

April 29, 2010

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be fiction authors

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Charles Stross lays out the miserable truth about the practical issues when you try to write fiction for a living:

Most people have a very romanticized view of what it is that authors do. Firstly, there’s a widespread perception that the workload involved is relatively easy — in modern western nations, the level of functional literacy is high enough that a majority of the population can read a book, and write (at least to the extent of thumbing a 160-character text message on their phone). Because there is no obvious barrier to entry as with music (where proficiency with musical instruments clearly takes practice), most people assume that writing a novel is like writing a text message — you put one word in front of another until you’re done. The skills of fiction composition are largely invisible, until you try to actually do it. Secondly, many people harbour peculiar ideas about how much money there is in commercial publishing — and when disabused of the idea that selling a first novel is a road to riches, they assume it’s because the evil publishers are conspiring to keep all the money to themselves (rather than the unpalatable truth — publishing commercial fiction is hard work for little reward). Finally, there’s the Lifestyle chimera.

In short: it’s actually work to write for a living. The pay sucks for the vast majority of fiction writers. You face all the risks of a start-up business, but the potential pay-off is lottery-odds unlikely to come your way. Unlike other work, creative writing can’t be done (for most authors) in a predictable regular way:

Putting words in a row is wearying work. When they’re flowing fast, I can sometimes reach a dizzying peak output of 2000 words per hour for a couple of hours — not in fiction, but in a blog entry or a non-fiction essay. I’ve occasionally had death march sessions in which I pumped out as much as 10,000 words in a day. But such Stakhanovite output isn’t sustainable; a 10,000 word day is usually followed by a three-day-weekend to recover from it. A more realistic target for a full-time professional writer is 500-1000 words of finished prose per workday, corresponding to about 1-2 hours of writing, 2-4 hours of polishing, and another couple of hours of thinking about what they want to say, and how to say it. Like anyone else, they need weekends and vacation weeks and time to do the housekeeping. 1000 words per day for a 250-day working year (50 weeks of 5 days a week) works out at 250,000 words per year — or two 320 page novels.

There’s one SF/Fantasy author who seems to publish a new book every month, but he’s extremely unusual. For most authors, one or two books per year is pretty good output.

More wineries to screw it up, er, I mean “on”

Filed under: Economics, Science, Wine — Nicholas @ 12:17

The debate over wine bottle seals may not be quite over, but the evidence is mounting that modern screw-top closures (PDF document) are going to win out over traditional cork and modern synthetic cork closures:

The image above shows the state of 14 bottles of white wine sealed under various closures 125 months (just over 10
years) after bottling. This closure trial was conducted by the Australian Wine Research Institute to assess the relative
effects of cork, plastic and screw cap closures on bottle-aged wine and has unequivocally shown the superiority of
screw caps in aging wine.

[. . .]

The bottled wines were systematically analyzed over a 10 year period by sensory and analytical methods and
photographed (you can see the sequential photographs below). The bottle sealed with a screw cap is positioned on the
far left. While the pictures tell a convincing story, leaving little doubt as to which seal provides the most effective
method of preserving a wine, it is the sensory evaluation results that are most revealing. The wines sealed under screw
cap were still drinkable and showing appealing secondary aged characters while retaining freshness.

In spite of the obvious colour differences, those bottles all hold the same wine, from the same vintage. The bottle at the far right has darkened quite significantly and there’s quite a lot of sediment accumulated at the bottom of the bottle. Just looking at it, you’re probably correct to say it’s dead — don’t even bother uncorking it.

H/T to Michael Pinkus for the link.

All the Senate’s a stage, and Goldman Sachs merely a player

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Although in this case, it’s the Senators as walking shadows, poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then (if we’re lucky) are heard no more. Megan McArdle isn’t impressed:

The statements from the Senators make it clear that they are not holding this hearing in order to find out what happened; that’s the SEC’s job. They’re holding this hearing in order to be televised yelling at investment bankers. Claire McCaskill’s rant was particularly irrelevant to the actual question at hand, but all of them are mostly trying to express outrage, not make any coherent assessment of the strengths of the SEC’s case.

April 26, 2010

Maxime Bernier: Harper’s successor?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:32

Okay, so Andrew Coyne doesn’t quite go so far as to say that Bernier is the next leader of the Conservative party, but he certainly makes a case for Bernier speaking for an under-represented viewpoint in that party — actual conservatives, even (whisper it) “libertarians”:

Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what an extraordinary thing Maxime Bernier is attempting. The former minister in the Harper government is widely said to be preparing the ground for a future leadership bid. How has he been going about it? Since January, Bernier has been methodically laying explosives beneath the government and detonating them at regular intervals, in speeches and writings that, while not overtly criticizing Conservative policy, point in precisely the opposite direction to that on which the government happens to be embarked.

[. . .]

I cannot think of a precedent for this performance. Bernier is careful not to attack the party’s current leadership — just everything they’ve been doing. Yet he could hardly be accused of heresy. He represents, to paraphrase Howard Dean, the Conservative wing of the Conservative party — the party’s soul, its core beliefs, varnished as they may be under layers of expediency, yet still there. Indeed, so contorted has the Conservative party become that many people insist he is merely giving voice to what the leader himself believes.

[. . .]

Indeed, as a libertarian conservative from Quebec, he may find he has more supporters in the West. I don’t suggest he will be leader, or should. His record in cabinet was decidedly mixed: a fine industry minister, he was a disaster at Foreign Affairs. Though the speeches are thoughtful, it remains unclear whether there is a man of substance behind them, not least after the Couillard fiasco. Yet his willingness to state brave truths openly, to call the party back to its authentic self, marks him as one to watch.

I’ve often asked folks what substantive difference there is between the current Conservative government and the previous Liberal government. Other than the colour of the party signs, there’s not much actual “conservative” governing going on.

April 22, 2010

Tonight’s 1st round of the NFL draft

Filed under: Economics, Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

As in previous years, I have nothing useful to say about the draft because I don’t follow US college football — I don’t know the Heisman Trophy winner from the redshirt freshman at your local junior college. I’m so uninvolved that I won’t even catch the TV coverage.

My favourite team, the Minnesota Vikings, have eight picks in the draft (before the traditional horsetrading gets underway), and were expected to pick a cornerback in the first round (where they have the 30th pick). Yesterday, they signed former Eagle and Jet cornerback Lito Sheppard to a one-year contract, so they’re now expected to pick a defensive lineman . . . or maybe a quarterback (Tim Tebow, anyone?).

Under the circumstances, I did find this Wall Street Journal article quite interesting:

For a league that does many things well, the first round of the NFL draft is a mess.

The league gives its worst teams first crack at incoming college talent in the name of parity, but instead of giving bad teams a leg up, it often forces them to draft players they don’t really need at prices they can’t afford. Many top picks hold out of training camp before they sign, only to end up with enormous contracts that have little to do with their true value to a football team.

What’s more, as this page reported Wednesday, NFL teams have a 50% chance of blowing a first-round pick entirely — the sort of costly gaffe that can set a franchise back for years.

Granted that there is no perfect mechanism available to replace the current draft process, it’s pretty clear that improvements could be made. Gregg Easterbrook has been championing a rookie salary cap for several years, which would move the monster contract negotiations out from initial signing to a later date, allowing teams to pay more directly for demonstrated ability (but even that sort of system could be gamed, of course). As I wrote last year:

The story repeats, draft after draft, as highly touted college stars are taken early in the first round, sign megabucks contracts and then go into the witness protection program. A rookie salary cap would be in the interests of almost everyone: teams, veteran players, and rookies-not-taken-in-the-first-round. The only ones who’d see their situation change for the worse would be the first 32 players taken in the draft (who would now have to prove that they can make the transition to the pro league before being rewarded with big contracts).

Update, 10:45pm: Speaking of horse-trading . . . I just happened to check the New York Times liveblog, and Minnesota has traded their first round pick, #30, to the Detroit Lions. No Viking pick in the first round, but they get Detroit’s pick in the second round, #34 overall, plus a 4th (#100) and a 7th (#214) in exchange. QB Jimmy Clausen had slipped from a speculated top-10 pick all the way to 30, where the NY Times folks were speculating he’d be the Vikings’ pick. Don’t know if he’ll still be there at the 34th pick, or if the Vikings are even interested (the chatter had them interested in Tim Tebow, who went to the Denver Broncos with the 25th selection).

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