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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- I don’t have a whole lot for you this week. I stayed up lateon Monday to watch my Georgia Bulldogs valiantly battle the referees, er...Alabama Crimson Tide...only to come up just a fraction short of winning a championship, then spent the rest of the week chasing work stuff. That didn’t give me a lot of time to write this, or to solicit questions, so you only get three! I mean, really, guys, I can’t do everything. My life-long Georgia fandom is explained, along with my brilliant plan to manage the inevitable expansion of the College Football Playoff. Then we talk some Canadian Economic issues with Lady Catherine before closing out with some more Star Wars, which is more or less your favorite topic, as far as I can tell. Finally, I will tell you who Kendrick Lamar is, since some of you apparently live in isolation chambers. Submitted by: Gavin Why are you a Georgia fan and is there any fixing you? ;) So...the thing is, I’m not, really. At the beginning of last year’s College Football season, a lot of trash talk started floating around the Misfits. Between Rex (Alabama), CDP (Arkansas), Anne (Texas A&M), JR (Texas) and Marc (Texas A&M), there were a lot of intense rooting interests and many of them seemed to be SEC-centric. Always looking to be involved in the needling, I arbitrarily decided to adopt Florida as my rooting interest. Someone else who I can’t seem to remember picked some other terrible SEC school for less arbitrary reasons. My major rationale was that Florida seemed like they should be pretty good, and @VitaeLibertas could serve as my fan consultant. That worked fine, and we also added Kayla (Washington) and Musket (Texas Tech) as intense rooting interests this year, which increased the fun level. Incidentally, the only school that would actually make a lot of sense for me to root for played BOTH Washington and Texas Tech this season...but I didn’t know that when I was choosing!!! Then Florida really disappointed me. First, they kinda sucked, and second, they rolled out the single ugliest uniforms in the history of sports. Orange and Blue is a tough color combination to begin with, and they somehow managed to find something dramatically worse than that. I can’t look bad and root for a loser, so I bid the Gators adieu and jumped ship to their northern rivals, at least partially because they have America’s best mascot. Not to toot my own horn, but the fortunes of the two programs have changed pretty dramatically since I left Gainesville for Athens! Florida had their worst season in recent memory, including a “not as close as the score” 42-7 pasting in the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. Yea, that’s right...I am a traditionalist and I still call it the Cocktail Party. They embarrassingly bungled the firing of their coach and then failed to secure a top 15 recruiting class for the first time in ages. Meanwhile, Georgia stormed through the SEC, avenged their only loss to Auburn to win the league title, beat Oklahoma in a thrilling Rose Bowl and found time to put together the nation’s top recruiting class. They may have been ruined by referees who apparently forgot what holding is and couldn’t see simple illegal motion, but it has still been a pretty good fall for my Dawgs! On this subject, @CDPayne79 and I pretty much sketched out the future of college football in the half hour or so after the game. I may not know a whole lot about football (I did date someone who played in the NFL during college) but I have been involved in some sports-business stuff that gives me a better grasp on the economics of sports than you probably think. And college football is a VERY big business… So, long and short, we’re getting a bigger playoff (too much money not to) and under Alex’s rules, we’d have 12 teams with byes to the top four (similar to the NFL), including the five major conference champions, the highest rated non-power conference champion and the next 10 best schools as decided by the committee. The four byes will go to the four highest rated conference champions (which preserves the importance of conference championship games). First, the same committee breaks the 12 participants into three groups: the top four, the next four and the bottom four. There is no #1 and #2, there are only groups. In Week 1 (which would have been the weekend of December 15th this year), the teams in the middle tier would host games against teams in the bottom tear, on the campuses of the higher seeded teams. The committee can make the matchups however they see fit, whether it be to increase TV ratings, attendance, geographic preference, perceived fairness or whatever they see fit. If we take this year’s pool of teams as determined by the final rankings as an example, teams 5-8 (Alabama, Wisconsin, Auburn, Southern Cal) would each be matched against a team 9-12 (Penn State, Miami, Washington, Central Florida). The committee would probably want to avoid intra-conference games and regular season rematches, so Southern Cal and Washington, for example, would be kept apart. And maybe they’d send Washington to Wisconsin because it is a much shorter trip than somewhere in Alabama. Since there is no convenient trip to Los Angeles, maybe the lowest seeded team (Central Florida) gets sent there. I’d play one game at 8:00 EST on Friday night and then three games at 1:00, 4:30 and 8:00 on Saturday. Four of those teams advance to play the following week (December 23rd this year) on the campuses of the top four teams, allocated similarly. Again, you’d likely want to keep conferences away from each other if you could, so Wisconsin or Penn State would be kept away from Ohio State, Alabama and Auburn from Georgia and Miami from Clemson. Again, play one game Friday and three Saturday and you have cemented College Football as THE sporting even for the month of December. From there, you pick right back up where we are now with the semifinals and final played in a rotating group of bowls and neutral sites. Voila! You’re taken the magic of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and applied it to a sport that people care about for more than just its easy-to-understand gambling format! Are there problems here? Sure...for one, you’d have to think about whether teams could still play 13 regular season games (yes, they probably can. It’s not good for the players, but that has never bothered the NCAA and I don’t expect it will now). You also devalue the non-semifinal bowls because the top 12 teams are all committed to games that matter. Honestly, this is less of a problem than it has ever been before...the bowls are dying. There are too many of them with too fewer attendees and too few eyeballs. Somewhere around a dozen would survive to serve the next 20-30 teams who don’t make the playoff, but a whole bunch would fold (spoiler alert: many are going to fold anyway.) And there you have it: Alex makes college football even better! Submitted by: Lady Catherine How did Canada’s unemployment rate drop to its lowest level in decades? I have several guesses:
The truth is that the unemployment figure dropped the old fashioned way...from a robust economy sending people back to work. For somewhat complicated reasons, the published unemployment rate is a more meaningful figure in Canada than it is in the United States, where it has become increasingly misleading. But that is a story for another day...for now, just go with “lower unemployment, yay!”. First of all, some data normalization...while the United States is about 9 times bigger than Canada (323 million people vs. 36.3 million), the labor force is only about 8 times bigger (160.6 million per BLS vs. 19.6 million per Statistics Canada). The primary reason, as far as I can tell, is that Canada counts everyone over age 15, while the US counts everyone over age 18, but there are also differences in the number of people actually looking for work. This has some ramifications that make a straight comparison a little misleading, but it is small enough that I am going to ignore it. The Canadian economy generated 422,500 jobs in 2017, nearly all of them full-time jobs. A similar proportional increase in the US would be nearly 3.5 million new jobs, a figure not seriously approached since the late 1990’s. Despite a flurry of seemingly good news at the end of 2017, the US economy added only a little over 2 million jobs, the fewest since 2010 and many of those jobs were part-time. If I had to guess without knowing, I’d say that the cost of benefits for a full time employee is lower as a result of Government-provided healthcare, so Canadian employers are maybe quicker to add full-time rather than part-time workers, but I am lacking in further specifics on that, so it is just that: a guess. By volume, most of the job growth came from the services sector, but the growth rates were faster in sectors that make, harvest and mine stuff. Transportation, finance and technical services all grew faster than the overall average and added roughly a third of the overall total new jobs. Manufacturing was the biggest job creator (87,000) while natural resources and construction also grew faster than average. Retail, education, health care and social assistance were the slowest growers. There are actually a lot of interesting data points in here. Nearly HALF of the new jobs went to older people (55+, about 30% of the population)...which is bad phrasing, since most likely they just didn’t retire as fast as they usually do {think of the way the math works on this...total workers goes up when people find new jobs OR when current workers turn 55. It goes down when they retire. The number of unemployed workers goes down either when someone finds a job or when a non-worker dies}. That rise was more dramatic for women than it was for men. There is, however, one huge unexplored risk hovering over the economy. OK, there are two, since the country is aging at a rapid rate and the population of young people is actually falling. The real risk, though, is that the economy collapses under the weight of a huge surplus of crappy ham products as millions and millions of Q4’17 buyers return their purchases at the same time, collectively shouting “I was defrauded! This is not bacon!” Submitted by: Heidi Ho! Rank the Star Wars Movies, Alex. I took maybe a little bit of shit for telling you that The Last Jedi is meh, but less than I kind of expected. So, feeling emboldened, I will happily tackle this one!
Interestingly, the only two here that I don’t think you can move out of their spots are Revenge of the Sith, which is the third best movie and not very close to either #2 or #4, and The Phantom Menace, which is absolutely the worst. You could swap the top two if you like, and I think you can more or less throw a blanket over #4-#7 (maybe not Attack of the Clones, that was pretty dumb). Also leaves a big question for the ninth installment...in the first trilogy, the third movie was clearly the weakest, and in the second trilogy the third movie was clearly the strongest. How will this one turn out? ----------------- Alex’s random old song of the week For some reason, a whole bunch of you don’t know who Kendrick Lamar is. Where the hell have you been? I mean, I don’t expect you to know all the words from To Pimp a Butterfly, but you have to at least know who he is! This is pretty obviously not an old song (not that I am calling any of you “old”) but it’s this week’s song. Here, then, is a quick intro...the frenetic, pounding m.A.A.d City. *Sigh*...fine, he was the guy in Bad Blood, too.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
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