Melbourne Cup shuts down indefinitely as unions call for strike

Event organisers of the annual Melbourne Cup 2011 horse racing event have shut down their operations and stabled all horses indefinitely much to the dismay of the general Australian public.

After being plagued by months of tedious negotiations with jockey, stable hand and horse whisperer unions, Michael Burn, chairman of the Victoria Racing Club, has announced a stalemate.

“We simply can’t find a middle ground regarding the unions’ demands for Australian-only horses in the event.” Burn explained.

“Strewth” proclaimed one union representative, “we’ve still got Phar Lap rearing to go! She’s in good nick compared to the rest of em!”

Calls to exhume dead Australian racehorses for the event fell on deaf ears as race organisers insisted that it could only serve to damage the sport and wither their support base.

“Sure, the Australian public might not get a great product, but gee if they knew how much easier my job would be having only to take care of dead horses as opposed to live ones, well they’d happily make the small sacrifice of enduring the least possible competitive form of the sport” opined one young stablehand.

“Plus we can’t have our national icon event sullied by foreign imports! I mean this is Australia! We need to preserve our national identity.” he added, satisfied that his personal demands also somehow aligned with the nation’s interests.

Jockeys are frustrated too. Many foreign horses are bringing with them foreign contractor jockeys, who appear to be taking a share of the pie. The people, it seems, must make the difficult choice between enjoying competitive horse racing or promoting domestic mediocrity.

“Is it too much to ask that the Australian public change their preferences entirely so that we’re less mildly inconvenienced than we’d prefer?” quizzed James Schanks, head of the Australian Jockey’s Union, who’s eyes appeared to be firmly focused on an insect that had landed on the camera lens as his, ostensibly idiosyncratic, lip-smacking habit grew increasingly audible.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has intervened at the last minute, calling all parties to strongly consider a middle-ground solution in the nation’s first ever large scale ‘Fair-Racing Committee’. One key recommendation to emerge from these discussions is to consider reconfiguring the wording of the expression “you can’t flog a dead horse” to “you can’t flog a dead horse unless it’s in the nation’s social and economic interests”.

Meanwhile, in some industrial wasteland in Sydney, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce was smacking his head against a wall. Repeatedly.

North Londoners plead with rioters to return to the streets of the capital

After having ostensibly recovered from days of rioting and looting by snot-nosed kids in desperate need of some new sneakers and some indiscriminate arson, north London endured its worst devastation since the The Blitz.

“These lads from Manchester just have no respect.” Bemoaned Arsene Wenger, the misanthropic manager of Arsenal Football club.

Tottenham’s manager, Harry Redknapp, also joined the chorus. “They think they can come over here and just take whatever they want.” Class, dignity and premiership title hopes were amongst the casualties.

After the clubs were destroyed by their Manchester rivals yesterday afternoon by margins of 4 and 6 goals, respectively, both north London managers have called for a return to anarchy in the streets of London in order to stem the tide of ‘Mancurean’ destruction.

“The government just simply failed to recognise the organic emergence of anarchy as an automatic stabiliser for rubbish quality football” explained professor Hackney of the London School of Economics. According to the football-welfare theorem, when football clubs are doomed to fail, unscrupulous rioting typically precedes it in order to draw attention away from the club’s inevitable demise.

“Instead of over-compensating by expediting  the punishment of ‘offenders’, the government really should be arming the rioters with biological weapons in order to fully stabilise the negative sentiment directed towards Tottenham and Arsenal football clubs” concluded Hackney.

Mr Wenger concurs. “What about that ‘rage virus’? Have we developed anything like that yet? If the film ’28 Days Later’ is anything to go by, then a zombie outbreak would certainly be the optimum solution to restabilise the public’s negative perception of my team.”

“The great thing about zombies is that they don’t only ensure apocalyptic Armageddon, but they also tend to rather like eating Londoners’ brains. Which is precisely the organ that we’d like our supporters to desist from using.” added Harry Redknapp, enthusiastically.

The fate of north London football, it seems, depends largely on the probability of such an event to occur.

Hersh’s coffee conundrum

Takeaway coffee:

99% of the time the cashier asks for a name with an order.

95% of the time they need help spelling ‘Hersh’.

75% of the time we have an unnecessarily long conversation about ‘Hershey’s Chocolate’.

100% of the time, the barrista doesn’t even bother with my name when my order’s up.

Solving backwards:

70% of all mornings, I have existential angst

Innovative charity borrows funds from its own recipients

This month marked the Annual General Meeting of the ‘Because we know better‘ foundation, a charity.

What made this particular meeting unique, was that it was held in the Sahelise Republic. The attendees were not the board of directors, but rather the aid recipients of this benevolent, charitable organisation. The presenters were Carly Caring and her teenage sweetheart Charles Charmley. Both are co-founders of the foundation, recent university graduates and people that generally think that getting a job is, like, sooo what everyone else is doing.

Unfortunately, hygiene concerns around the general ‘ickiness’ of the developing world led the organisers to opt for a live satellite feed instead of their original plan for a ‘full-blown poverty tour’. Around the same time that cost estimates were released, the couple decided it might even be more appropriate to tape their general meeting and just send over a copy of it on DVD. Ingeniously, they discovered that they could simply pause at certain intervals of the recording so as give the ‘live-feel-appearance’ of taking questions from their audience. They would then proceed to answer them in a way that would not be too overbearingly specific so as to risk giving the impression that a different question were being answered altogether.

“You see, we want to show our beautiful little people over there that it’s all about them, you know? We want to show them that we know them. That we know them better than they think we do. And, one might even say, better than they know themselves!” Charmley seemed to refrain, as though a rapturous applause were due. Once he realised that he was the only person in the room and actually talking into a tape recorder, he continued: “My dear, of course we already know what they’re going to ask us! And by gosh we’re jolly well going to pre-record and send our answers over there for our lovely little jubbly bubblies, even if it kills us!” He paused, thoughtfully. “And you know, we just really can’t wait to explain our whole loss-leading thingy-majig to them”.

Charmley, of course, is referring to the foundation’s investment strategy for this year. “You’ve gotta spend money to make money” the couple chimed in chorus with an eeriness that only hours of rehearsal could explain. The foundation’s revenue base revolves around the fabulous cocktail parties and black-tie balls organised for their friends and people-their-friends-want-to-hook-up-with each year. As it turned out, last year’s haute-couture cum saving-poor-people bonanza was unfortunately not as well managed as initially expected. They turned a loss. The twelve-foot ice sculpture of Bono, the laser light show and the fresh Caspian Caviar just didn’t quite attract the number of attendees they needed to cover their costs. What makes this awkward for the couple is that this year, instead of being able to provide donated funds to their recipients, they are, hat-in-hand, asking them for a loan.

“Today we come to you with nothing. Well… er, we actually come to you with, um, less than nothing.” Caring explained that the foundation was determined to make this year’s ball more super-fantastically-fabulous than ever, ever. So long as this year’s has guest appearances from Masterchef stars, cocktail barmen that can throw lots of thingies in the air and that the ice sculptor can take special requests from guests – then no-one will even think of going to Stephanie’s ball this year. Or as she is more commonly known within the foundation: “stupid-Stephanie“. Apparently, last year Stephanie made the claim that attending her charity ball would not just make poverty history, but make it history one month earlier than all the other charitable organisations would. Having an indoor swimming pool and bar is also understood to have helped her cause.

“Loss leading charities are the way forward, people” continued Caring “I want you to think of this as an investment in your futures.”

“You know for all those books, or toilet paper or whatever it is that you need over there. Education, or healthcare or was it drinking water? I forget. But it doesn’t matter. The because-we-know-better foundation is here to save you! Just not today is all.”

The residents of the Sahelise town collectively sighed and got back to whatever it was that they were doing before they were distracted by the sideshow.

“At least we only have to put up with them once a year” said one, optimistically.

Burrito-nomics

We’ve all been there. Watching the 1972 film of Mario Puzzo‘s “The Godfather“, and thinking:

“Ah.”

“Yep.” Followed by a thoughtful pause, “That’s pretty sweet.” An unadulterated expression of dreamy ambition, if ever there were one.

Alas, all sorts of petty insecurities always got in the way of realising this dream. You know, those absurd hang-ups that we have over things like brushes with the law, having to negotiate inconvenient prison visiting hours and possibly getting roughed up by some rather unpleasant chaps from time to time. For reasons that defy reason itself, these were what we decided to be the insurmountable obstructions between our ambitious desires and commandeering our very own Corleone family.

And so instead, we traded unprovoked street brawls for a bachelors degree in something or the other with an important-sounding-ring to it. A roughneck posse, for a professional network. A brutal arsenal to call upon, for a lovely collection of beautifully embossed business cards.

A fork in the road, you might say. The direction down which we, rightly or wrongly, chose conservatively.

Or so you might think.

You may be surprised to know that the very collection of business cards that we previously scoffed at, some professional collusion and the prospect of free burritos – all form a magnificent recipe for the modern street-level cartel.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that there’s a hypothetical burrito shop. Whilst we’re in the mood for hypothetical scenarios and all, let’s also say that this shop has a weekly competition where the lucky prize winner will receive TEN FREE BURRITOS!!! The mechanism that such a hypothetical store might use to draw the results would be to collect participants’ business cards and draw one card each week to determine the winner. On average there will be 20 unique business card entries per week.

Winners Curse...?

You. The young burrito loving professional that you are, having never understood why you ever really needed a business card in the first place, will suddenly find meaning in the wanky business card universe. And your odds on winning each week will be 1 in 20. If you win, lets also go on to say that you will be required to claim all of your 10 burritos at once. This will mean that you’ll need to share them with 9 of your pals. That makes the expected payoff for you and your muchachos out to be 0.05 burritos per week.

Alternatively, you and your burrito fratelli could illegally collude to increase your odds. This strategy will combine your 10 business cards together with which you will crowd-out the competition. Locked in an unspoken bond of mutually beneficial chipotle infused goodness, your individual expected payoffs will jump to 0.333 burritos per week. That’s a jump in your odds by a whopping 567%!

The rules of the cartel will be simple. No individual business card can be greater than the family. No individual will disrespect the cartel. This will keep the burrito racket in the family and will also plump up your odds for some serious burrito eatage.

Anyone who brings shame to La Familia will sleep with the fish burritos. A caveat that must be made clear from the onset.

Follow these simple rules, my fellow bored, middle-class, gangster-flick-loving friends, and your burrito families will flourish beyond the dreams of the Corleones.

Buon Appetito, compardes.

GDP slump to propel England’s World Cup hopes

As it turns out, the bleaker England’s economic outlook becomes the better the chance they stand at lifting the 2011 Cricket World Cup, according to the latest research.

The economists that predicted 11 of the last 5 recessions have put their analytical skills to the test with their latest break-through predictive model. The rationale, according to Professor Hackney of the LSE, is that “The English really do like to work, but tend to be rather distracted when any of the national sports teams are performing well.“

Since it is such a rare occurrence, it seemed only a matter of time before researchers studied the societal implications of high performing English sporting teams.

“Forget the Global Financial Crisis“, says Hackney. “We’ve got our sights set firmly on the English Cricket Board“. And it seems he has a point. Surely it can be no coincidence that the cricket team can perform so well in the worst economic times and yet so poorly in the best. This inverse relationship has been tracked closely by, taxpayer funded, British civil servants and statisticians to reveal this uncanny correlation.

GDP growth is inflation adjusted. Similarly the cricket results have been adjusted to neglect meaningless matches against rubbish sides like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe

So it seems the effect of cricket performance is strongly, negatively correlated with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in lock-step. Although the direction of causation is largely driven by the performance of the cricket team, it is undeniable that the response in GDP performance is instantaneous. As such, GDP growth as an indicator has become the most robust gauge to date for predicting the form of the English national team.

An enthusiastic economist and fanatical cricket fan, Hackney could barely restrain himself from revealing his paper’s final conclusion:

“And the best news for English cricket fans is that the economy looks set to tank spectacularly this year!“

Cinderella: the micro economist

Many people have mistaken Cinderella to be a tale of romance against adversity. You may remember the tale to be about a poor, working girl who finally got a shot at living the high life and finding her prince charming. Curiously, all of this nonsense about fairy godmothers, pumpkins and the like were overlooked by our younger, less skeptical selves.

Upon closer inspection, we can derive some truths whilst eradicate some myths about the tale. That she was a working girl is true. That she went out to a ball is also true. That she met some nice fellow but conscientiously left at midnight is all true! The rest, however, is absolute rubbish.

You see, the fact is that Cinderella was a young professional who understood that although going out to balls and meeting princes can be jolly good fun and all that… she had to get up for work the next morning. The truth is that Cinderella taught us nothing about romance or adversity.

Instead, she taught us the importance of trade-offs and exponential time discounting.

Cinderella, like any of us, went out drinking on the town on a weeknight. The difference between you and her, is that she realised that it made perfect economic sense to go home at midnight.

It’s quite simple, really. Beyond a certain point in time the utility that you gain from staying out and partying doesn’t sufficiently compensate the disutility that you get from losing that time in which you could have been sleeping. Put differently, the opportunity cost of staying out and drinking is the sleep that you could be getting otherwise. For anyone that has had to work the next day, you know… it’s rarely worth it.

The crappy sleep, the headache, the fatigue, the hating on peeps on the train, the hating in general. And for what? Typically for conversation that deteriorated into talking about celebrities’ haircuts – invariably in a slurred, drawled and unintelligible manner. I mean, have you ever looked back at a debaucherous weeknight and thought – “man when we stuffed our underpants with ice cream at 3am it was TOTALLY WORTH IT”?

I suspect that the lower life forms of you lot might beg to differ. But I’m not particularly interested in your opinion. Nor would be Cinderella.

But to be clear, Cinderella and I aren’t only looking at one side of the equation. We’re well aware that going out and partying IS a lot of fun, it’s just that on weeknights you have an extra constraint to consider. After all, we’re only looking out for your true ‘time value’.

You see, going out and drinking is a logarithmic function of utility. This means that the increase in your happiness (utility) is propelled greatly by the amount of time you spend out on the turps. However, it is also a diminishing function after a certain point. This means that your level of utility ‘plateaus’ after a certain point in the night. Maybe the 15th beer didn’t really add all that much more value than the 14th, for example.

Now when you’re out on a weeknight, there’s another function that you need to consider. It’s a negative logarithmic function which represents the utility that you lose by not getting to bed. Because in this case, waking up the next morning’s totally gonna be a drag.

Basically this function gets off to a slow start, which pretty much tells us that you’re not really losing all that much utility to start with. But then it accelerates after a certain point in the night. Maybe after about 4am, when you start to think… “Why am I still awake? And why’s there a circus clown following me?”

e = Equilibrium, EL = Efficiency Loss

What Cinderella was interested in was the optimal point at which these functions intersect. Cinderella helped us to find that point, and I took the liberty to sketch a graph to illustrate her message for you.

And so is revealed the truth behind Cinderella: the micro economist.

No pumpkins. Just economics.