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Millennials and Comic Books: Chill Out, Haters

by Aaron Duff Posted on December 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Saul DeGrew surveys the various complaints people have about the Millennial generation. Here’s one:

Another part of the Millennial complaint brigade is complaining about how they are still into videogames, comic books, and other activities from their childhood….I admit that I find this aspect of the Millennials staying Kids debate to be a bit troublesome but that is probably my own snobbery and cultural elitism coming in more than anything else. I don’t quite understand how explosion and bang wow movies are still big among a good chunk of the over-30 set.

Forget videogames: that’s a huge industry that spans all generations these days. Their popularity says nothing about arrested adulthood. But I was curious: just how many Millennials are still reading comic books? Not just “interested” in comics or willing to see the latest X-Men movie. DeGrew may not like “bang wow” movies, but they’ve been a pretty standard part of Hollywood’s product mix forever, and the current fad for superhero bang wow movies doesn’t say much of anything about Millennial culture in particular.

So: how many actual readers of comic books are there among Millennials? I don’t know, but here’s a guess:

  1. Diamond Comic Distributors sold about 84 million comics in 2013. Diamond is damn near a monopoly, but it’s not a total monopoly, and that number is only for the top 300 titles anyway. So let’s round up to 100 million.
  2. That’s about 8 million per month. Some comic fans buy two or three titles a month, others buy 20 or 30. A horseback guess suggests that the average fan buys 5-10 per month.
  3. That’s maybe 1.5 million regular fans, give or take. If we figure that two-thirds are Millennials, that’s a million readers.
  4. The total size of the Millennial generation is 70 million. But let’s be generous and assume that no one cares if teenagers and college kids are still reading comics. Counting only those over 22, the adult Millennial population is about 48 million.
  5. So that means about 2 percent of adult Millennials are regular comic book readers. (If you just browse through your roomie’s stash sporadically without actually buying comics, you don’t count.)

I dunno. I’d say that 2 percent really isn’t much. Sure, superheroes pervade popular culture in a way they haven’t before, though they’ve always been popular. Adults watched Superman on TV in the 50s, Batman on TV in 60s, and Superman again on the big screen in the 80s. But the rise of superhero movies in the 90s and aughts has as much to do with the evolution of special effects as with superheroes themselves. Older productions couldn’t help but look cheesy. Modern movies actually make superheroes look believable. Science fiction movies have benefited in the same way.

In any case, superheroes may be a cultural phenomenon of the moment—just ask anyone who tries to brave the San Diego Comic-Con these days—but even if you accept the argument that reading comics is ipso facto a marker of delayed adulthood1, the actual number of Millennials who do this is pretty small. So chill out on the comics, Millennial haters.

1I don’t. I’m just saying that even if you do, there aren’t really a huge number of Millennial-aged comic fans anyway.

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Millennials and Comic Books: Chill Out, Haters

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How About If We All Get Back to Protecting and Serving?

by PrestonCaraway Posted on December 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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My neighboring city of Costa Mesa may be thousands of miles from New York and much, much smaller (population: 112,000), but they have something in common: police unions that don’t seem to know when to quit. Check this out:

An Orange County Superior Court judge on Wednesday ordered a private investigator to stay away from two Costa Mesa councilmen he allegedly helped surveil in the run-up to local 2012 elections.

….The false-imprisonment charge relates to the filing of a police report that caused Councilman Jim Righeimer to be detained briefly when an officer responded to his home to perform a sobriety test, according to prosecutors….Scott Impola ‘s firm was retained by the Costa Mesa Police Assn. to surveil and research local councilmen who were trying to cut pension costs and reduce jobs at City Hall, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

As part of their work, Impola and private investigator Chris Lanzillo allegedly put a GPS tracker on Councilman Steve Mensinger’s car and later called in a false DUI report on Righeimer as he was leaving Skosh Monahan’s, a restaurant owned by fellow Councilman Gary Monahan.

….Prosecutors say they have no evidence that the police union knew of any illegal activity beforehand.

Well, yeah. No evidence. But there is this:

Costa Mesa police officers mocked members of the City Council and suggested ways to catch them in compromising positions in the run-up to the 2012 municipal election, according to emails contained in court documents reviewed Monday by the Daily Pilot.

…. In one message, the association’s then-treasurer, Mitch Johnson, suggested telling the union’s lawyer about two of the councilmen’s upcoming city-sponsored trip to Las Vegas….”I’m sure they will be dealing with other ‘developer’ friends, maybe a Brown Act violation or two, and I think Steve Mensinger is a doper and has moral issues,” Johnson wrote in an email from a private account. “I could totally see him sniffing coke off a prostitute. Just a thought.“

Yes. “Just a thought.” I have a feeling that maybe the GPS and DUI revelations didn’t come as a big shock or anything when the union was confronted with them. There’s also this:

The association’s president at the time, Jason Chamness, told the grand jury that he asked the law firm to dig up dirt on certain City Council members because he believed they were corrupt. Shortly after the DUI report involving Righeimer, the union fired the law firm, although the affidavit notes the union continued to pay a retainer until as recently as January 2013.

During his testimony, Chamness also said he deleted emails from his private account, which he used to contact the law firm about union business.

And why did the police union hire these two goons? Because the city councilmen in question were trying to cut pension costs and reduce jobs at City Hall. How dare they?

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How About If We All Get Back to Protecting and Serving?

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Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

by William V. Wainscott Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

From Politico:

Jeb Bush is stepping down from the board of a health care company that has reportedly profited from Obamacare, a move that comes as the Republican explores a run for the presidency.

According to various media reports, Tenet backed President Barack Obama’s health reform act and has seen its revenues rise from it. Bush’s involvement with Tenet could give ammunition to conservatives in the GOP who view him as too moderate — particularly those who despise the Affordable Care Act.

I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this. In normal times, Bush would have left Tenet because it’s a big, soulless corporation that’s paid fines for Medicare fraud and been criticized for dodgy tax practices at the same time it was beefing up executive pay. A man of the people who aspires to the Oval Office can’t afford to be associated with this kind of dirty money.

But no. At least if Politico is to be believed, this isn’t really an issue in the GOP primary. What is an issue is that Tenet might have profited from Obamacare, which in turn means that Jeb may have profited from Obamacare. Even if it’s a double bank shot, that’s dirty money in tea party land.

Of course, Jeb also has some of the more conventional plutocratic image problems:

Soon after his tenure as governor ended, Bush became an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays….In May 2013, Bush set up Britton Hill Holdings and dove into the private equity business….Bush’s first fund invested in Inflection Energy….His next one, BH Logistics, raised $26 million this spring from investors including China’s HNA Group….Bush’s newest fund, U.K.-based BH Global ­Aviation, is his largest and most complicated. It deepens his financial ties to China and Hainan….“In many deals, the U.K. ­effectively serves the same function as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda,” Needham says. “It’s like a tax haven, except it’s the U.K.”

Plus there’s the fact that Jeb stayed on as an advisor to Barclay’s for years after it was fined for illegally trading with various blacklisted countries, notably including Cuba and Iran. If being on the board of a company that profited from Obamacare is a problem, surely this is at least equally bad. The attack ads write themselves, don’t they?

Anyway, apparently Jeb is now in cleanup mode:

“These are all growth investments that the governor has worked on,” said Bush’s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell….Campbell said the 61-year-old former governor is “reviewing all his engagements and his business commitments” now that he’s begun to focus on a potential race. “That’s a natural next step,” she said.

Indeed it is. On the other hand, Mitt Romney severed most of his ties with Bain Capital a full decade before he ran for president, and just look at how much good that did him. Jeb probably isn’t out of the woods yet.

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Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

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Christmas Movies Are Now Just As Horrible As Everything Else Related to Christmas

by bisericidinlemn Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this answers a question for me. Dan Drezner describes the standard Jewish ritual for Christmas day:

Chinese food and a movie. Perfectly pleasant rituals, made special by the fact that the Gentiles are all at home or at church….

No longer.

I don’t know when it became a thing for Christian families to also go see a movie on the day commemorating the birth of Jesus, but personal experience tells me this is a relatively recent phenomenon — i.e., the past 15 years or so. All I know is that what used to be a pleasant movie-going experience is now extremely crowded.

Several years ago I naively decided that it might be nice to see a movie on Christmas. I figured the crowds would be really light and we could just slip right in. Needless to say, I was disabused of this notion quickly, and headed for home just as fast as my car would take me. At the time, I wondered what was going on. Had things changed? Was I just unaware that Christmas had always been a big movie day? Or what?

I guess it’s the former. There really was a golden era when Christmas movies were uncrowded, but it disappeared before I even knew it existed. Sic transit etc.

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Christmas Movies Are Now Just As Horrible As Everything Else Related to Christmas

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How Much Would You Pay For $4,905 In Pension Benefits?

by JanetTTWWo Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Adam Ozimek points us to some recent research suggesting that people don’t actually value pensions very highly:

The study utilizes a change in policy in Illinois that allowed teachers to purchase more pension benefits in exchange for a one-time fee. This allowed the determination of how much teachers are willing to pay for marginal pension benefits. The authors found that on average, teachers valued each $1 in marginal pension benefits at $0.20.

This is useful information for two reasons. First, it suggests states may be able to save money and make teachers better off by buying back pension obligations in exchange for current lump sum payments. Second, it suggests that for districts looking to cut costs, decreases in benefits do not need to be offset with equal dollar value increases in current pay in order to maintain labor supply.

(Yes, that’s 20 cents for one dollar of present value. Specifically, the study finds that on average, teachers are willing to pay only $1,000 for benefits that the pension fund has to pay $4,905 to purchase.)

But does this mean that Illinois teachers would snap up a $1,000 lump sum today in return for a decrease of $4,905 in future pension benefits? Not so fast, pardner. A combination of status quo bias, loss aversion, and the endowment effect suggests that things wouldn’t be so easy.

Status quo bias is just what it sounds like: we all tend to succumb to a sort of emotional inertia that favors whatever benefits we happen to be getting at the moment. Loss aversion is the well known effect that people work harder to avoid the loss of $X than to secure the gain of $X. And the endowment effect causes people to ascribe greater value than normal to things they own, solely because they happen to own them. Put all these things together, and it’s highly unlikely that Illinois teachers would be willing to sell off a dollar of benefits they currently get in return for 20 cents today. In fact, it’s quite possible they’d only sell it off for more than a dollar.

Of course, this applies only to workers who are already vested in a pension system. For brand new workers, given a choice of salary today vs. pension tomorrow, it’s quite possible they’d undervalue the pension. In fact, I’d say it’s almost inevitable, since most of us do exactly that. Nonetheless, I’m skeptical that this research tells us much about either the size of this effect or whether it would be good public policy to even offer the option. The circumstances are just too different.

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How Much Would You Pay For $4,905 In Pension Benefits?

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The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The news business has always had evergreen stories. When Time magazine asks “Why Did Jesus Have To Die?” on its cover, it’s following in its own footsteps along with hundreds of others. If it’s Easter, we have stories about Jesus.

The wonky blog world has its own odd set of evergreens. These are stories that might have been interesting the first time I read them, but which I’m now heartily sick of. So even though I’m a day late for this to be part of the Festivus airing of grievances, here are a few examples:

Does Daylight Savings Time really reduce energy consumption?
An economist explains why Christmas gift giving is inefficient.
The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really signed on July 4th.
Christmas and those crazy Asians: KFC in Japan and Spam in South Korea explained.
Scientists are adding a second to the year today. Here’s why.
The Dow is a lousy proxy for the actual state of the stock market.
Etc.

Of course, if this year happens to be the first time you see any of these evergreens, they’re fresh and new to you. It’s only the fact that I’ve seen them so many times that makes them so tired to me. So feel free to ignore my griping on this subject. In fact, feel free to mock me for it if you like.

Anyway, I was reminded of this by the inevitable spate of bloggish stories last week about why Christmas is inefficient, and then reminded again by not one, not two, but three bloggy pieces about KFC in Japan that I happened to see within five minutes of each other this morning. (Bad luck, that!) And it got me thinking: ordinary old-school evergreens all seem pretty understandable. But these wonkish blog evergreens seem….a bit odd. So I’m curious: what is it that makes a subject a bloggy evergreen? What do these kinds of stories have in common?

Once I figure it out, I plan to write a blog post about it every year. Sort of like the one I write every year about the origins of Black Friday. Are you sick of that one yet?

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The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

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Smile! You’re on Cop Cam!

by AshliStead Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Seattle police have made the decision to adopt body cameras, but this means they need to find an automated way to blur out things like faces and license plate numbers before the footage becomes public. Dara Lind comments:

But as police departments move cop cams into the field, the an important question becomes whether there are things that shouldn’t be recorded to protect civilians’ privacy. And if so, who controls the footage?….As reported in Slate, the programmers that participated in the hackathon focused on ways to automatically redact police footage so that, for example, civilians’ faces and license plate numbers were blurred.

The fundamental appeal of automatic redaction for a city government is pretty clear. If you can write an automated program that takes care of any privacy concerns, you can release body-camera footage to the public en masse. Without an automated solution, the city would have to rely on the police department to edit the footage — which opens the door to manipulation.

En masse? I wonder where this leads? If I get pulled over for speeding in Seattle, the encounter will be saved on video. Does that get released to anyone who wants to see it? Does every encounter with a police officer become public? How long will police departments be required to save video records? What kind of indexing requirements will be imposed? Will they all be accessible as public records via Freedom of Information requests?

These are good questions to ponder. Body cameras for police forces are a good idea, but there are downsides as well as upsides.

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Smile! You’re on Cop Cam!

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Let Us Now Praise Obama’s Economic Policies

by ChristoSlama Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen evaluates recent economic news by the standards of Republican promises from two years ago:

The Romney Standard: Mitt Romney said during the 2012 campaign that if Americans elect him, he’d get the unemployment rate down to 6% by 2016. Obama won anyway and the unemployment rate dropped below 6% two years faster.
The Gingrich Standard: Newt Gingrich said during the 2012 campaign that if Americans re-elected the president, gas prices would reach $10 per gallon, while Gingrich would push gas down to $2.50 a gallon. As of this morning, the national average at the pump is a little under $2.38.
The Pawlenty Standard: Tim Pawlenty said trillions of dollars in tax breaks would boost economic growth to 5% GDP. Obama actually raised taxes on the wealthy and GDP growth reached 5% anyway.

Is this fair? Meh. Maybe, maybe not. But there’s not likely to be a whole lot of news to blog about today, so why not poke holes in some Republican balloons instead? As Benen says, “By the party’s own standards, Obama is succeeding beautifully. They established the GOP benchmarks and now the Democratic president is the one meeting, and in some cases exceeding, the Republicans’ goals.”

The downside of all this is that in the past Democrats haven’t promoted their own economic policies plainly enough to get credit now that the economy has finally turned around. Republicans, by contrast, simply cut taxes and then loudly and relentlessly repeat their promise that the economy will improve. Eventually it does, of course. Maybe not a lot, and maybe not for long, but economies always improve eventually. If Kansas ever manages a quarter or two of decent growth, for example, you can be sure that Gov. Sam Brownback will be crowing about it for the rest of his political career.

To some extent, of course, Democrats were stymied in their economic policy, which gave them less to brag about back in 2009. And five years is a long time to wait for a recovery. Still, Dems did pass a stimulus; enact a payroll tax holiday; extend unemployment benefits; pass Obamacare; reform Wall Street; raise taxes on the rich; and pass several jobs bills. It’s true that this laundry list doesn’t quite have the simple oomph of “Tax cuts will bring the economy roaring back to life!” But it is an economic program, and eventually it got us to where we are today: a pretty good recovery, and one that looks like it might be sustainable since it’s not built on the sandy foundations of tax cuts and deficits. Democrats should be louder about demanding more credit for all of this.

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Let Us Now Praise Obama’s Economic Policies

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

by JacquesBroome Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m going to keep things simple this year: Mother Jones is great! You already know that if you subscribe to the magazine (which you should) or if you read this blog. But no single source of funding can support what we do, so we rely on multiple sources. And you guessed it: one of them is reader donations.

So if you want to support our great journalism….

Or you just want to support this blog….

Or, hell, if you just want to say thank you to MoJo for providing me with much-needed health insurance this year….

Then how about making a year-end contribution? Small amounts are fine. Large amounts are even better! You can use PayPal or a credit card. Every little bit helps. So thanks for another year of reading my rants and raves, and thanks in advance for whatever donation you can afford. Here are the details:

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

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When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

by Lazaro7386 Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The United States might not have much leverage over North Korea, but China does. Virtually all of North Korea’s external trade is with China, and Chinese support is pretty much all that keeps North Korea from collapsing. This means that when the United States wants to pressure Pyongyang, it has limited options as long as Chinese support of the regime remains strong. But how long will that support last? Over the weekend, Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that it might finally be faltering:

When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.

….The parlous state of the relationship between North Korea and China was on display again Wednesday when Pyongyang commemorated the third anniversary of the death of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, and failed to invite a senior Chinese official.

The last time a Chinese leader visited North Korea was in July 2013 when Vice President Li Yuanchao tried to patch up relations, and pressed North Korea, after its third nuclear test in February 2013, to slow down its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Li failed in that quest….After the vice president’s visit, relations plummeted further, entering the icebox last December when China’s main conduit within the North Korean government, Jang Song-thaek, a senior official and the uncle of Kim Jong-un, was executed in a purge. In July, President Xi Jinping snubbed North Korea, visiting South Korea instead. Mr. Xi has yet to visit North Korea, and is said to have been infuriated by a third nuclear test by North Korea in February 2013, soon after Kim Jong-un came to power.

So does this mean that China might help us out in our current dispute with North Korea over the Sony hack? Probably not—or not much, anyway. North Korea’s very weakness is also its greatest strength: if it collapses, two things would probably happen. First, there would be a flood of refugees trying to cross the border into China. Second, the Korean peninsula would likely become unified and China would find itself with a US ally right smack on its border. Given the current state of Sino-American relations, that’s simply not something China is willing to risk.

Not yet, anyway. But who knows? There are worse things in the world than a refugee crisis, and relations with the US have the potential to warm up in the future. One of these days North Korea may simply become too large a liability for China to protect. If that ever happens, North Korea’s lifespan can probably be measured in years or months.

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When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

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