Super Senior,

OK, so you were able to have a fifth year of college because you’re a student athlete and your parents footed the bill. What about the rest of us? It seems like you’re advocating taking five years, but that’s just not financially possible for some people.

Understandably Bitter

Well of course I’m advocating taking five years; what bigger, better thing do you have going on that just can’t wait?

There are a couple of ways to approach this, but let me first take it from the perspective of the current economy. Do you really think you’ll be able to find a job after you graduate given that, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 22 percent fewer grads this spring will find themselves in a job compared to 2008? Or will you be like the 77 percent of 2008 grads that moved back home according to CollegeGrad.com?

So really, you’re S.O.L. on the job front anyway; unemployment is projected to be above 10 percent through the end of 2010 by Goldman Sachs, a firm not known for being overly pessimistic. So at this point it’s really just a decision about what you want your lifestyle to be like in the coming year(s). And given that your financial future is likely to be fail for quite some time, you might as well have some fun.

I look at it like this: say[Say SK] I take out a student loan to cover my fifth year of school for a generous $20,000 (in comparison, the average grad leaves college $19,000 in debt). Again being generous, let’s just say that works out to be $30,000 after interest. Next consider that the median UC Davis grad who managed to get a job made $52,000 in their first year. Let’s be conservative and assume that tops out at $75,000 per year by the time you want to retire. So, the question is then, are you willing to sacrifice six months of boring-ass retirement for one more year of the best fucking time of your life?

I mean really man, you live with your best friends, sleep in past noon, chemically alter your state of consciousness at will, fornicate at random and put in at most 30 hours per week going to school and studying shit that hopefully interests you.

Enjoy it.

Super Senior,

So I’m riding my bike around town, and all of a sudden I get a whiff of this … smell. It’s a smell I’m somewhat familiar with, though I’ve never encountered it outside or with such potency. It’s kind of nasty, and I don’t like it at all. What the hell is going on?

Not A Pervert

The smell you are referring to is the result of a tree; scientific name Pyrus kawakamii, common name the Evergreen Pear. But apparently people around here call it the Cumbleberry Tree, though I was far less creative when I first encountered it and just called it the jizz tree.

It’s always funny to see people’s reactions to this thing. Girls don’t want to admit they know what the tree smells like for fear or being labeled a slut, so they act all surprised when they find out that, yes Virginia, you now smell like semen. On the other hand, guys react the same way they do to their own farts with a sort of detached curiosity. Either that or they get indignant and grossed out because dude-that’s-totally-gay.

It’s surprising that you can smell it so early, but believe me, the streets will smell like ejaculate for many months to, uh, come.

Super Senior,

It’s about to get really hot. How do I stay cool in the geologic convection oven that is the Central Valley?

Fairweather Fiend

My first suggestion is simple: don’t. Don’t even try to stay cool here; get out as fast as you can. Find a job someplace that doesn’t have a low of 85 degrees at night or take some classes in The City. As Jack London once said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.“

But if you have to stay in Davis, my advice is the same: don’t. Don’t even try to stay cool here, because it’s not possible. The heat is inevitable, relax and enjoy it (Bobby Knight, eat your heart out).

OK but seriously, if you want to be at least somewhat comfortable my suggestion is to get a job indoors, preferably in a lab on campus (they keep that scheeze at like 65 degrees) or a grocery store stocking frozen foods. You don’t have to pay for AC this way, which would run you a couple Benjamins a month otherwise.

That said, getting a job in the near future is about as likely as Meghan McCain making any coherent argument, so maybe you should put a block of ice in front of a fan and lay there all day without moving or speaking. In fact, Meghan McCain should do something similar, especially the last part.

Anyway, whatever you do, just don’t get an internship working in a greenhouse. You will immediately regret that decision.

K.C. CODY likes to rationalize indolence. Attempt to rationalize being assiduous to him at kccody@ucdavis.edu.

Tumbling headfirst down the 365 stone steps of a Mayan temple, painted completely with a sacred recipe of blue paint, wearing an exit wound in his indigo chest from whence his heart was cut out and burned, a Mayan champion might think, ‘Maybe there’s something to that 2012 theory.‘ That is, if his waning consciousness could even operate through the hefty dose of hallucinogens a priest had given him before the ordeal.

Ancient Mayan culture, seen through modern eyes, seems inhumane, decadent and more than a little paranoid of the divine. It’s undeniable, though, that the rites and ministrations of the Mayan clergy were serious business. To an average Mayan, there was no higher order of human interaction. Science, religion, philosophy and art were rolled into one in their ritual observance of the cosmos – through making the dearest of sacrifices, Mayans hoped to influence the will of the universe.

One of the Mayan people’s most cryptic beliefs has recently been gaining the attention of mainstream America: the ominous date of Dec. 21, 2012.

For reference, that date is the Gregorian adaptation of the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. Mayan systems for keeping time are unusually elaborate; Mayans calculated thirteen 20-day months on at least 22 different calendars to, essentially, predict the future. The Long Count reached furthest into the future and kept track of the Great Cycle, their longest unit of time. Our current cycle ends on that winter night three years from now.

With this complicated system, the Mayans had some peculiar success in prophecy. Quetzalcoatl is a major Mayan deity, depicted as a feathered snake, combining the elegance of flight with the subtleness of the serpent. His significance is somewhat Satanic and somewhat Promethean – his first appearance to humanity brought Mayan ancestors out of savagery and into prosperous and joyous civilization.

Before disappearing, the snake-bird prophesied his return, which Mayans calculated to be the very same day as the arrival of Hernán Cortéz. For non-history buffs, he’s the megalomaniac Conquistador who destroyed almost all of Mayan culture.

In 2012, they say Quetzalcoatl is returning for a third time.

So are we all going to die?

When theologically big things collide, it’s common to predict the end of the world. For modern apocalyptists, 2012 is no exception. Thousands of alarmist YouTube collages and militant web pages can be dug up at a moment’s effort by typing in just those four numbers. While the exact rendering of doomsday varies in each (alien contact, meteoric impact, getting baked by the sun), all agree that human life will be impacted permanently. A subculture has arisen around 2012 – authors, thinkers and trippers preach spiritual enlightenment to prepare ourselves for the transition.

But it’s not Armageddon.

Mayan descendents and cultural scholars agree that the end of the Great Cycle did not portend human extinction. The few ancient Mayan scriptures that survived the European invasion instead reference only a time of turmoil and change. Mayan calendars were circular, more resembling shapes of nature than the squares we hang on our walls. So, most suppose, cycles will simply roll over.

The concept of the world as we know it being destroyed by a vengeful god on 2012 isn’t what the Mayans themselves predicted. Instead, it’s a Judeo-Christian repackaging to market the idea to people already well-adjusted to a Second Coming. The movie is already on its way – Sony Pictures is releasing 2012 this July and its trailer depicts a Tibetan mountaintop monastery blasted to bits by a tidal wave. I shouldn’t have to tell you what commercialized sensationalistic shlock that is.

My fellow columnist Michael Hower wrote a column earlier this week on 2012 that inspired me to write this piece a little ahead of time. In it, Hower overlooked, well, almost everything about 2012, which strikes me as culturally irreverent. Dusting off one’s hands and saying, ‘Case closed!’ after spending more time riffing bad musicians than analyzing data is a feat worthy of another Indiana Jones sequel. If Hower had similarly dismissed the Rapture, reactions wouldn’t be pretty. When 2012 comes around, believers won’t “join hands and sing ‘Kumbaya‘ with John Mayer around a campfire.” Much more likely, they’ll be smoking DMT and watching Koyanisquatsi. After the orgy, of course.

Already, we can see that that the human state of affairs is overdue for a shakeup. The global economic crisis is certainly the most obvious symptom – the capitalist terror that has had free run of the world for centuries has resulted in the elevation of the worthless while over a billion people can’t feed themselves every day. Forgotten, in favor of Twittering about the iPhone’s capacity for Lil Wayne ringtones.

Instead of tearing out hearts, we now affect our universe by building Large Hadron Colliders, testing relativity and studying antimatter. We also strip-mine for coal, propagate inequity and use unmanned drones to lob missiles into Pakistani schools. Mayans have been tremendously accurate in predicting that, 1,000 years after their decline, there would be a global civilization in crisis. Could we even say there will be civilization in another thousand years? Only with an emergence of a global conscience.

2012 deserves some serious reflection on our part. Although not apocalyptic, it certainly will be a critical year in the development of human society. All you students reading this will have (hopefully) entered the workforce and begun contributing to a (hopefully) reformed and sustainable capital production system. We (hopefully) will have elected the next president of the United States and will have our eyes turned toward eliminating the divisions that leave so many of our brothers and sisters hungry, sick and homeless.

2012 will be a year of change, and it is our responsibility to ensure the next Great Cycle will be more peaceful and united than the last.

Here’s to the snake-bird.

CHEYA CARY is already making plans for the party. Send ideas for décor and guest lists to cheya.cary@gmail.com.

We have a problem. Our problem is that Timothy Geithner is about to use our money to buy between $500 billion and $1 trillion “worth“ (more on that later) of toxic legacy assets. Our problem, put another way, is that we’re about to buy the financial equivalent of a whole lot of Kid Rock albums.

The short of it is that, as Geithner announced last Tuesday, Americans are going to give a few really rich guys (e.g. hedge funds and private equity firms) a crap load of money (between 67 percent and 93 percent of the total outlay) so that those really rich guys can give that crap load of money to some other really rich guys (e.g. Citi and Bank of America) so they can stay really rich (by removing toxic legacy assets from their balance sheets).

Despite the administration’s best attempts to convolute and obfuscate the plan in the hopes that Americans won’t be able to understand it, the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) is actually pretty simple.

The program dealing with toxic loans goes like this: The bank decides what assets it wants to auction, at which point the FDIC will provide “at most,“ i.e. “in practice,“ 6-to-1 debt-to-equity leverage for investors. Funny thing about the FDIC’s loan is that it’s non-recourse, so if the value tanks the investor just hands the FDIC the assets on their way out the door.

Anyhow, once the auction is completed and a price established, only then does the bank decide if it actually wants to sell. This is a put option, and it protects the bank from any uncomfortable write-downs by allowing it to set a minimum bid ex post. This is a big deal; if the spread between the winning bid and the bank‘s minimum sale price is too high, the whole plan crumbles.

But let’s assume the bank is willing to sell. The Treasury Department would then give the investor half of the cash it needs to cover the price after the FDIC leverage is applied. In theory, the treasury shares the gains and losses equally with the investor, but any further losses are all swallowed by the FDIC.

Ultimately, we’re on the hook for 93 percent of the cost of the asset purchase.

The program for securities, all those collateralized debt obligations backed by mortgage, auto and student loans and credit card debt, is the same in principle: minimal investor, uh, investment, and lots of taxpayer subsidy.

Now, the only way for this thing to work, and by work I mean remove between an eighth and a third of banks‘ toxic assets, is if Obama and Geithner can entice investors to intentionally overpay with taxpayer money. There is no other way for this to function. You know how I said that we would be buying between $500 billion and $1 trillion “worth“ of this shit? Well turns out the question of what this shit is “worth“ is about as open as Bristol Palin’s … well, anyway….

Banks are arguing that there just isn’t a market for toxic legacy assets; no one’s buying them because investors are irrationally panicked. The assets, they claim, are illiquid; there’s no pricing mechanism, and banks would be forced to take massive losses if they had to sell them or mark them on their balance sheets at market prices. Obama’s bought this garbage, and now he’s conjured a highly subsidized, highly rigged market to facilitate a gigantic transfer of wealth.

This is completely unnecessary, of course, because there actually is a market for toxic assets; but banks aren’t very keen on paying attention to it because the prices the assets are selling for would render them insolvent. Instead, banks prefer to just make something up; if they say an asset is worth face value, then damn it it’s worth face value.

“But wait!” you say. “Since Obama’s plan establishes a clear market price for the assets through the auction, shouldn’t the banks then have to mark to market, take write downs and risk insolvency?” Yes, they should. But no, they won’t.

Why? Because the Financial Accounting Standards Board has just decided that as of Apr. 2, mark to market is going the way of Marky Mark; under new rules pertaining to toxic legacy assets, a bank “would be required to assert that (a) it does not have the intent to sell the security and (b) it is more likely than not that it will not have to sell the security before recovery of its cost basis.“ As I said: If they say an asset is worth face value, then damn it it’s worth face value.

The argument for altering mark to market is that if a bank “does not have the intent“ to sell an asset, it shouldn’t have to value that asset at its sale price.

But how might a bank decide between holding an asset to maturity or selling it? Why, by determining what the market is willing to pay for it, of course! So the bank looks for buyers (thus marking the asset to market), freaks out because it’s not worth shit, and then claims “it does not have the intent“ to sell the asset and it will “more likely than not“ hold on to it.

This amounts to building a put option into the accounting rules, and will lead to a dangerously undercapitalized banking system.

Oh, and in case you had any doubt that these assets aren’t worth what banks say they are, the FDIC has just requested a $500 billion credit line to the Treasury; they know they’re going to take massive losses on the assets as a result of the PPIP, and they plan on borrowing from Treasury (i.e. us) to cover them.

Congratulations, we just became the bad bank.

Everyone involved in this charade, the banks, the hedge funds, the FDIC, the Treasury, the Fed, Obama himself, all know it’s a scam. Indeed, it must be for it to accomplish its goal.

But it gets worse.

The PPIP, assuming it “works,“ doesn’t do anything but return us to the status quo circa 2006; it leaves behind the same small number of the same large institutions run by the same people with far too much systemic risk, internal complexity and clout.

So to supplement the PPIP, Geithner made some suggestions for a systemwide regulator with a few new tricks. Some of his ideas make sense, but, as always, the fuck-you is in the fine print.

If you read it carefully, it becomes clear that Obama’s new regulatory scheme is designed to give the treasury broader powers to bail out the titans of finance; it creates, in essence, a permanent TARP, the very same program that’s allowing the PPIP to go forward in all its dubious glory.

But there is a glimmer of hope.

Maybe, just maybe, the PPIP is itself a ploy. The administration may actually be counting on the PPIP to fail, finally making it politically possible to do the only thing guaranteed to have worked from the beginning: taking the insolvent firms into receivership.

K.C. CODY hates all these acronyms. Commiserate with him at kccody@ucdavis.edu.