Why Is South Africa Being Stirred Up?

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Authored by Alexander Mezyaev via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Since the middle of February, the internal political situation in South Africa has worsened once again. During South African president Jacob Zuma’s annual address to the country’s parliament, the main opposition parties, primarily the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters, became rowdy and delayed the president’s speech for an hour. For security reasons, the parliament building was surrounded not by the police, as it was last year, but by  the SADF staff.

The opposition parties know they are not in a position to take power democratically, so the only choice they have is to destabilise the situation in the country. To be more precise, this means provoking bloodshed and seeing it through to a regime change. The actions of the parliamentary Economic Freedom Fighters party – insulting the country’s president or the parliamentary speaker and behaving like clowns – only seem like hooliganism at first glance. In fact, the tactic is intended to bring different segments of the population into conflict with each other and cause riots that will lead to fatalities. In the meantime, the Economic Freedom Fighters have so far done nothing to try and achieve their declared objectives legislatively. One of the main points of their political programme was the nationalisation of land without compensation, but while the Freedom Fighters were raising an uproar, a bill to change the Land Act, which provides for such nationalisation, was put forward by the African National Congress. This initiative of the ruling party led to even more ferocious attacks being launched against it by the Democratic Alliance, which represents the interest of local and transnational monopoly capital.

On 22 February, the High Court of North Gauteng (where the country’s government is located), ruled in the case brought by the Democratic Alliance that South Africa’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is «unconstitutional and invalid». What’s more, the court ordered President Zuma to revoke the notice of withdrawal. Against the backdrop of the recent coup in Gambia, the events in South Africa seem like an attempt, amid instigated large-scale riots, to make the government use force against ‘peaceful protesters’, thereby paving the way for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

The danger of last year’s pogroms against ‘foreigners’ has come back with a vengeance. On 24 February, large-scale demonstrations were held in a number of cities, including the capital, against immigrants, who then held their own demonstrations in response. Violence was unavoidable. The situation was summed up fairly shrewdly by the leader of the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa: «In our view, the xenophobic attacks are well coordinated and political. Opposition parties which are fighting the ANC government want to make South Africa ungovernable and they are mobilising communities to attack foreigners».

Behind this picture is the blatant desire to disrupt the government’s plans outlined in President Jacob Zuma’s address to parliament. These plans include amendments to the law on mineral resources in terms of the State’s right to exercise sovereignty over all the country’s mineral resources, and changes to the racial imbalance within the country’s mining industry. At present, nearly all of the major mining companies are owned by transnational corporations (diamond mining is dominated by De Beers, which is owned by Anglo America plc, and platinum mining is dominated by Anglo Platinum Limited, which is part of Anglo American Platinum Ltd owned by Anglo American plc). The government is planning to pursue direct state involvement in this sector of the economy. A bill on these issues will be introduced into parliament this year.

There are also other plans. An interesting programme is being implemented in South Africa’s agricultural sector to create collective farms. The construction of free housing will continue – more than four million families have already been provided with houses. Nine million households that did not have electricity have now been connected to the grid. Only two of the six million jobs that the government planned to create by March 2019 have so far materialised, but this is also an achievement. A total of seventeen million people, almost one in three, receive social support from the government.

In addition, the government has responded to last year’s mass student protests over the increase in university tuition fees by allocating 32 billion rand to support higher education. This will not solve the problem entirely, but it will allow those less well-off to continue on with higher education.

The bold steps being undertaken by President Jacob Zuma in the social and economic sphere are being reinforced by the pan-African scope of South Africa’s foreign policy. Good examples of this are the plans to create a pan-African free trade zone by merging three regional organisations – the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) – and South Africa’s participation in peacekeeping operations in Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Mozambique, South Sudan, Libya, and Somalia.

The ruling African National Congress party conference is set to take place at the end of 2017. The ANC will elect its new leader and, by extension, the country’s most likely president (should the ANC win the parliamentary elections). The approach of this political challenge, along with the South African government’s determination to continue along its chosen course, is increasing the anxiety of those who regard what’s going on as a threat to their centuries-old positions – positions that are no longer looking quite so unshakeable.



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Signs That The Silicon Valley Tech Bubble Is About To Burst

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18 months ago there was a seemingly limitless number of Silicon Valley future billionaires buying up multi-million dollar homes and renting out lavish pads.  But if demand for excessively priced real estate is any indication of the health of Silicon Valley's tech industry then all the venture capitalists who have tripped over themselves to invest in the next 'decacorn', or startups worth $10s of billions pre-IPO despite burning billions of cash quarterly, should be getting pretty worried right about now.

As the following chart from Zillow points out, home prices in San Francisco stalled about a year ago and rents have followed a similar path.

San Fran

 

But home prices aren't the only thing stalling, according to a note from The Guardian, resumes are also starting to flood into Silicon Valley headhunters from recently unemployed software engineers who were let go after their companies failed to attract its required latest round of financing at a ridiculous valuation.

“We’re starting to get a lot of résumés from [software engineers at] companies where the business model isn’t working and they can’t get funding, so they are closing down or cutting back,” said Mark Dinan, a software recruiter based in the Bay Area, who keeps track of companies’ hirings and firings.

 

These startups are running out of money because VCs are being more discerning about where they place their money, making fewer, bigger bets.

 

“The number of investments [in the private market] has fallen by about a third, but the amount of capital is around the same,” said Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Redpoint, adding that some of the “fast money” from hedge funds and mutual funds had shifted away from the sector.

 

“It’s been happening for a couple of years. It’s not as easy to raise capital and VCs are demanding better terms,” added Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business.

Despite the meteoric rise in the stock market over the past several years, venture capitalists have been forced to pull back on new investments partly because of a slowdown in companies going public. Last year was the slowest for US IPOs since the recession, with the amount raised by technology companies falling 60% from 2015.

Tech IPOs

 

Meanwhile, if SNAP's IPO is any indicator of how other potential tech IPOs might be expected to perform, then we wouldn't hold out hope for public investors to save the venture market from their valuation sins.

SNAP

 

But, a series of “down rounds” – when a company raises funds by selling shares that are valued lower than the last time they raised funds, leading its overall valuation to fall – may imply that there just isn't a healthy backlog of companies that are IPO-worthy. CB Insights has tracked more than 100 of these down rounds and exits since 2015, including software company Zenefits, mobile app Foursquare and online music streaming service Rdio.

“It used to be that 95% of [investment] rounds were up, now 20% are down,” Tunguz said.

 

Then there are the so-called “decacorns” – unicorn startups valued at tens of billions of dollars – such as Airbnb, Uber and Palantir – which some believe are overvalued, but it’s hard to tell until they go public and are forced to reveal details of their underlying finances.

 

Ride-sharing app Uber, for example, has raised more than $16bn and is valued at more than $69bn. That’s more than automotive giants such as General Motors and Ford, despite the company losing $2.2bn last year.

 

“The interesting question with Uber is how long they can keep as a private company. They are raising capital like a public company without any of the disclosure and consequences of being a public company,” said Damodaran, who believes the company’s value is overinflated and it’s really worth $23bn.

So, how does this moment compare with the time leading up to the dotcom crash?  Here is the take of one Silicon Valley software recruiter:

“I got here in 97 and it was like it is now – incredibly packed, impossible to commute, high apartment costs,” Dinan said.

 

"We’re seeing overvalued companies, funded based on hopes and dreams and aspirations and not good business models. Companies counting users and eyeballs rather than profits. There are a lot of similarities.”

 

Another echo of the dotcom era is what Dinan calls “bad habits” such as the allegations of sexual harassment at Uber and human resources startup Zenefits cheating on mandatory compliance training.

 

“There was a lot of crazy behaviour in the late 1990s, including sexual harassment. It’s a result of there not being discipline,” Dinan said.

 

“The [dotcom crash] happened very suddenly and without any warning,” Damodaran said. “When it does happen everyone says they saw it coming. If you saw it coming then why didn’t you get out of it?”

Well, when all else fails there's always the 'negging' option to drive valuation...



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MIT Professor says powerful elites set up monopolies so they can abuse consumers

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Our recent book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, received the harshest reviews from those who see geography and culture as the root causes of poverty, and enlightened leaders — or even more enlightened outside donors and organizations — as the keys to economic development. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his dedication to international aid, billionaire foundation chief Bill Gates falls into this category: His Feb. 26 review of our book was particularly uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, it was also dead wrong on many counts.

Gates’s review is disappointing, but not just because he disagrees with us. As academics, we expect that. Research is all about arguing and contradicting, finding new pieces of evidence, developing new concepts and perspectives, and getting closer to the truth. Alas, Gates fails in this endeavor. His inability to understand even the most rudimentary parts of our thesis means that his review fails to invite constructive argument. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to respond because of the undue attention the review has generated.

To start with, Gates makes some pretty baffling statements about our book, such as his assertion that "important terms aren’t really defined." Actually, all of the major concepts we use in the book are defined; one just needs to read the book. Other assertions demonstrate not only that Gates is unfamiliar with the academic literature, which is understandable, but that he actually did not bother to consult the bibliographic essay and the references at the end. He writes, "The authors … attribute the decline of Venice to a reduction in the inclusiveness of its institutions. The fact is, Venice declined because competition came along … Even if Venice had managed to preserve the inclusiveness of their institutions, it would not have made up for their loss of the spice trade."

This is just bad history. Venice didn’t decline because of the loss of the spice trade. If that were the case, the decline should have started at the very end of the 15th century. But the decline was already well underway by the middle of the 14th century. More generally, research by Diego Puga and Daniel Trefler shows that Venice’s fortunes had nothing to do with competition or the spice trade.

Likewise, Gates seems to think that the Maya declined because of the "weather." Though there is certainly scholarly dispute over why Maya civilization decayed, to our knowledge no reputable scholar argues that it was due to the weather. Instead, most scholars emphasize the role of inter-city warfare and the collapse of Mayan political institutions. Nor does the book, as Gates would have it, "overlook the incredible period of growth and innovation in China between 800 and 1400." We discuss that period, and explain why it didn’t translate into sustained economic growth (see Chapter 8, in particular, pp. 231-234).

Gates also says at one point that our book "refers to me in a positive light." Sorry, we do no such thing. We point out that Gates, just like Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, would have loved to form a monopoly. He tried and failed. What our book shows in a positive light are the U.S. institutions, such the Department of Justice, that stopped Gates and Microsoft from cornering the market. We say, "sadly there are few heroes in this book." Bill Gates was not one of them.

On a related note, Gates writes that that our book is "quite unfair to Slim." Mexico, he contends, is "much better off with Slim’s contribution in running businesses well than it would be without him." But once again, this reveals a lack of understanding of our main thesis, which isn’t that Carlos Slim is evil and the root cause of Mexico’s problems. We argue that ambitious entrepreneurs like Gates or Slim will do good for society if inclusive institutions constrain them, and that they will mostly serve their own interests otherwise. So the right counterfactual to Slim isn’t no Slim, but a Mexico in which people like Slim (and hundreds of other talented would-be entrepreneurs who never got the opportunity to flourish because of the country’s poor education system or because of its terrible competition laws) operate within the context of inclusive economic institutions and therefore enrich their society to a much greater extent.

For the record, however, before cheerleading Slim, Gates might want to read the OECD’s 2012 report on telecommunications policy and regulation in Mexico, which estimates the social costs of Slim’s monopoly at U.S. $129 billion and counting. (The latest Forbes list of the world’s richest people puts Slim’s net worth at U.S. $79 billion). So in what way is Mexico better off exactly?

Gates also complains in his review that we "ridicule modernization theory." We don’t. We try to articulate an alternative theory of extractive growth — which takes place under extractive, authoritarian political institutions — where countries grow  because their leadership controlling these extractive institutions feels secure and able to control and benefit from the growth process. This occupies a large part of our book because it is a central feature of economic and political development over the last several thousand years. Our theory suggests why extractive growth doesn’t automatically lead to more inclusive institutions: Growth is made possible, at least in most cases, by the leaders and dominant elites’ belief in their relative security.

Gates is right that there are examples like South Korea (which we discussed in the book) that have transitioned to more inclusive institutions following a period of extractive growth. But South Korea’s transition to democracy in the 1980s was in no way automatic. It came about as a result of protests by students and workers against the military regime, and only after the repression by the military failed to quell the unrest. More importantly, as a cursory look at our bibliographic essay would have shown, our dismissal of modernization theory isn’t based on a few case studies or a gut feeling, but on careful econometric evidence. See, for example, our papers titled "Income and Democracy" and "Re-evaluating the Modernization Hypothesis, both jointly authored with Simon Johnson and Pierre Yared.

At another point in his review, Gates contends that economic growth is "strongly correlated with embracing capitalistic economics." Yet it is far from clear what he means by "capitalistic economics." Were Egypt’s economic institutions during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak — after he liberalized the economy and reduced the role of the state — capitalistic? Most people refer to this as "crony capitalism," but perhaps this is all part of capitalist economics? Or consider the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico in the 19th century, which eradicated many of the remaining restrictions of the Spanish colonial system, established an economy based on private enterprise (especially of his cronies), and "freed" markets (including the creation of the market for coerced labor). Was that capitalistic? What about South Africa under apartheid, based on private enterprise by whites, but disempowering and exploiting the majority blacks? Perhaps Gates himself should have more carefully defined his terms.

The concept of capitalism doesn’t feature in our book for good reason. It muddies the waters. Our point, by which we stand strongly, is that what distinguishes societies isn’t whether they are centrally planned or capitalist, but whether they are extractive or inclusive. Though centrally planned economies are by their nature extractive, so are many "capitalist" economies.

Finally, Gates takes issue with our supposedly "huge attack on foreign aid," citing in particular our "misleading" claims about Afghanistan. But again, he would have benefited from looking at the bibliography. The finding that about 10 percent of foreign aid goes to intended recipients isn’t from Afghanistan, as he seems to think, but from Uganda, which was not a war zone but a peaceful country at the time of the 2004 study we cite. More importantly, there is now considerable evidence showing that foreign aid in the postwar era has had little positive impact on economic development, which Gates chooses to ignore (see, for example, William Easterly’s White Man’s Burden). Denying this is really putting your head in the sand.

But even sadder is the fact that we don’t even argue against foreign aid. What we argue in the book is that aid — the little of it that reaches its target — does a lot of good for poor people. But it is not the solution to the real problems of development. Instead of endlessly asserting empirically untenable positions, we all need to move on and find more constructive ways to engage with poor countries. Foreign aid should certainly be part — but not all — of this engagement.

Gates does correctly point out that much is missing from the framework in our book. Even if underdevelopment isn’t just a problem of bad leadership, and even if its solution won’t come from enlightened leaders, a more complete framework should indeed integrate the behavior of leaders that play an important role in state building, organizing collective action, and articulating visions for social change. Examples of such leaders include Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, both of whom undoubtedly influenced the course of their country’s development. But we chose to emphasize institutions in our book because for leadership to have a lasting impact, it must become institutionalized via inclusive political institutions. After several decades of promoting education and developing a Tunisian national identity, for example, Bourguiba, who ran Tunisia as a dictator, was elbowed out of power by a very different sort of strongman, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was far more interested in using his power to loot the country’s resources. But Gates doesn’t seem to be interested in such subtleties, preferring instead to criticize every aspect of Why Nations Fail.

Some say that all publicity is good publicity, and we should be thrilled to have Bill Gates review our book. Publicity is nice. But we spent more than 15 years researching, writing, and thinking about these topics, and we would be thrilled if the reviewers actually read and understood the book in the first place. Then we could have a constructive debate about the root causes of poverty in the world.



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Yardeni Warns "Late In The Game To Be A long-Term Investor" In Stocks

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Excerpted from Dr. Ed Yardeni's blog,

US Flow of Funds: ETFs Driving Stocks Higher

...the saying that a picture is “worth a thousand words” is attributed to newspaper editor Tess Flanders discussing journalism and publicity in 1911. We have always believed that a chart is worth a thousand data points in a time series. Given our chosen profession, we tend to focus on the data for the equity and debt markets in the Fed’s quarterly statistical extravaganza. Let’s focus on equities:

(1) Supply-side totals. Net issuance of equities last year totaled minus $229.7 billion, with nonfinancial corporate (NFC) issues at -$565.7 billion and financial issues at $269.7 billion. The increase in financials was led by a $283.9 billion increase in equity ETFs, the biggest annual increase on record. The decline in NFC issues reflected the impact of stock buybacks and M&A activity more than offsetting IPOs and secondary issues.

 

 

(2) Demand-side total. To get a closer view of the demand for equities, let’s focus now on the quarterly data at an annual rate rather than at the four-quarter sum. This shows that equity mutual funds have been net sellers for the past five quarters, reducing their holdings by $151.3 billion over this period. Over the same period, equity ETFs purchased $266.4 billion, with their Q4-2016 purchases a record $485.4 billion, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. Other institutional investors have been selling equities for the past 24 consecutive quarters, i.e., during most of the bull market! Foreign investors have also been net sellers over this same period.

 

The bottom line is that the current bull market has been driven largely by corporations buying back their shares, as I have been observing for many years. More recently, we have been seeing individual investors increasingly moving out of equity mutual funds and into equity ETFs.

Both kinds of buyers tend to be much less concerned about historically high valuation multiples than more traditional buyers are.

We may be witnessing the beginning of an ETF-led melt-up, which may simply reflect individual investors pouring money into passive stock index funds. Lots of them seem to be more interested in seeking out low-cost funds rather than cheap stocks.

In this case, valuation multiples would lead the melt-up, until something happens to scare investors out of those passive funds, which could trigger either a correction or a nasty meltdown.

It is obviously a bit late in the game to start only now to be a long-term investor given that stocks aren’t cheap no matter how valuation is sliced and diced.



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AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models

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automation

GUEST:

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’ve broken the terms of use for SaaS software and shared a license before.

Surprised? My guess would be no … because you’ve probably done it too.

In general, per-seat licensing has been a great way for SaaS companies to charge a subscription and collect reliable revenue. It’s helped companies like Salesforce, Zoom, and Box grow into large, successful organizations. But there’s also no question that this success and revenue reliability comes at a cost, where pricing is not tied directly to how much a customer uses a service.

In short, seat-based subscription models have lots of problems but have been “good enough” for a long time. However, as more SaaS services leverage AI to augment human work, it will make less and less sense to charge per human seat and more sense to charge for what is actually being used to get work done: the compute power needed to run increasingly intelligent and useful AI-enhanced services.

This shift from human to AI-based productivity is going to fundamentally alter how SaaS companies sell their services. If SaaS companies don’t start thinking about this inevitability, and pricing it into their models, AI may cannibalize their revenue over time.

AI and the SaaS pricing equation

For service models in which AI can provide value, such as in customer service or CRM, the AI itself is going to actively reduce human work over time. What does this mean in practice? In the customer service sphere, for example, bots will work alongside humans, so humans will operate with greater productivity. But SaaS companies that integrate AI while continuing to charge on a per-seat basis will actually be dis-incentivized from making users more efficient. Think about it: companies will lose revenue as they increase AI, because each person (each seat they sell) will be able to do more, and fewer people will be needed to do the same job. So this pushes vendors to drag their heels on innovation.

On top of all of that, it gets pretty darn expensive to do the research for developing good AI and to run the system 24/7. Compute power can easily take a solid chunk of revenue. So, SaaS companies with AI integration will start to sell fewer seats while their system becomes more expensive to develop and run.

Given these trends, the calculus for the vast majority of SaaS companies needs to change — both for the customer and for their own long-term viability. Otherwise, in five or 10 years, many of these companies will be in for a rude surprise as AI cannibalizes their revenue.

Expect to see SaaS companies start charging based on usage. That might mean charging for AI work – because it costs compute cycles. The more efficiency a customer wants, and the more they rely on the AI, the more they will end up paying for service, but the less they will pay for staff.

Usage-based pricing isn’t a novel idea. Amazon has been the obvious pioneer behind pay-as-you-go SaaS pricing. It was no surprise for AWS to introduce a pay-as-you-go model, because the service provided with AWS is not based on human users or account management time. Instead, customers are charged for the type of computing unit being consumed. For example, EC2 charges in cloud compute units. Getting even more granular, Lambda charges by the execution second, while S3 charges by the gigabyte of used disk space.

Usage-based pricing opens the door to a more granular experience in which the customer only pays for what they use. It’s the equivalent to buying a ticket to a single football game, versus being forced to buy a season pass, even if you can only make it to that one game. But usage-based models also have other positive byproducts. They take away the ability for customers to “cheat” by sharing accounts, and they remove the incentive for the SaaS provider to push customers to overbuy licenses in order to “plan for growth.”

Just like Amazon’s services, AI-enhanced SaaS companies that charge based on usage will introduce greater elasticity, better user experience, and more efficiency into their systems, leading to less churn and more long-term revenue stability.

Fred Hsu is CEO of Agent.ai.



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Pay fight between USA Hockey and women's players intensifies

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As world championships inch closer, the pay dispute between USA Hockey and the women's national team is getting hotter. The two parties still haven't come to terms on a deal.

USA Hockey released a document Friday that details what it says it offered to pay the women's national team and what the players are demanding. But the players said it is full of "patently false" information.

The women's team players have threatened to sit out the upcoming International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship in protest against unfair pay. The tournament, held every non-Olympic year, begins in Michigan on March 31.

The players say USA Hockey doesn't offer them a living wage, and that the men's hockey team is afforded more benefits and marketing help.

USA Hockey has said it will bring on replacement players if the team does not reach an agreement before the world championships begin.

What USA Hockey is offering - and what the players say in response

USA Hockey says it offered the women, among other things, a $24,000 annual base salary and an extra $7,500 if they win the gold medal at the world championship games.

For Olympic game years, USA Hockey said the women would stand to earn $74,000 to $90,000 if they take home silver or gold.

But players say those numbers are misleading because they conflate USA Hockey's payments with money that comes from the U.S. Olympic Committee, which offers the same medal bonuses to athletes across all sports and genders.

Related: USA Hockey will compete in women's world games -- with or without protesting players

The only money the players get from USA Hockey comes during the six-month period leading up to the Olympics. In 2014, ahead of the last Olympics, USA Hockey paid the women's Olympic Team $1,000 per month during that time period.

USA Hockey did offer to bump up that amount to $3,000 a month. But the organization hasn't offered the women any money for the time the team spends training, competing and making public appearances for USA Hockey outside that six-month time frame, a team spokesperson said Saturday.

USA Hockey could not be immediately reached for a response to the players' claims.

usa womens national ice hockey team

What the US Women's National Team asking for

Dee Spagnuolo, a partner at the law firm Ballard-Spahr, which is representing the players, told CNNMoney that the women are asking for a $68,000 annual salary and child care, maternity leave and other benefits.

The players also want the opportunity to compete in more games throughout the year. Currently, Spagnuolo said, they only engage in about nine competitions during a non-Olympic calendar year.

USA Hockey claimed in the documents it released Friday that the players are asking to make between $146,000 and $149,000 per year if they earn first or second place at the world championships. And they want $210,000 to $237,000 for a top-two finish at the Olympics.

But Spagnuolo says those numbers are "baffling" and inflated.

She said she believes USA Today may be factoring into those numbers costs for things like coaching and equipment -- not just cash compensation to the players.

"That's not very helpful. [The players] can't use that money to eat and they can't use that money to pay their rent," Spagnuolo said.

What the USA Men's Hockey team makes

Players on the USA Men's Hockey team are offered the same amount in medal bonuses from the U.S. Olympics Commission. But most USA Men's Hockey players also have the chance to earn big money in the NHL, where the minimum annual salary is $650,000.

The National Women's Hockey League, by comparison, is a young enterprise and struggling to stay afloat. The league announced in November that it is slicing salaries in half, and most players were earning only between $14,000 and $18,000 per year to begin with.

That means professional female hockey players have much lower earning potential throughout the year. Some opt to not even play in the NWHL because they can potentially earn more elsewhere. And about half of the women's team members work one or two jobs in addition to training and competing.

And because the women's team players aren't tied up in a professional league all year, they perform more duties and spend more time training with USA Hockey. That's why, the team says, they deserve a consistent paycheck.

The women's team is also asking for the same treatment as the men's team when it comes to publicity, travel and support for female youth leagues.

Related: Carli Lloyd and Alex Morgan head overseas amid US fight for 'Equal Play, Equal Pay'

Spagnuolo says USA Hockey spends about $3.5 million per year on developing boy's hockey programs, but she it doesn't spend anywhere near that much on girl's youth hockey.

USA Hockey has declined to share a specific dollar figure for its spending on girl's youth hockey. It says it is a "world leader" in developing the sport among females.

She said members of the women's national team have been at odds with USA Hockey over payment terms since 2000, but have never sat out a competition in protest.

"It's obviously not their first choice to sit out the world championships," she said. "But they'd be willing to miss the opportunity because they realize it's not going to get better without a united and dramatic move."

There is still a chance that the two sides will reach an agreement before the world championship begins. Dave Ogrean, executive director of USA Hockey, said in a statement Friday that he wants to avoid bringing in replacement players.

"We remain committed to having the players that were selected to represent the U.S. in the upcoming women's world championship to be the players that are on the ice when the tournament begins," Ogrean said.

CNNMoney (New York) First published March 18, 2017: 5:01 PM ET



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Why you should aim for 100 rejections a year

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In the book Art & Fear, authors David Bales and Ted Orland describe a ceramics class in which half of the students were asked to focus only on producing a high quantity of work while the other half was tasked with producing work of high quality. For a grade at the end of the term, the “quantity” group’s pottery would be weighed, and fifty pounds of pots would automatically get an A, whereas the “quality” group only needed to turn in one—albeit perfect—piece. Surprisingly, the works of highest quality came from the group being graded on quantity, because they had continually practiced, churned out tons of work, and learned from their mistakes. The other half of the class spent most of the semester paralyzed by theorizing about perfection, which sounded disconcertingly familiar to me—like all my cases of writer’s block.

Being a writer sometimes feels like a paradox. Yes, we should be unswerving in our missions to put passion down on paper, unearthing our deepest secrets and most beautiful bits of humanity. But then, later, each of us must step back from those raw pieces of ourselves and critically assess, revise, and—brace yourself—sell them to the hungry and unsympathetic public. This latter process is not only excruciating for most of us (hell, if we were good at sales we would be making good money working in sales), but it can poison that earlier, unselfconscious creative act of composition.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott illustrates a writer’s brain as being plagued by the imaginary radio station KFKD (K-Fucked), in which one ear pipes in arrogant, self-aggrandizing delusions while the other ear can only hear doubts and self-loathing. Submitting to journals, residencies, fellowships, or agents amps up that noise. How could it not? These are all things that writers want, and who doesn’t imagine actually getting them? But we’d be much better off if only we could figure out how to turn down KFKD, or better yet, change the channel—uncoupling the word “rejection” from “failure.”

There are two moments from On Writing, Stephen King’s memoir and craft book, that I still think about more than 15 years after reading it: the shortest sentence in the world, “Plums defy!” (which he presented as evidence that writing need not be complex), and his nailing of rejections. When King was in high school, he sent out horror and sci-fi fantasy stories to pulpy genre magazines. For the first few years, they all got rejected. He stabbed his rejection slips onto a nail protruding from his bedroom wall, which soon grew into a fat stack, rejection slips fanned out like kitchen dupes on an expeditor’s stake in a crowded diner. Done! That one’s done! Another story bites the dust! That nail bore witness to King’s first attempts at writing, before he became one of the most prolific and successful authors in the world.



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Breath of the Wild: a list of petty grievances

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Listen up, friends: I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If I were a betting man, I’d say its odds of being Chris Plante’s Game of the Year: 2017 Edition are quite high. We’re talking top percentile. However, I do have some gripes.

Now, I’ve noticed that parts of the internet aren’t especially keen on Zelda gripes. That is a shame. As we all know, no game is perfect, and there’s a certain relief in noting a game’s flaws, as they provide necessary contrast to a game’s strengths. So, at the risk of sabotaging my Twitter stream, I will enumerate my grievances, and I invite you to do the same. We will all be kind in the comments and on social media, because we all have unique tastes, and this is a truth worth celebrating.

Without further ado...

My problems with Breath of the Wild:

  • I can’t heal without opening a menu.
  • It takes too long to cook recipes that I’m just going to sell anyway.
  • I can’t romance Prince Sidon.
  • For the life of me, I can’t find the damn sunshrooms, but my Sheikah Slate won’t stop telling me they’re nearby.
  • I want to surf on my shield, but that will break my shield and I hate breaking things.
  • It rains too often.
  • The boss battles are sort of bland.
  • I can’t save recipes, so now my memory card is full of recipe screencaps.
  • Sometimes, I am gliding over a field, minding my own business, when an enemy pops into the environment and spoils my leisure time.
  • I can’t romance Trello, the clumsier version of Prince Sidon.
  • I have to skip the intro when watching a speedrun, because it’s so boring.
  • I bought amiibo for this.
  • Nintendo named it Breath of the Wild, right? So why doesn't the game end with Link defeating Ganon, turning to the camera, chewing an entire pack of spearmint gum, and saying, “Breath of the Wild? Not anymore.”
  • I can’t ride Yoshi.

I think that’s all of them. What about y’all?



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