Month: September 2009

Poll: News media’s credibility plunges to all-time low.

Americans believe news coverage is inaccurate and biased.

At George Washington’s blog:

I would argue that mainstream newspapers haven’t just lost readers because of the Internet as an abstract new medium, but that they lost readers because they became – with some exceptions – nothing but official stenographers for the powers-that-be. No wonder people have lost all faith in them.

It takes three years, minimum, just to make each barrel that’s used for aging cognac.

David Lebovitz reports, “From the selection of oak, mostly from France (with some from the US), the wood that these men get needs to be cured for a minimum of two years with an alternating system of watering, then drying, during which time it changes color and becomes less porous, and starts its journey to becoming a barrel.

“There’s machines to cut the wood, but the finishing and banding is all done by hand.

“The long curing of the barrels reduces their humidity so when the distilled liqueur is stored in there, only 3 to 4% evaporates every year, which is called the Part des anges, the part the angels take.”

     jonny I miss you
I walked four miles in sun and snow. Sun and snow is worth that.
     jonny you gone 6 months
I walked into an eight foot cabin old enough to fall.
     jonny you son of a bitch
I read her note.

Oh what will they do for algae fuel? But nobody wants our fat.

Barely Imagined Beings Department: In the latest move in Japan’s war on giant jellyfish, high school students in the town of Obama have developed a new type of caramel candy made from the enormous sea creatures. Yes, the town of Obama. Near Wakasa Bay. What’s so unbelievable about that?

Phytogeography – the geographic distribution of plants.

In contrast to American introducers, Trabut, a very well-educated taxonomist, phytogeographer and evolutionist, delved deeply into the selection of species and genera.

He created an important botanical garden, where a worldwide tropical and subtropical flora is concentrated.

There he gathered what was most valuable.

The fame of Trabut is immortal. His methods are used not only in different countries along the shores of the Mediterranean; they are also employed in the subtropical areas of the Soviet Union.

Mark Morford:

Harry Potter, at some point in his interminable journey to becoming increasingly annoying, is apparently stalked by a big black dog called “the Grim,” which for my money would’ve been far more terrifying had it been a tiny manic spazzball Jack Russell Terrier that never shuts the hell up, refuses to sit still for more than three seconds and tears around Hogwarts biting off everyone’s kneecaps.

Were we marching not for superstition and lies, our rage would build this nation.

David Adams:

Applied Materials is a US company that makes the machinery that produces microchips and another silicon product: solar panels. All 14 solar panels factories built by Applied Materials in the past two years were constructed in Europe, Asia, and …even Abu Dhabi. Revenues in the last 12 months alone were $1.3 billion.

Germany, for example, generates nearly 50% of the world’s solar power and in doing so is a world leader in solar research, engineering, manufacturing, and installations, generating 50,000 new solar industry jobs.

I would add that US solar, by contrast, has yet to equal the kWh output of ONE typical coal-fired power plant.

Michelle Obama:

Farmers’ markets are a simple but major ingredient in solving access issues in many communities.

We know that when we start coming out to these markets, we’re going to start talking to each other. We’re going to talk about, where’d you get those peaches, and which stand, and let me try them, and what’s fresh.

We talk to each other in different ways.

So this market is not just about food. It’s about our community.

And this is just the beginning of the discussion.

(Applause)

News9.com

OKLAHOMA CITY — Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States.

Yes, one in four.

I’ve been waiting to see this.

1. Leading companies and investors announce readiness to address climate change.
2. There is great economic potential in transforming our societies to address climate change.
3. Investors have a crucial role to play in building a low-carbon, energy efficient global economy.

181 investors collectively managing more than $13 trillion

Tom Engelhardt:

• “War is peace”
• No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing.
• This wasn’t always the case.
• War is now the American way.
• Victory no longer seems to matter.
• And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it.

An eloquent essay. A searing essay.

I showed up at the shop to get my mane trimmed, and took notice of another customer already in the chair.

He was about 80 years old, very thin and dark, face almost like a skull, hardly a tooth in his head, and a few wisps of white hair on a mostly bald head–which, for some reason, he was having trimmed.

At the end of his haircut, of course, the near-toothless farmer grinned and paid his 50 baht, plus a generous tip.

Mark Thoma:

I have criticized regulators for not having plans ready to deal with too big to fail institutions.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that the ad hoc response from regulators made things worse, and we need to be better prepared with plans to dismantle these firms without destabilizing markets next time around (and do our best to prevent problems from developing to begin with, including regulating connectedness). The fact that we were caught without such plans was a big handicap in dealing with the unfolding crisis.

But the same can be said about macroeconomics. We didn’t plan for a big crisis either.

We had no plans on the shelf that we could rely upon when the crisis hit, and what we have seen from macroeconomists is the same kind of ad hoc scramble for an effective response that many of us have criticized regulators for.

But if macroeconomists had taken the possibility of a massive meltdown seriously before it happened and developed the theoretical apparatus we are now calling for now that we have seen that such events are, in fact, possible, then perhaps regulators would have been more inclined to think through this possibility and get ready for it. I don’t think the blame is all theirs.

Paul Volker’s tidbit:

[Laughter] It’s interesting you ask that question because I recently commented to some of my economist friends that I’m not aware of any large contribution that economic science has made to central banking in the last 50 years or so.

Oil and Economics: a dialogue between Mr. Q and Mr. A, with an occasional comment by Polly, a parrot.

Q: What is the most important thing to know about oil and economics?

A: Marginal cost, the cost of the next barrel of oil.

They came from all across this great land, from Sun City to Leisure World, united only by … by … Dick Armey’s astroturf roots movement and their dissatisfaction with … something-or-other.

Rebels without a common cause, they came to Washington because whatever irks them, it must be that guy’s fault, that Obama. He’s been in office practically forever.

So they brought their Winnebagos and walkers to Washington, all two million, one million, 100,000, 60,000 of them.

Stephen Baldwin:

I have recently returned from circumnavigating the salad bar at my local Shaw’s Supermarket. Magellan may have sailed further into uncharted realms, but I doubt that he experienced as much uncertainty and ill-omen as I did amid the lettuce and tomatoes. Darwin’s voyage of discovery may have penetrated more exotic ecosystems, but his microscope cannot have encountered any specimens more fearsome, alien and repulsive than those that wriggled between the teeth of my tongs.

Aside from the usual, unappetizing array of salad bar items such as scrimshaw cauliflower and dead-man’s cucumber, there were macaroni-shaped pasta worms drowning in some sort of mayonnaise scum; rubberized eggs, too; broccoli rendered as verdigris carbuncles; mushrooms that might have been grown in the dimmest recesses of a slave ship’s hold; and various other undesirable, indescribable types of organic matter that had been lately dredged from their watery grave. These were the monsters of the deep; vegetable krakens, giant squids and sliced albatrosses that lurked beneath a bed of brined lettuce and scurvy onion.

Talk about a “nightmare life-in-death” that “thicks men’s blood with cold”, I think tomorrow I’ll hike overland to Dante Ristorante instead. I hear tell that they do a good Italian cold-cut special, even if waiting in the long lunchtime line is purgatory.

Bill Easterly:

The Origin of Development as a Cover for Imperialism and Racism

Economic Development was “a new justification for colonial rule to replace the unpopular and increasingly implausible idea that they were a superior race destined to rule inferior races.”

…”in the end, the elites still believe in their fundamental superiority.”

Robert Levine:

And melioration is crucial: left alone as they were before 1933, the downsides of Schumpeter/Kontratieff waves and lesser cycles have in the past caused immense human misery and immense, if pre-nuclear, wars. They must be meliorated better than they were in the first half of the 20th century.

And I will end this comment on comments as I did my initial contribution. Depending on Schumpeterian innovation on the one side, and developing-country competition on the other, we may be in for a long trough—the “secular stagnation” of the 1930s.

In that case, I am firmly on the ultra-Keynesian (and what may be the Krugman) side with regard to means of melioration. Secular stagnation may mean secular deficits; so be it, it is better than the alternatives.

Aug 21, 2009? Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyclone, said:

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population….”

ROFL

Justin Fox:

Who Has All the Answers?

There is no grand, unifying theoretical structure in economics.

We do not have one model that rules them all.

Instead, what we have are models that are good at answering some questions – the ones they were built to answer – and not so good at answering others.

Steven Attewell says it’s the fight worth having.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for. She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out, ” said George W. Bush. “What is she, the governor of Guam?”