Author: Brian

China to be World’s Largest Economy in about a Decade, says Deutsche Bank.

The forecast is dramatically stepped-up from two years earlier.

Ten years is not enough time to imagine how this will reshape the world.

Learn something new every day!

Non-golfers sometimes treat the terms ‘golf course’ and ‘links’ as synonymous, but they’re not.

“Linksland is a specific type of sandy, wind-sculpted coastal terrain — the word comes from the Old English word blinc, ‘rising ground’ — and in its authentic form it exists in only a few places on earth, the most famous of which are in Great Britain and Ireland”.

Links are always dry — even in the depths of winter — because of the way water drains through the sandy base. So the ball always bounces on the fairway, and never ‘plugs’ in the way that it will on a sodden inland course. And because links are always, by definition, by the sea, to the challenges of the terrain must be added the complications of wind.

See John Naughton’s Memex for more on Missing Links.

Jorge Cham, author of PhD Comics, offers us a few pearls in these panels, such as,

Mike Masnick at TechDirt has been following the capped web and he’s finding that ISPs are pulling our leg:

Just as the various broadband providers are ramping up their bogus astroturf attempts to convince the world that broadband caps are necessary and good for customers, Saul Hansell has been digging deep into the numbers and can’t find any justification at all for the caps.

All those stories about overwhelmed networks and exponential traffic growth? Not happening.

If anything, the evidence is that the opposite is true: advances in technology means that it’s become cheaper for broadband providers to meet the needs of their customers.

I live just outside of town and just south of the famous Silicon Valley, but the only Internet connection available is Sprint’s 3G using an extra $400 for an amp and roof antenna. I no longer consider dial-up a valid product. Sprint’s cap means that I must block all video, all Flash, 99% of any advertising, all audio and cannot view movies or television clips. It’s peg leg web at $60 per month.

Again I point to Leo Kolivakis. He’s testifying to Canada’s Parliament:

By shifting assets out of safe government bonds, first into equities and then alternative investments like hedge funds, private equity, real estate, commodities and other risky investments, pension funds have contributed to systemic risk of the global financial system.

This process is what I have dubbed the global pension Ponzi scheme because pension funds were investing billions into alternative investments, ignoring the securitization bubble and without due consideration of how their collective actions are affecting the soundness of the global financial system.

Pension funds claim that the shift into alternative investments was done for diversification purposes, to “smooth” overall returns and to deliver absolute returns.

However, there was another reason behind the shift to alternative investments: it allowed senior executives at pension funds to game their policy benchmarks so they could collect huge bonuses, claiming they are adding value to overall returns.

Fix threat.

It’s not easy. It’s not a matter of courageous power or ingenious wit. It’s a matter of grace.

There is much war in this world, but it comes first from much worry. If a citizen fights there’s a parade, but citizens must also put their life on the line long before battle.

Nearly 25% of land around the world is in bad shape and getting worse, and human activities are to blame.

Greed has a signature of pathology. We think of its driving force but too little of its weakness. Imagine a flock of flamingo filtering rich algae then rushing to the sky. Imagine terrified bankers.

There was not a run on the banks by depositors in the streets to withdraw their savings. Rather, it was an escalating and terrifying run on the banks in effect by the banks themselves, which would reproduce the events of 1929.

The very vast majority of us around the world do not choose greed but fail under it, a Ponzi promoted as security, vinegar sold as sugar, fools and Republicans telling us greed is wise.

The sky is ours, but we have nowhere to fly.

271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals dumped into our water… warfarin, fluorouracil, pentobarbital, tetracycline… active pharmaceutical ingredients…

As buccaneers bilk our finance industry, as the Republican platform continues to pimp Wall Street, the NakedCapitalism blog is running a series on pension risk written by Leo Kolivakis.

When employers began turning 401(k)s into retirement plans, the financial community was not shy about promoting them. The prospect of trillions of dollars in the hands of unsophisticated investors opened the door for all sorts of potential abuses.

…
It’s disgusting and while America worries about “Al-Qaeda”, the real crime is happening right under their noses.

Public pension fund shakedown? If you ask me, it’s a shakedown of the entire public of unsuspecting investors who are getting fleeced by Wall Street crooks.

When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

‘Superweed’ explosion threatens Monsanto heartlands

The gospel of high-tech genetically modified (GM) crops is not sounding quite so sweet in the land of the converted.

A new pest, the evil pigweed, is hitting headlines and chomping its way across Sun Belt states, threatening to transform cotton and soybean plots into weed battlefields.

In late 2004, “superweeds” that resisted Monsanto’s “Roundup” herbicide, popped up in GM crops in Georgia.

Monsanto, the US multinational biotech corporation, is the world’s leading producer of Roundup, as well as genetically engineered seeds. Company figures show that nine out of 10 US farmers produce Roundup Ready seeds for their soybean crops.

Roundup contains the active ingredient glyphosate, which is the most used herbicide in the USA.

Superweeds have since alarmingly appeared in other parts of Georgia, as well as South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, according to media reports.

How has this happened?

Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed…

Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.

One year of pigweed means seven years of weeding.
Little TinyFarm deals with pigweed.
tip to Doug Powell’s Agnet
pigweed wiki

Harvard business blog:

The Pirate Bay guys were criminally prosecuted for….violating (largely obsolete) copyright. Almost no one in finance has been held even civilly liable for vastly more economically damaging actions.

On the one hand, we have damages worth maybe (maybe) a few million. On the other, a few trillion.

Jeffrey Goldberg discusses why he fired his broker. “His company couldn’t manage its own money, much less ours.”

If I lose my job, then I’ll complain…

But for now, no whining: just confusion and bemusement and fear, along with an uncharacteristic sense of paralysis….

I called a psychologist to find out what could explain this weird passivity. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize–winning innovator in the field of behavioral economics. He explained that my feelings of paralysis were to be expected.

“You no longer know the world you live in,” he said. “You played by the rules, the rules benefited you. The world functioned according to some regularities. Right now, it’s unclear what rules apply. There is a new regime. What seemed prudent earlier has disappeared. I’m surprised Americans aren’t more panicked. Americans seem to accept a level of insecurity in their lives that Europeans wouldn’t tolerate.”

…
I should have seen the signs of dysfunction much earlier.

Here’s a summary of bubble errors that’s pretty rare, cuz most commentary is either bitchy or narrow. You pro’ly know this stuff already.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/17/henry-kaufman-what-the-fed-missed/

Lisa Schwarzbaum is a writer for Entertainment Weekly. Her comments on the performance of Susan Boyle are touching.

“In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging – the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts – the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace.

“She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective.”

From the BBC.

David Simon:

The same game is played everywhere – nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution is supposed to do…

If there’s an institution that is supposed to serve you or that you are supposed to serve, and it’s supposed to care for you and be a societal positive, it will betray you.

Other junk from the rich:

Time will tell how it all shakes out, but the reshaping of New York, at least Manhattan, over the past 25 years or so is notable for the sheer scale and amount of demolition, as well as construction. No previous era had that much destroying to do to impose its will, and obviously no previous era built so much so high.

And the corporate ethos that drove all that business was also about getting the most from the least, so the gaudiness of the recent past was matched by its shoddiness—whatever the failings of the late 19th-/early 20th-century robber barons, at least they built to last.

The ’80s/’90s/2000s will leave really lousy ruins.

Folks strutting with an air of morality should be a warning to us that something bad is on the way.

Deric Bownds reports at MindBlog of new experiments evaluating human behavior. Two points emerge.

1. We suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally.
2. However, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.

So many dead and maimed. Children struck down. All of the noise of economy and politics cannot compare to the wasteland of morality.

A further article here:

A team of researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation, USA, has been investigating the role of ethical and religious beliefs, or ‘sacred values’, in motivating human behavior.

“Sacred values must be studied as they form a core part of individual identity and is the root of cultural conflicts. People want to protect what they hold sacred and it leads to irrational behavior,” says Sonya Sachdeva of Northwestern University

Our ‘moral ecology’ may be the most damaged and requiring our greatest effort.

Summing a visit to a tea party:

The hatred was palpable today on the State Capitol’s steps. Hatred for taxes, hatred for government, hatred for state workers, hatred for teachers, hatred for Democrats, and hatred for all of the straw men that leap from the imaginations of talk radio jocks.

…
George W. Bush’s entire eight years was nothing but a neo-liberal experiment in skewing government and every other public good toward serving the interests of profiteers and the rich. That was apparently fine with these rightwingers as long as the government money was flowing upwards into the hands of the rich and corporations.-

…
And therein lies the beauty of the whole Tea Bag ‘movement’. Affluent people like Michelle Malkin and Grover Norquist and the army of radio ‘personalities’ convince working people, most of who have a relative or are themselves on Medicare or Social Security, to denounce taxes on affluent people. Joseph A. Palermo, Associate Professor of History

urban cartography responds to tea parties:

…why are the current “tea party” protests so often organized by and appealing to conservative voters? isn’t it their own call for deregulation that caused the problem?

… hasn’t the constant coddling of big business – since the late 1940s – been the signature, the hallmark, of the Republican party, with conservative politicians responsible for almost 250 times more earmarks to big banking, insurance & manufacturing than Democrats (in 50 years, that amounts to about 98 trillion, according to the OMB)?

I think the bailouts are a mistake, too, but not for made-up Socialist scare tactics, but rather because it’s yet more public dollars going to the already rich – even more of this continuing ingrained right-wing bullshit brainwashing we’ve had that it’s the job of the working to prop up the billionaires of the country and the world.

Pioneering was a bitch when only a homestead mattered.

Now we’re walking far.

We are good work, not following, not Crusade nor War, these are only mileposts we see with our poor mind. History is made of spirit, trundle and baggage yes, but glint and spark as well.

Our foot is heavy, but it does lift. We stay along the good trail, our gift many travel, seared in blizzard maybe, but convinced of virtue’s key.

We too are ancestors.

Let’s say for a moment that it would be good if there’s a sincere economist.

Mike Stathis posts at a syndicate site called SeekingAlpha:

…while I may not agree with some of their editorial decisions, I want to commend their provision to allow contributors to have a free uncensored voice through the addition of the instablog. I feel it to be a fair compromise for those of us (as few as there are) who are committed to telling the truth for the benefit of investors.

I understand the SA wants to ensure their content meets certain guidelines – because it is streamed through to mainstream media sites. But people have had enough of the mainstream media bull.

It was the mainstream media that denied problems with the economy. People want the truth.

Investigators say that Dick Armey instigated the Tea Party, or as Larisa Alexandrovna reports, The rich buy the stupid and manufacture a movement… nothing grassroots about it.

Pulling strings in Red States, well-funded committees organize a froth.

Oh you betcha I got a kick outta this headline. Puts mythic medicine in a bottle and brings dopamine’s cousins into our heraldric DSM. From the BBC: Ancient medicines were alcoholic

We throw up too much.