Category: interesting

Money invested in protecting nature can bring huge financial returns – a hundredfold return on capital.

Pavan Sukhdev, Deutsche Bank economist:

“We have now evaluated 1,100 studies ranging across different countries and different ecosystem services.

“And we find that with protected areas, for example, no matter how you slice the figures up you come up with a ratio of benefits to costs that’s between 25-to-one and 100-to-one.

“Now we can say quite confidently that there is a solid benefit from investing in protected areas.”

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study is the first attempt to evaluate the economic value of ‘ecosystem services’ – things that parts of the natural world do for free, such as purifying drinking water.

Some governments are on board already: Germany – which initiated the project in 2007 – Norway, and the UK. [BBC]

The AP is tracking Sarah Palin errors. Wonkette is citing various poor writing and silly quotations.

“A month of diapers cost as much as a truck payment, and it was always a gut wrenching decision: ‘keep the big new truck or let Trig stay in a wet diaper for an extra few days’”

Return to Sender casket looks like a shipping crate. Biker, Trucker and Hunter models available. $2600 delivered.

Withdrawal from intense exercise can produce effects that parallel, chemically, heroin withdrawal. The opiates the body produces naturally during exercise can have similar effects to externally administered opiates such as heroin; it also implies that endurance activities such as ultrarunning might be of use in helping drug addicts replace a “negative” addiction with a “positive” one.

Many, many psychological and sociological studies rely on college students, but:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic] societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans”.

Mind Hacks

Obama is pacific:

“I know there are many who question how the United States perceives China’s emergence. But, as I have said, in an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another. Cultivating spheres of cooperation — not competing spheres of influence — will lead to progress in the Asia Pacific.

“So . . . I want everyone in America to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home. This is where we engage in much of our commerce and buy many of our goods. And this is where we can export more of our own products and create jobs back home in the process.”

Full speech here.

Craig Newmark — Wikipedia: the first draft of history

“It’s an exemplar and test platform for large-scale, global collaboration. By that I mean large numbers of people working together for common goals. Wikipedia, in that sense, is a major advance for all humanity.

“It’s also dramatic proof of the supreme effectiveness of collaboration: people work together on Wikipedia to build articles, often in collaboration across the world, and often over long periods of time.

“The style of collaboration is novel in that it balances expert work with that of talented citizens. That’s the same balance we see emerging all over the Net. It’s also the same balance between representative democracy and grassroots democracy. In that sense, Wikipedia is a democratic system, reflecting the best of what we see in all human endeavors.”

Masnick:

Plenty of smart publishers are perfectly profitable.

conversations with global leaders
27 pages from mckinseyquarterly.com

Mahindra:

Lack of vision and resource constraint is the main reason for problems that we are facing today.

We can understand the resource constraint the country faced earlier. But not having right visionary leaders at the right place at the right time is going to cost us more in coming days.

Leaders who are running this India, these Indian states, these Indian cities… absolutely do not have a proper plan to serve 1.2+ Billion people.

Farmer:

The 18-year-long day is no less epic than a 700-page day spent with Joyce’s Ulysses and a whole lot more accessible and pleasurable.

Climate Change Costs $500 Billion Per Year:

Faith Birol, our pet IEA Chief Economist says “…the world must speed up the reduction in fossil energy use and make a transition faster to clean renewable energy, not only because because of climate change but because of growing problems within our energy system and possible implications for the global economy… .

“People are either hardened to it or really sensitive about it.”

Fort Hood is one of the largest bases. At Shoemaker High School, for instance, 80 percent of the students have at least one parent in the military.

“We were expecting something like this to happen,” says Cynthia Thomas, director of Under the Hood, a military resisters’ café near the base. “With the multiple deployments, the lack of psychiatric care in huge numbers, this has been building.”

This is ridiculous:

Royal Bank of Scotland, the biggest bank in the world, failed. Citibank, which by some measures is the second biggest, failed, requiring two and a half government infusions of capital.

Is good sense avant guard?

Unusual for a book about physics, Louisa’s book is crowded with people.

“Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement: is remarkable in two ways: first for her solid grasp of the quantum concepts and her ease of explanation, and second, for her decision to frame these concepts as conversations between the great men who struggled to formulate and understand this mathematical breakthrough into Nature’s storehouse of mysteries.

“Louisa does not entirely invent these conversations but assembles them from letters and unpublished papers. Her method gives an impressive immediacy to these ideas which mere exposition would lack, Nick Herbert says, “…eavesdropping on the private lives of the discoverers of the greatest of Nature’s secrets.”

Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed:

“It is important to improve resolution procedures for financial institutions in the event of insolvency.

This includes requiring firms to formulate contingency plans that would be used in the event of their failure. Doing so should reduce the chances that the collapse of a particular institution will threaten the broader financial system …

“At the same time, maintaining financial stability is also likely to involve more-proactive, state-contingent measures, that is, policies that vary with economic conditions.

“For example, when faced by several indications that asset markets may be exuberant, we might consider increasing capital requirements.”

Wall Street Journal

An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Health Care Costs, by Robert Reich:

Dear Senator,

I know you’re in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman’s derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor.

But Harry, you really need to take on future health-care costs. The House bill fails to do this. The public option in the House bill is open only to people without employer-provided health insurance. That will be too small a number to have bargaining clout to get good deals from drug companies and medical providers. And it will mainly attract people who have more expensive medical needs…

You also know a public insurance option that’s open to everyone would cut future health costs dramatically by imposing real competition on private for-profit insurance plans. That’s why the private insurers hate the idea. …

In addition to the House’s weak public option, the deals the White House and Max Baucus made with the drug companies and the AMA will force Americans to pay even more. If, on the other hand, Medicare were allowed to negotiate lower drug prices, biotech drugs weren’t granted a twelve-years monopoly, and doctors had to accept Medicare reimbursements in line with legislation enacted years ago, Americans would save billions.

You know all this but you’re also trying to get 60 votes in order get any bill to the floor. You have my sympathies, but unless you get these reforms into the final Senate bill you’re not really helping most Americans afford future health care. So what do you do?

First, try for the “reconciliation” process, which requires only 51 votes. Every one of the reforms I mention above would fit under the Byrd rule.

If that doesn’t work, wrap these reforms together … and have CBO score the savings. I guarantee you, the number will be large. Then you should dare anyone, Democrat or Republican, to vote against saving Americans so much money…

If neither of these tactics work, then take whatever bill you must to the Senate floor. But then introduce this reform package as the very first amendment to the bill. Call it the “Ted Kennedy Amendment for Helping Middle Class Families Afford Health Care,” and whip the hell out of the Democrats. … If you can’t get 51 votes out of Dems for this, publish the list of Dems who vote against it, strip them of their committee chairs or sub-chairs, and make sure the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee gives them zilch when they’re up for re-election.

Nobody promised you this would be easy, Harry. But, hell, why are you there, anyway? Your responsibility isn’t just to pass whatever will muster 60 votes and that the President and Dems can later call “health care reform.” It’s to do the right thing by the American people and bring down future health-care costs. Don’t cave in to Lieberman or Nelson or the drug companies or the private insurers or the AMA or anyone else. Lead the charge.

All best.

California’s outyear budget is underfunded by 49.3%.

this made me chuckle

“I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy,” said Michael C. Genest, the director of the California Department of Finance.

“I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status.”

Wall Street Journal

Scripp’s photo slideshow at NY Times.

“In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

“Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.”

EPA Office of Water
National Study of Chemical Residues in Lake Fish Tissue

Toxic chemicals in fish tissue in nearly all 50 states.

Mercury concentrations in game fish at 49 percent of lakes and reservoirs nationwide, and PCBs in game fish at 17 percent of lakes and reservoirs.

The local paper reports that Sony Pictures notified OneCommunity, which operates the county’s one-block hotzone, that a movie was downloaded “illegally.”

Wi-Fi Networking News

‘Superweeds‘

A Transgenic Variety of corn that is fatal to ladybugs?

We are repairing a long list of sloppy. The introduction of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops has created a dire situation:

Ladybug.
Frankencash.
Living vs killing.

Phil Cubeta:

What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another.

To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination.

We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets have failed us.

Walt Whitman:

We have frequently printed the word democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, younger brother of another great and often-used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.