As this essay sets out to prove, there is no assurance that the sky will not fall any minute now. Consider yourself warned.
Essay of the Week: 5/18/08 – 5/24/08
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Monthly Archives: May 2008
Close call
One of the overlaps between my old job duties and my new duties is monitoring an effort to improve our service to a key customer. As with a similar initiative about a year ago, I am frustrated with merely noting the problems we are having. I don’t think using extraordinary focus to compensate for systemic Click Here to continue reading.
Japan facing a severe shortage of engineers.
The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.
By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.
Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat version of capitalism.
The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”
This is happening all over the developed world. To much talent has been directed towards being a lawyer or a banker. Add that to a shortage of kids general and young engineers are going to be in high demand.
Many towns in China lost an entire generation of young people to the earthquake
That anger is flowing in communities across the disaster zone. While the overall death toll has passed 21,500 and is expected to climb as high as 50,000, there is special tragedy — and perhaps a whiff of scandal — in the number of young people who died in collapsed schools. Communities like Juyuan have had an entire generation of young people wiped out. In the nearby city of Dujiangyan, more than 300 students were killed when the Xinjian Elementary School collapsed. Sixty miles away in the mountainside town of Hanwang, the scene repeated itself at the Dongqi Middle School, where an estimated 200 students died. Five children were killed when two schools even collapsed in Chongqing, the state-run Xinhua News Service reported. The city is more than 200 miles away from the quake’s epicenter.
Cool Bird Formations
Heard of a plague of grasshoppers? Well, there are enough birds (I’m assuming they’re starlings) in the sky in this video taken in California to be a plague of starlings. But what is even more intriguing is the sight they make when they fly around. It’s a huge number of birds making changing formations in the sky, swirling around and ballooning out making various elliptical shapes. There are many groups of them, and as they fly around it makes undulating black patterns as all the birds move to one spot or another.
For example, at one point, there are four sections of birds: a neatly-contained elliptical shape at the top, two smaller groups underneath, and a more scattered-apart group coming in from the bottom. The bottom group moves upward and forms a bulging “head”, compresses down into a dense mass and then puffs outward and dissipates. The top section of birds flies upward, condensing as it goes into a small black blob. Meanwhile one of the smaller, side-groups pushes a narrow arm into the other side group, which spreads out, swirls downward, thickens as it moves up, rushes forward and collides (or seems to; they’re really two distinct layers) with the small dark blob, which is so thick with birds it looks black. The group thins on one side as some birds go behind the dense blob, which seems to fall apart and collect again, undulating with the added birds; meanwhile on the other side, it swells out. That was only a few seconds worth; at another point there are even more groups. Anyway, you can go see for yourself!
Around the middle of the video they seem to disappear, but keep watching; they come back in an even more impressive display.
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(Posted by Good Doggy)
From the Economic Blogs….
Freddie Mac issued its quarterly “report” and gave clues as to how to paint lipstick on pigs and actually get away with it. The trick is to put $157 billion (from $32 billion before) over to Level 3, where absolutely no haircut is then reported. Readers may recall that Level 3 essentially allows the reporter to make up their own prices separate from market prices. In the case of Freddie, management has determined that “market prices don’t make any sense”, hence the move. This writer would argue that the quasi-official institutions like the GSE and foreign central banks themselves are creating massively distorted Soviet Union style prices that if anything makes even the market prices that Freddie dismisses too high.
From Macro Man (Click on link for graphs)……
Regular readers will recall that when the Fed cut 50 bps in September, Macro Man opined that the dollar was toast. When BB and co. slashed rates by 75bps when the stock market got Kerviel’ed, it seemed like they were hitting the panic button. And what’s happened since then? Median one year inflation expectations have rocketed from 3.1% to 5.2%. Sadly, Bloomberg doesn’t have historical data for average 12 month inflation expectations; those are now a resounding 7%!!! It seems as if not everyone is living in the Fed’s hedonically and seasonally adjusted, core goods world.
The rise in inflation expectations is all the more remarkable when put into historical context; they are now the highest since February 1982. Now, just because you expect higher inflation and demand higher wages doesn’t mean you’ll get ’em, especially in the context of an incipient recession. But with the balance of probability favouring a Democratic sweep come November, what odds that there emerges a legislative response to the juxtaposition of near-record corporate profits as a % of GDP along with stagnant/negative real wage growth?
From the Daily Rap via Calculated Risk……
The truth is their data is wrong. The market has, obviously, taken the view that the worst of the writedowns are behind us, and if anything it’s now just a macroeconomic problem we face. I think that’s dead wrong. We’re now entering the phase where the macro impacts earnings, but also the stage where real cash losses start to hit the banks (subprime and Alt-A is primarily a mark-to-market issue, but HELOCs are going to be large, outright losses). Once WAMU, WFC, BAC and JPM start to get data through on how rapidly their HELOC portfolios are deteriorating, watch the losses pile up. I’m talking realised losses, not mark-to-market writedowns.”
Cosmic Justice
I know I should not feel this way, but I can’t but help feel that the upswing in coyote attacks in California represents some kind of cosmic justice. Especially when I read lines like this….
Authorities dissuade people from hunting renegade coyotes themselves and suggest that they instead make noise or throw objects to scare them from neighborhoods.
Wardens have spotted the coyote that tried to drag a 2-year-old girl from her front yard Tuesday in Lake Arrowhead, about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, but did not have a clear shot to fire. They have since set up traps for it.
Authorities were also investigating reports of two possible attacks earlier this year in the same resort town in which a coyote may have bitten two young children in the buttocks as their father barbecued on the deck.
In the latest case, police said her mother was photographing the toddler and her siblings in front of the house when she ran inside to put the camera down. That’s when a coyote tried to make off with the toddler.
The girl was treated for wounds to the head and neck, but was expected to survive.
Dotti Edwards, a neighbor, came home after the attack and spotted a scrawny coyote in the street. Her neighbors have complained of coyotes in recent weeks with reports of the wild animals sleeping in yards and pestering residents.
“They’re so brazen right now,” she said. “They just stand there and look at you.”
Coyotes are not stupid. If they know that the worst that will happen to them is that people will try to “scare” them they will have no fear. But a clear eyed understanding of nature is not politically correct in California.
Video montage of tornadoes
A Quote to Remember
Courtesy Of Marginal Revolution, I came a across this quote from this essay from Interfluidity…..
If the Fed were to blow through the rest of its current stock of Treasuries, it would have invested more than $2500 for every man, woman, and child in America. Public investment in the financial sector would have exceeded the direct costs to date of the Iraq War by a wide margin. Would that that be enough? If not, how much more? Just how large a risk should taxpayers endure on behalf of companies that arguably deserve to fail, to prevent “collateral damage”? Have we considered other approaches to containing damage, approaches that shift costs and risks towards those who benefited from bad practices, rather onto the shoulders of taxpayers and nominal-dollar wage earners? Does this sort of policy choice belong within the purview of an independent central bank?
In case you have not been keeping track, it has already blown through more then half its stock of Treasuries.
They don't all live in the US…..
From Spiegel…….
The men, enjoying the sunny spring weather with their wives, couldn’t get the coal to light with their lighter liquid so the 37-year-old host decided to pour a glass of petrol on it instead.
That did the trick. “The resulting darting flame made him drop the glass of petrol. That in turn startled his 28-year-old friend who dropped the petrol canister, which contained between three and five liters, onto the floor,” police in the southwestern German city of Kaiserslautern said in a statement.
The burning liquid ran off the balcony onto the host’s car which burst into flames. The fire then engulfed his wife’s car next to it as well another car parked on the other side.