The War in Afghanistan Comes To Life In These Pictures
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Yearly Archives: 2008
Good Question
From The Telegraph….
What irks officials in Puntland most, though, is the failure of the multi-national force now patrolling the Gulf of Aden to take a robust approach to the problem. In a land where rule has seldom been by anything other the gun, few have been impressed by British and European officials’ talk of pirates having “human rights” that spare them from more traditional punishments like hanging.
The case in September, where a Danish warship dumped 10 arrested pirates back on a beach after deciding they lacked the jurisdiction to prosecute, caused widespread bemusement here. “Where is the deterrent for people to join the pirates, if they think they might not even get arrested?” asked Dr Abdirahman Bangah, Puntland’s acting fisheries minister.
Please Tell Me This Is Not True
The other day I took my seven-year-old son Louis to buy some running shoes. “Pick something with Velcro,” I said, as he trotted off to roam the racks.
A clerk, hovering nearby, gave me a jaundiced look, “You know we get high school kids in here who have to buy Velcro because they never learned to tie their shoes. Every year their parents would just buy them Velcro because it was easier than making them learn how to tie laces.”
I stared at him and he went on.
“The other day we had to special order a pair of shoes for this kid’s high school graduation because he couldn’t tie his laces, and he needed a pair of Velcro formal shoes.”
I put the shoes Louis had chosen back on the shelf, and picked out a pair of lace-up running shoes. It wasn’t just that I’d been shamed into compliance by the salesman, but something Jane Jacobs had written about in her last book about the coming dark ages hit home. The loss of knowledge, she said, once vanished, is so difficult to regain — even if it’s something as mundane as tying your shoes.
In case you think this episode is an isolated example, the other day I heard a youth worker, whose job it is to help teens at risk, say that almost none of them know how to tie their shoes. I’m sure this isn’t a causal relationship — wear Velcro, go to jail — but it made me think. What else have we lost, or failed to pass along, to the generation of kids about to inherit an increasingly compromised planet?
I have long argued that my generation is by and large worthless. But I have a hard time believing that kids are growing up without even learning how to tie their shoes.
So much for energy efficiency
From the Wall Street Journal….
An unexpected drop in U.S. electricity consumption has utility companies worried that the trend isn’t a byproduct of the economic downturn, and could reflect a permanent shift in consumption that will require sweeping change in their industry.
Numbers are trickling in from several large utilities that show shrinking power use by households and businesses in pockets across the country. Utilities have long counted on sales growth of 1% to 2% annually in the U.S., and they created complex operating and expansion plans to meet the needs of a growing population.
“We’re in a period where growth is going to be challenged,” says Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp. in Charlotte, N.C.
So who cares right? Everyone has problems. But these problems are going to be your problems. Cut your energy usage in an effort to save money? Does not matter. From later on in the article….
Utilities are taking a hard look at the way they set rates and generate profits. Many companies are embracing a new rate design based on “decoupling,” in which they set prices aimed at covering the basic costs of delivery, with sales above that level being gravy. Regulators have resisted the change in some places, because it typically means that consumers using little energy pay somewhat higher rates.
But it could be worse. We could live in Ukraine.
A Forced Merger With Who?
That collapse began a steady decline in Citigroup shares that snowballed this week as speculation grew that the bank might require a government bailout, a forced merger that would crush common equity holders, or an ouster of Mr. Pandit.
In the last five days alone, more than half of Citigroup’s market value was vaporized, and investors and analysts intensified calls for the bank to find ways to lift its stock price, including splitting the company, selling pieces or selling itself outright.
“They don’t have the sovereign wealth funds or other big investors to turn to anymore,” said William Fitzpatrick, an equity analyst for Optique Capital Management. “There are two remaining options: a federally forced merger or nationalization.”
A forced merger with who? Doesn’t everybody realize that Citigroup is the largest financial services organization in the world? How can they solve Citigroup’s underlying problems by merging them with someone who is smaller?
All this crazy talk surrounding Citi is making me think that John Hempton was close to the truth with his crazy little conspiracy theory.
Good Point, Bad Solution
But one thing that continues to surprise me is the frequency with which the US in 2007-2008 is being compared to the US of 1929-1930. I’ve mentioned in passing that China is in the position that the US occupied in the late 1920s: a massive manufacturer that was generating large trade surpluses, to the point where the imbalance was destablizing (under a gold standard, the US was sucking the metal out of its trade partners; the modern analogy is China’s massive foreign exchange reserves). And as the US was the epicenter of the Great Depression, we cannot be certain of the trajectory of this economic crisis until we have a sense of how bad things are getting in China and how good its policy responses are.
Reader Michael has been e-mailing me from time to time with not-pretty sightings on China’s responses to the downturn. This post from Michael Pettis tells us that China appears to be trying to keep its exports up, which is eerily parallel to what the US did in the Great Depression.
The point is good one. The Michale Pettis post that she links to is interesting. The conclusions that Michale Pettis and herself draw is all wrong.
Keynesian economics has never been able to solve the problem of overcapacity. Japan could not do in 90’s. The US could not do it in the 70’s. Nobody has ever been able to use Keynes ideas to solve any problem successfully. Yet his ideas it is still held out as the solution to the problem of overcapacity on the belief that everyone else did not properly follow Keynes ideas.
We Are Setting Records
From dshort.com…
Over the 80-year period since 1928, the average volatility in the Dow is about 1.8%. There have been only 66 days when the intraday volatility exceeded 8%. That’s right — 66 out of over 20,300 market days. If they were evenly spread, that would be about one 8% plus volatility day every 14.5 months.
Here’s the amazing and rather disturbing part . . .
Sixteen of them have occurred since September 29th — two in the past five days. The Crash of 1929 had only eight. Another thirty followed during the ten-year Great Depression. Four were clustered around the Crash of 1987. Only two happened during the nasty 2000-2002 bear.
The current bear market has had a record-breaking nine consecutive days of 8% plus volatility (October 6 through the 16th). Second place goes to the Crash of 1929, with eight super-volatile days spread over a 14 market-day period (10/23/29 to 11/13/29).
A lot of people are given false hope by the sharp drops coupled with sharp upswings. They think that if they wait long enough, everything will go back to the way it was before. I wonder how long it is going to take before the majority of Americans realize that they have lost a lot of money they are never going to get back no matter how long they wait.
Interesting Read
McGaugh and his staff realized they were looking at an exotic case, perhaps even a scientific sensation. For that reason they took a thorough approach, and for five years they subjected Price to batteries of neuropsychological tests, combed the professional literature for similar cases and developed special questionnaires to allow them to test her memory.
Once she was asked to write down the dates of all Easter holidays from 1980 to 2003. “It took her 10 minutes, and she only got one of the 24 dates wrong, where she was off by two days,” says McGaugh. He had Price repeat the test two years later, and the second time she got all the dates right. “I thought that was especially impressive,” says McGaugh, “because she is Jewish. Easter means nothing to her.”
The scientists were able to verify her autobiographical data because she has meticulously kept a diary since the age of 10. She has filled more than 50,000 pages with tiny writing, documenting every occurrence, no matter how insignificant. Writing things down helps Price organize the thoughts and images shimmering in her head.
In fact, she feels a strong need to document her life. This includes hoarding every possible memento from childhood, including dolls, stuffed animals, cassette tapes, books, a drawer from dresser she had when she was five. “I have to be able to touch my memories,” Price explains.
McGaugh and his colleagues concluded that Price’s episodic memory, her recollection of personal experiences and the emotions associated with them, is virtually perfect. A case like this has never been described in the history of memory research, according to McGaugh. He explains that Price differs substantially from other people with special powers of recall, such as autistic savants, because she uses no strategies to help her remember and even does a surprisingly poor job on some memory tests.
Oil Free Falls
US benchmark commodity futures hit $49.75 a barrel in New York, while the price of Brent in London fell to $48.45 – prices not recorded since May 2005.
Oil has lost about two-thirds of its value since July’s record high prices, as the economic slowdown around the world has weakened demand.
I feel bad for all the people who pre brought their heating oil on the fear that it would keep going up.