From the Wall Street Journal….
But considering individual sectors, “This will go down as the one of the worst holiday sales seasons on record,” said Mary Delk, a director in the retail practice at consulting firm Deloitte LLP. “Retailers went from ‘Ho-ho’ to ‘Uh-oh’ to ‘Oh-no.'”
The holiday retail-sales decline was much worse than the already-dire picture painted by industry forecasts, which had predicted sales ranging from a 1% drop to a more optimistic increase of 2.2%.
From the Telegraph….
“You can’t make this up” is a catch phrase of Inspector Gadget. I faithfully follow his blog and I read various British publications and I have gotten kind of use tales of total absurdity coming out of the United Kingdom. But every now and again, I come a crossed a story that still shocks me. This is one of them.
Figures released by the Conservatives show that 2,196 foreign offenders have been invited to take part in the early release scheme, called End of Custody Licence, since its introduction 15 months ago in response to prison overcrowding.
As well as walking free having served less than half of their sentence, each released prisoner is entitled to around £7 a day in compensation to make up for missing out on the state-provided food and lodging they would have received had they remained in jail.
Offenders released on End of Custody Licence receive an initial discharge payment of £46, followed by the subsistence allowance of £47.12 a week, up to a cap of £168.24.
If all those eligible received the full allowance, the taxpayer would by now have paid out £369,455 in compensation to foreign prisoners who had been released early.
Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”
When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.
“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. A video is online at www.beatricedegelder.com/books.html.
The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.
All the things that go on in our minds with out us being conscious of it always strike me as being a little freaky.
The defense establishment is currently preparing for a military move against Hamas targets in Gaza, after the Islamist group launched more than 70 rockets into Israel on Wednesday.
As an initial retaliatory measure, an Israel Air Force strike killed a Hamas gunman in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Israel’s response will go beyond the air raid, an Israeli official told Haaretz.
Russia had to devalue the rubble again. From Bloomberg…..
Russia devalued the ruble for the third time in a week, sending the currency to its lowest level against the dollar since January 2006, as oil’s drop below $37 a barrel dimmed the outlook for growth.
To help pay their bills, the are trying to get blood out of a stone. From a different Bloomberg article….
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened sanctions against Ukraine, and state-run OAO Gazprom said it might cut off natural gas to the former Soviet republic if it fails to pay $2.1 billion it owes by next week.
Meanwhile, even their victory over Georgia is giving them problems. From Spiegel…..
In the city, 10 schools, kindergartens and the hospital have been rebuilt. But in many houses there are now plastic tarps and blankets where windows used to be. “We brought enough glass to Tskhinvali to provide it with three times as many windows as it needs,” Russian Disaster Protection Minister Sergei Shoigu said angrily.
No one knows exactly what happened to all the glass and other building materials. The same appears to apply to much of the €350 million ($490 million) in Russian reconstruction aid. To be on the safe side, Moscow did send two of its own people to Tskhinvali to serve as prime minister and finance minister. But President Kokoity has declared the budget, filled almost exclusively with Russian funds after the war, a state secret. A former security advisor accuses Kokoity of having surrounded himself with confidants from the Russian regions of Samara and Ulyanovsk and of conducting money-laundering operations with dubious companies.
Yuri Morosov, the former prime minister who resigned after the war — supposedly of his own free will — voices similar complaints. According to Morosov, 100 million rubles or about €2.7 million ($3.8 million) in salary payments for public servants were embezzled shortly before the conflict. Most of the money was intended for South Ossetia’s armed militias.
The above might seem just like western tut tuting. But the problems in South Ossetia have gotten so bad that even the normally compliant Russian media have been talking about them.
GMAC is now a bank, even though they haven’t reached requested levels of capitalization.
To me, the most interesting part of the Fed’s decision to allow GMAC to become a bank is the fact that it will be broken up to the point at which its owners will effectively have no control over it any more. The Fed seems to have concluded that GMAC has a strong management team in place, and that its current woes are more a function of its shareholders than they are of GMAC’s own internal mismanagement.
The total disregard for anything that resembles rules is going to cause big problems down the road.
As it turned out, they would make it across the wadi, but not easily. Most of the Afghan “jingle trucks,” named after their tinkling decorations, got stuck in the mud, some more than once. Some of the American vehicles got stuck trying to pull them out. The crossing took three hours.
The convoy finally reached its destination, Combat Outpost Kushmand in Paktika province, but only after a 17-hour day that covered just 20 miles.
Iraq was the bad war. Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war. But before it is all done, I think that Afghanistan is going to leave deeper scars on the American consciousness.
The supply situation is just so much worse in Afghanistan then it was in Iraq that I can’t help feeling that we are a heart beat away from a detachment being surround and killed. Or even worse, the supply lines for Pakistan getting cut and forcing the evacuation of most American troops.
The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
From later on in the article….
Seattle also equips its plows with rubber-edged blades. That minimizes the damage to roads and manhole covers, but it doesn’t scrape off the ice, Wiggins said.
That leaves many drivers, including Seattle police, pretty much on their own until nature does to the snow what the sand can’t: melt it.
The city’s patrol cars are rear-wheel drive. And even with tire chains, officers are avoiding hills and responding on foot, according to a West Precinct officer.
I could almost understand this if the stated reason was to save money. Seattle does not get that much snow and everyone has to pinch pennies these days. But the stated reason for not using salt is the desire to protect the Puget Sound.
This does not make any sense to me. To best of my memory the Puget Sound is a body of salt water so what harm could a little salt do to it?