Category Archives: Front Page

How would you like to run in this?

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From Fox News…

The Chinese capital was shrouded in a thick, gray haze of pollution Sunday, just 12 days before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. One expert warned that drastic measures enacted to cut vehicle and factory emissions in the city were no guarantee skies would be clear during competitions.

The pollution was among the worst seen in Beijing in the past month, despite traffic restrictions enacted a week ago that removed half of the city’s vehicles from roadways.

Visibility was a half mile (less than 1 kilometer) in some places. During the opening ceremony of the Athletes’ Village on Sunday, the housing complex was invisible from the nearby main Olympic Green.

h/t Crunchy Con.

Gene Logsdon on growing raspberries

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From his blog….

The reason the wild ones survive on their own is that they move about. In the garden, humans usually want to keep raspberries corralled in permanent rows. Raspberries are like teenagers: they want to get away from their parents but maintain a connection in case they got in a jam. On black and purple varieties, the new canes that come up in the springtime grow to about five feet high, then bend over in midsummer so that the tips of the canes pierce the soil surface and root. The red and yellow ones spread by suckering, that is new canes come up from the roots moving out and away from the parent plants. By moving away from the old stand every year, the new canes usually avoid disease until they fruit in their second year and then die naturally. (Everbearing reds and yellow canes fruit in the fall of their first year and summer of their second year and then die naturally.)

Understanding this process, the successful raspberry grower sets out new plants in the spring (suckers on red raspberries and the new tip sprouts on the blacks that rooted the year before), at some distance from the old plants, same as they do for strawberries. Setting out new plants at least a hundred feet from the old row avoids diseases or delays them at least. And makes weed control a little easier. Even if you buy so-called virus-free plants, they are not really all that free because virus-free rarely last for very long and is of no help against fungal diseases like orange rust. It does help to cut out the old canes as soon as they are through fruiting, but that is very hard work since they are growing right in among the new canes.

We have a lot of debt

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From Naked Capitalism…..

We will return to discuss the implications of how big the debt level is, but the graph itself should serve to focus the mind. The March 31 level was 350% of GDP. The previous peak occurred in 1933, during the Great Depression, at just under 270% of GDP. Note that the peak was reached due to the start of the rapid fall in GDP taking hold faster than debts were written off, a dynamic not in operation now. So the comparable level to our situation is in fact lower than the 270% peak.

An additional bit of cheery news comes from reader Bjomar: Japan’s total debt to GDP in 1990 was roughly 250% (it took some triangulating among this, this, and this source, his interpolation of corporate debt at 100-140% of GDP, household at 65%, and government at 60%). And unlike us, Japan had a very high saving rate, so its net debt would have been less alarming.

Look at the Graph.

Rant of the Week: 7/27/08–8/2/08

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The Chieftain of Seir recently wrote an essay arguing that authority is weak all over the world and that it would only take worldwide economic problems to shatter political stability the world over. One of the things that he linked to in support of his case was this rant by Le Pen.

Now we are no great fans of Le Pen (this reasonably fair overview of the man) but we think it is important to listen to the voices of those who are likely to be empowered by economic problems. For better or for worse, the arguments of Le Pen are the future of France

Essay of the Week: 7/27/08–8/2/08

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The report of the commission to assess the threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack is too long for most mere mortals to read. But everyone should at least make an effort to read chapter one (skip the introduction and scroll down to page 17).

The commission details how the US electrical grid has become increasingly vulnerable to all forms of disruption, not just EMP Attacks. Like the various reports that detailed the problems with the levees that held back the water around New Orleans, this report is going to be ignored. It will only receive widespread press once the grid goes down.

And as the report makes clear, the electric grid is very vulnerable and becoming more vulnerable with every passing day. Vulnerability to EMP attacks is simply the tip of the iceberg. An increasing shortage of black start capability combined with a shortage of parts means that simply blowing up a few key transformers could cause major problems.