Category Archives: Front Page

There is no limit to the stupidity of Man

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From Marginal Revolution…

Oakland’s recent gun buyback was especially ridiculous. The police offered up to $250 for a gun “no questions asked, no ID required.” The first people in line? Two gun dealers from Reno with 60 cheap handguns. Fortunately the buyback did manage to get some guns off the street, too bad they were turned in by a bunch of senior citizens from an assisted living facility. Whew, the streets are safe at last.

From the New York Times via Megan McArdle……

African nurses and pharmacists are also sought after by clinics and drug store chains offering better pay and legal assistance with immigration, said the experts, who include the heads of several pharmacy and medicine schools in Africa. “The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”

Good news for once

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This from Robert Rapier….

We could still potentially see $4 gasoline by summer, but it is looking increasingly less likely. Inventories should start to come down as turnaround season gets into full gear, but we are starting this year in a more comfortable place than last year. Presuming oil prices don’t go on a big run this spring, unless we have a repeat of last year’s steep draw down I doubt we will get close to $4 before summer.

Read the whole blog post for the supporting information. But the bottom line is that gasoline inventories are unusually high this year. The last time they where this high was back in 94. This should have a moderating impact on the price we pay at the pump.

Of course, there are still high oil prices and a generally inflationary environment working on prices from the other end. Still, we can hope that those who are predicting $4 a gallon gasoline will turn out to be wrong.

I want to try some of this butter…

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From the Crunchy Con…..

Life is too short to eat margarine. Really and truly. One of my indulgences is to drop $3 for a brick of Somerdale English butter at Central Market. It’s too expensive to use for cooking, but spread it on bread and it will knock your socks off. It’s like tasting real farm eggs, or chicken that comes from an actual farm. For people raised on mass-produced food — which is to say, almost all of us — it’s like tasting the Platonic essence of the thing for the first time. If you’re me, there’s very little that can give so much pleasure for $3 than a block of English butter, which makes most commercially available American butters taste pale and watery.

News From Spiegel

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We have not been keeping up with the news in the way we should. Here are some links from Spiegel that we should have posted when they came up.

First, a large treasure find?

Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

If this is true, Indian Jones was wasting his time. Who wants a holy grail when you can find this much gold?

Also fish with weird dangly things?

“We had some of the world’s experts on Antarctic fish, and they were completely, completely flabbergasted,” said Martin Riddle, the lead researcher of the Australian ship, Aurora Australis. “Many of the fish had very large eyes…[and] fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths.” The fish experts on board, Riddle said, “were unable to name them.”

Who knew that dangly things was technical term that cold be applied to biological phenomena? Not that we are casting stones. In fact, we heartily approve of this approach to learned discourse. Shortly, we shall all sound educated.

Moving on to more boring news, Germany’s state own banks are having problems….

Matthäus-Maier’s bank KfW has already had to provide IKB with close to €5 billion in a series of three bailouts. With KfW itself gradually running out of cash, the federal government has now contributed another €1.9 billion.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has injected €1 billion into WestLB, another state-owned bank, as well as providing the ailing bank with another €3 billion in loan guarantees. The situation is even worse in Saxony, where the state has issued €2.73 billion in loan guarantees to Sachsen LB, that state’s Landesbank, as Germany’s state-backed regional banks are known. The other state-owned banks are providing another €14 billion in guarantees. Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank urgently needs €1 billion in fresh capital, while BayernLB last week reported a €1.9 billion write-down as a result of subprime exposure. BayernLB announced Tuesday that the bank’s chief executive, Werner Schmidt, will be stepping down as of March 1 as a result of the crisis.

The situation for Germany’s public banks has become so dramatic that it threatens to topple what has been one of the key pillars of the country’s banking system. The state-owned banks are supposed to bail each other out when necessary, but the problem is that many are in trouble themselves and hardly in a position to help their peers. And things could get even worse.

Germans used to be known for the soundness of their banking system. But now a days, everyone is sub-prime.

Speaking of the world being turned up side down, who would ever have thought that Europeans would be telling America that we are underestimating the likely hood of Iran getting the bomb? This from a group of experts who work for the European Union……

As part of a project to improve control of nuclear materials, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy set up a detailed simulation of the centrifuges currently used by Iran in the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium. The results look nothing like those reached by the US intelligence community.

For one scenario, the JRC scientists assumed the centrifuges in Natanz were operating at 100 percent efficiency. Were that the case, Iran could already have the 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary for an atomic device by the end of this year. Another scenario assumed a much lower efficiency — just 25 percent. But even then, Iran would have produced enough uranium by the end of 2010.

For the purposes of the simulation, the JRC modelled each of the centrifuges individually and then hooked them together to form the kind of cascade necessary to enrich uranium. A number of variables were taken into account, including the assumption by most experts that Iran isn’t even close to operating its centrifuges at 100 percent efficiency. What is known, however, is that the Iranians are operating 18 cascades, each made up of 164 centrifuges. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself said last April that the country had 3,000 centrifuges in operation. At the time, most Western observers discounted the claim as mere propaganda. But the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Ahmadinejad’s assertion in November.

This would not be news, except for the fact that EU is telling the US that it might not be hawkish enough.

Deconstructing Starbucks

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Language deconstrutionists teach that language has only relative meaning. If you say the word “chair” to me, you may mean your comfortable stuffed armchair and I may picture my much less comfortable desk chair. Likewise, no matter how many words you use to make a point, I may understand those words differently and come up with a different point. Thus, the theory goes, it is impossible to ascertain what words mean, and their “meaninging” in the vulgar, functional sense of the word is determined by their opposition or difference (or differance, for those in the know). That is, if you say “chair,” I am not likely to think of a dog or of the planet Neptune.

What they say about language is correct, but not what they say about meaning. After all, no matter how we misunderstand each other, your chair, my chair, and the planet Neptune all exist. The lifeblood of civilization is communication that is functional as a transactions of meaning. None of our language can exhaustively define what we are speaking of; that would require words which create precisely that which they define (there’s the rub). Short of that, we are borrowing a portion of the possible meaning when we communicate, as the moon reflects light. But the light is still real, even if it is reflected; and so the meaning.

Now, that’s a rather tedious way to introduce this video which you can enjoy without considering any of that. But with that introduction, I pose the question: is the customer being naive in failing to grasp the relative meaning of the word “tall,” or is the “nameless” coffee shop being perverse in its attempt to confuse the meaning of the word “tall”?

I’m siding with the customer.