Sunday Reads
After a week of gray, rain, grayer, snow, and even more gray, the sun is finally out. The snow has melted, and its gorgeous out. Time to take the two seater out for a ride, and enjoy the weather!
Meanwhile, I have several good reads from the past few days that are worth pouring a cup of coffee and spending some time with before the weekend is over:
• Retailers Shift Focus to Post-Holiday Deals to Lure Buyers (Bloomberg)
• A Flat Dow for [another] 10 Years? Why It Could Happen (Barrons)
• Corporate Governance two-fer:
-Does Golden Pay for the CEOs Sink Stocks? (Yes) (WSJ)
-What Iceberg? Just Glide to the Next Boardroom (NYT)• How Overhauling Derivatives Died (WSJ) Short answer: The US Congress, a wholly owned subsidiary of the banking sector.• More prime mortgages default in 3rd quarter (LA Times)
• Andy Kessler: Put Down That Shovel! Forget old-fashioned infrastructure — here are 6 government projects to foster a lasting economic recovery.
• Media two-fer:
-The Real Reason Newspapers Are Losing Money
-The Tablet Hype: Why they can’t save newspapers (Slate)• Green Daredevils: Rise of Wind Turbines Is a Boon for Rope Workers (NYT)
• Give us our daily brand (Guardian)
• The 2009 List of 2009 Lists (Fimoculous)
What are you reading?
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December 27th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Two stories I liked today:
Robert Reich
Sunday, December 27, 2009
2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/12/2009-year-wall-street-bounced-back-and.html
==============
First person account of airplane blow-up attempt
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
December 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
A little farther afield:
http://economia.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/efe/2009/12/27/brasil-tem-o-maior-spread-bancario-do-mundo-afirma-estudo.jhtm
Quick translation:
“Brasil has the largest bank spread in the world, a study affirms”
São Paulo, 27 dez (EFE).- The bank spread, which is the differencea betweem passive and active rates in banks, costs Brazilians R$ 261,7 billion and it is the highest of 40 countries with the same model, affirms a study disseminated today in São Paulo.
The study, elaborated by the ‘Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Fiesp)’, noted that , in the 12 months of global financial crisis, Brazilian clients and businesses paid a greater differential between ‘the cost of money charged by the banks and that which they pay their clients in order to obtain ‘deposits’.
With the world mean applied in Brasil, the bank spread in the country would have fallen to R$ 71,5 billions, noted the study, which took as a basis data from the IMF (Fundo Monetário Internacional).
One other source: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j5p808847j4u19q5/fulltext.pdf
Holiday links from one of the nutcase commenters. Il ny’a pas de quoi.
December 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Via NakedCapitalism.com:
http://www.correntewire.com/how_status_quo_can_kill_example_free_trade
Good interview with economist Steve Keen & an Engineer:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/12/27/interview-on-engineer-net/
and Obama CorporateCare:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/top-ten-reasons-to-kill-the-senate-health-care-bill.html
December 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
jeg3-
thank you, the correntewire link is excellent. The anecdote about titanium weld failures and the issue of reverse polarity was sobering. Makes one think twice about getting on an airliner.
December 27th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Barrons published a similar article about the “death of growth” for the coming decade in America in 1990; that was a really lousy prediction.
December 27th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
ancientone — can you please provide a link for that?
Thanks!~
December 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
BR,
Why would management think in the longer term, when we pay them to think in the short term? We nurture sociopaths and then act surprised when they act on their desires? We are living in kleptocracy 3.0 (now with extra sophists, apologists and secular priests).
–http://dissention.wordpress.com/
December 27th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
The Andy Kessler “Put Down That Shovel” article was interesting reading, but the action really starts with the reader comments. A couple of WSJ readers concisely captured the sentiment –
“Spending the TARP money is government at its best. Money that was to be repaid, that had only one use before returning to lower the debt, spent by greedy congress, wannna bet they bring up TARP in the future and blame Bush for the debt?”
“Andy, You accept the inevitability of spending public funds and using government coercion. No matter how worthy the goal, government (especially central govt) involvement will be corrupting. Economic ends will be turned to vote-buying or campaign fund-raising, often against the general public’s interest. Bad ideas, without the discipline of the market, have a way of propagating instead of being killed off. If government has a role here, it is to deregulate and de-tax. End of story.”
December 27th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
the piece from the Guardian was worth reading..
here’s a snip..
“…Klein accurately describes how the Obama campaign used the corporate model to launch the President-as-brand campaign. She writes:
Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate….”
you know, for the “(D) makes all the difference in the World”-believers..
it, the piece, goes beyond that, into better ideas..
~~
and, from a different tangent..
“…Our insane alphabet-soup agencies, CIA, NSA and the rest of them are simply a bunch of robotic brainwashed idiots – running around the world sticking their noses in everyone else’s business – then when their nation-building antics backfire – we, the American public, are supposed to sit here and accept the police state required to maintain this madness. How about no?
How about no more prisons? How about no more cops running around with automatic rifles in this “land of the free and home of the brave?” How about some real change we can believe in?
Obama is a fraud, a liar, and as far as I am concerned a traitor. He is a one-world government con-artist with no respect for what America really stands for. He is a front-man for a group of con-artists – troops to Yemen, Columbia, Pakistan – continue the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, saber-rattling toward Iran. Is this clown for real? Why doesn’t he declare war on the North Pole? Or is that a coming attraction?
Here in Charlottesville, Virginia we’ve recently been buried under a blanket of snow too high to drive through with most Jeeps. The entire town crippled – couldn’t plow our own roads. What if Al Quaida attacked then? People were stuck in their cars overnight – no emergency crews could reach them. Yeah – we are really a superpower. Meanwhile our military is deployed the world over to save everything…”
http://americansjourney.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-i-fear-for-my-country.html
we’d do well to Wonder, you know, it is Our Lives, afterall..
December 27th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Just finished “Gangs of America” by Ted Nace.
Good description of the supreme court incremental enabling of assigning personhood, and the specific protections of the bill of rights.
But what I particularly enjoyed was the history of the corporate form, particularly as it pertains to the history of English settlement in North America. The Virginia company history was an eye opener, with the direct connect to the British East India Company. So much of the identity of the US is tied to the Boston Tea Party. Seeing it’s tie back to the corporate form is great.
Bill
December 27th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
enjoy it while it lasts, it will be in the single digits by New Years Eve
December 27th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
It seems Australia has ”decoupled” from U.S. economy, and only had an economic slowdown, instead of the severe recessions plaguing the north atlantic countries and eastern Europe. Six years ago, U.S. ranked second for Australia’s exports, U.S. now ranks fifth behind China, Japan, South Korea and India. From Ross Gittins australian insight:
http://www.businessday.com.au/business/australia-exits-americas-orbit-after-crisis-20091227-lg7x.html
I didn’t followed closely the Copenhagen climate talks, kind of knew it would end in a cul-de-sac. It seems China’s leaders arrogance or contempt had something to do with it:
” China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated US President Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ”deal” so Western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. ”
This piece from Mark Lynas in the Sydney Morning Herald, quite a big news site I discover today…
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/blame-china-not-the-us-for-copenhagen-20091227-lga3.html
December 27th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
“A new study reports a surge in drug-resistant strains of a dangerous type of bacteria in US hospitals: Acinetobacter strikes patients in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and others and often causes severe pneumonias or bloodstream infection, some of which are now resistant to imipenem, an antibiotic that is reserved for last-line treatment.
The study is the work of researchers at the Extending the Cure project, led by Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan, of the Washington DC-based think-tank Resources for the Future, and appears as an electronically published paper in the December 23 issue of the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. (Extending the Cure is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio).
As well as affecting ICU and other patients, Acinetobacter infections are arising in soldiers returning from the war in Iraq…”
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/174821.php
“…There is an increasing body of evidence that cleaning or disinfection of the environment can reduce transmission of healthcare-associated pathogens. Because routine cleaning of equipment items and other high-touch surfaces does not always remove pathogens from contaminated surfaces, improved methods of disinfecting the hospital environment are needed. Preliminary studies suggest that hydrogen peroxide vapour technology deserves further evaluation as a method for decontamination of the environment in healthcare settings…”
http://tahilla.typepad.com/mrsawatch/hydrogen_peroxide_cleaning/index.html
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=aerosolized+hydrogen+peroxide+drug-resistant+bacteria+MRSA
simple, simple, ‘technologies’ like ‘thorough cleaning’..
utilization of age-old Hydrogen Peroxide (vaporized/aersolized) whack out much of these ‘threats’..
to say nothing of, well-know-n/-able, UV Photocatalysis for Air Purification..
this ‘Health Care’-”debate” is, truly, a sham.
all horror stories/fear-mongering about Price/Access, no talk of systemic improvements, improvements of current practices..
much of what ails us is our own Ignorance, of simple cures, and protocols, that dramatically improve our well-being..maybe that’s bad news for PFE/UNH/ and the power-mad bureaucracies of D.C, but it need not be, for us..
December 27th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Copenhagen confusion, in the same website, just read an article (reprint from The Guardian it seems) from George Monbiot that blames Obama :
” Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation. Either they signed it, or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/us-is-culprit-for-copenhagen-failure-but-shifts-blame-to-china-20091222-lbny.html
Well, I just don’t know what to conclude, Copenhagen results don’t feel right when I read about it, so much depends on what is the real state of global climate, I guess at some point the future will take care of itself the right way.
December 27th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=UV+photocatalysis+Air+Purification
“…Research and real world application studies conducted by members of the International Ozone Association (IOA), their customers and testing agencies have shown ambient temperature wash of laundry and surfaces with ozonated water to be effective at reducing pathogenic organisms including Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) bacteria and MRSA by up to 99.999999%.
In a 2006 paper presented at the International Ozone Association Conference in Arlington Texas, “Ozone in the Laundry Industry — Practical Experiences in the United Kingdom”, Cardis, et. al. reported on comparative testing conducted by Microsearch Laboratories (UK) confirming that low temperature ozone wash is extremely effective at inactivating organisms typically found on garments, towels and linens from healthcare facilities”…”
http://www.olgear.com/ozone_kills_mrsa_super_bugs.html
and, simple Ozone, O3, as well, is a wonderful aid..
though, after decades of EPA brain-washing, ‘Caines think Ozone is a ‘ground-level Pollutant’ that will Kill You..
they should ask the Japanese, who have been using, for similiar decades, Ozone in their personal Washing Machines..
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Japan+Ozone+Washing+Machine
remember, your Illness is someone else’s Profit..
December 27th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Loved Mr. Kessler’s suggestions…all of them are worthy.
December 28th, 2009 at 12:26 am
Health care reform: Elgin man with heart troubles has change of heart
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-health-reform-convert-dec27,0,2418252.story
While “Joe the Plumber” only fantasized about his six figure business, Tim Fraas – a surveyor, the occupation of the first Commander-in-Chief – is NOT fantasizing about his health problems.
Now Mr. Fraas is speaking out.
December 28th, 2009 at 2:23 am
“simple, simple, ‘technologies’ like ‘thorough cleaning”
On the other hand, according to this story at the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8427399.stm) scientists have observed bacteria developing resistance to a disinfectant, in a manner which *also* gave it resistance to an antibiotic which the bacteria had not yet been exposed to.
“Scientists from the National University of Ireland in Galway found that by adding increasing amounts of disinfectant to cultures of pseudomonas aeruginosa in the lab, the bacteria learnt to resist not only the disinfectant but also ciprofloxacin – a commonly-prescribed antibiotic – even without being exposed to it.
Writing in the journal Microbiology, the researchers report the bacteria had adapted to pump out anti-microbial agents – be they a disinfectant or an antibiotic – from its cells.”
December 28th, 2009 at 7:33 am
Oil keeps going up through speculation as opposed to demand:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602013&sid=abS1HzLIvy_k
Pretty sick of this.
December 28th, 2009 at 8:33 am
jonhendry,
note, from the BBC art. “At the high concentration levels generally employed this was unlikely to be a problem – but “in principle this means that residue from incorrectly diluted disinfectants left on hospital surfaces could promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria”, said study author Dr Gerard Fleming.”
also, the ‘disinfectants’, in that study, go unnamed in that article..
as well, if you read about the study, itself, it was, actually, trying to breed such a response from the bacteria..
these ‘disinfectants’, being discussed, are Commercial ‘proprietary mixes’ that would be blown out of the market if Science, not $$, was driving the Equation..
LSS: I’ve, yet, to see any mention of these ‘superbugs’ being resistant to H2O2, or O3 ..
note, this: “A hydrogen peroxide-resistant mutant of the catalase-negative microaerophile, Spirillum volutans, constitutively expresses a 21.5 kDa protein that is undetectable and non-inducible in the wild-type cells.”
http://www.medscape.com/medline/abstract/9830123
is a lab-created mutation that isn’t seen ‘in the wild’
December 28th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Gold plated bacteria !
”The bacteria don’t actually ”make” the gold – they just attract gold that is already dissolved in the groundwater. Now we have absolutely no idea why these bacteria can purify gold to almost 24 carat purity.” …
”It’s a slow process – it takes over a year to ‘grow’ a gold grain roughly the thickness of a human hair (about 0.1 mm). It would take a long time to ‘grow’ a 70 kg nugget. (Maybe we could speed the process up, by genetically engineering the Pedomicrobium bacteria.)”, observations by John R. Watterson of the US Geological Survey, article by Karl S. Kruszelnicki:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/trek/4wd/Over44.htm
”Use of Hydrogen Peroxide-Producing Bacteria for Tooth Whitening”, by Hillman, Jeffrey Daniel:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0311199.html
”The invention provides compositions and methods for whitening teeth of a subject comprising administering one or more isolated, non-pathogenic, hydrogen peroxide-producing bacterial strains to an oral cavity of a subject.”
”A method for treatment of stained teeth, dental caries, periodontitis, oral bacterial infections, oral wounds, Candida or fungal overgrowth, halitosis, and xerostomia-induced dental caries, comprising: administering a composition comprising one or more isolated, non-pathogenic, hydrogen peroxide-producing bacterial species or strains and one or more lactate dehydrogenase deficient mutans Streptococcus species or strains to an oral cavity of a subject.”
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0311199.html