10 Tuesday PM Reads
By Barry Ritholtz - September 20th, 2011, 5:15PM
Eclectic Train Reading:
• Dow hits 20,250 by 2020, but first a big crash (Marketwatch)
• Survival Of The Stupidest (Science 2.0)
• Should You Automatically Reinvest Dividends? (NYT)
• Milton Friedman misunderstood Quantitative Easing (Pragmatic Capitalism)
• Decoding the Wide Variations in House Appraisals (NYT)
• Pre-Copernican Models and Economic Forecasts (Modeled Behavior)
• Jon Stewart: Daily Show is like Fox News: ‘We’re Both Expressions of Dissatisfaction’ (Rolling Stone) see also Behind the Scenes with TDS (Rolling Stone)
• Google Goes Face to Facebook (WSJ)
• Ayn Rand: A Fitting Muse for the Tyranny of the Self (Jesse’s Café Américain)
• An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer (NYT)
What are you reading?
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September 20th, 2011 at 5:45 pm
– There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html
September 20th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
New Condor Cam at San Diego’s Safari Park
SAN DIEGO (AP) — San Diego Zoo Global has launched a webcam that gives visitors a birds-eye view into a California condor nest at Safari Park.
The new camera, which launched Monday, allows people to see events such as courtship, egg incubation and hatching that previously had only been seen by animal handlers and biologists.
Zoo officials say the condor breeding season begins in November and the webcam will focus on a nest.
The organization has been breeding California condors since the 1980s, when there were only 22 left in the wild. Since then, 165 have been bred and 80 returned to their habitats.
Online: http://www.sandiegozooglobal.org/video/condor_cam
Confidence Men (on my 2008 Sony PRS500 Reader if you can believe that.) Fascinating. On page 35 & can’t wait to get back to it.
http://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Men-Washington-Education-President/dp/0061429252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316555325&sr=8-1
BTW, thanks Petey for the laugh and concise wisdom.
September 20th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Zagat guide, Now, with more “Shark Jumping”..
http://www.preparedfoods.com/articles/zagat-ranks-fast-food
September 7/Los Angeles/Los Angeles Times — Five Guys Burgers & Fries, Subway, Panera, Starbucks and McDonald’s are America’s best and most popular chains, according to a Zagat survey.
More than 6,000 participants responded to the “2011 Fast Food Survey,” which crowned Five Guys as Best Burger and Most Popular Large Fast Food Chain.
Not to be outdone, McDonald’s took honors for Best Fast Food Value, Best Value Menu, Best Fries, Best Breakfast Sandwiches, Best Drive-Thru, Top Facilities (mega chains) and Most Child Friendly. Subway was first in the Most Popular Mega-Chain category, and Starbucks topped the Most Popular Quick-Refreshment Chain and Best Coffee lists. Best Salads and Top Facilities (large chains) props went to Panera.
Full-service chains also made the list, including Red Robin, Cheesecake Factory, Outback Steakhouse, IHOP and Chuck E. Cheese’s.
The full survey results are available at http://www.zagat.com .
~~~
“…Most traditional operators are all too aware of their four-wheeled, Twittering, Facebooking counterparts’ growing presence in their collective rear-view mirrors. To protect their brick-andmortar restaurant constituencies, many cities have implemented legal speed bumps to make business challenging for food-truck operators. Not allowing the trucks within 1,000 feet of traditional restaurants and restricting street parking are among the infractions local police departments in big food-truck cities (including Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta and Chicago) are issuing citations over, in what began as a simple idea to offer something new.
On the other side of the curb, standing up for the interest of foodtruck operators is The Institute for Justice (IJ), calling itself a “libertarian public-interest law firm.” Earlier this year, the group announced its National Street Vending Initiative, first in Texas and later in several other states known to be foes of food trucks and other street vendors.
In its “Streets of Dreams,” report, a review of vending regulations in the 50 biggest US cities, IJ states: “With the booming popularity of food trucks…interest in street selling is perhaps greater than ever. Nonetheless, complicated webs of regulations in cities nationwide tie up would-be vendors, making it needlessly difficult or even impossible to set up shop in many cities.”…”
http://www.meatpoultry.com/Writers/Joel%20Crews/Keep%20on%20truckin.aspx
‘Regulation’ being used to tamp down Competition(?) Say it isn’t so…
September 20th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Wow…. Atlas Thugged.
September 20th, 2011 at 7:31 pm
>> An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer (NYT)
I’m anticipating AI before Immortality (because an AI cloud offers the potential to accelerate biotech so much more quickly). But, I don’t mind being wrong about the order. ;-)
September 20th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Yikes – that Cullen Roche link is stunningly wrong. By any definition, if the Fed buys a bond and pays with cash reserves, it is creating money. It is also giving the bank an incentive to lend by taking away a risk-free instrument. Whether the bank actually lends is of course up to them. But potential for lending is increased, potential for a cash crunch is reduced, liquidity is increased. If the money multiplier is shrinking because people are afraid to borrow/lend, broader monetary aggregates might be shrinking. But the central bank’s ability to overcome that is not constrained by anything but their own orthodoxy. One might think helicopters and QE are a bad idea, or increasing the money supply doesn’t matter in a liquidity trap, but I don’t see how you can argue they don’t/can’t increase money supply. It’s simple accounting, the bond goes out of the financial system, cash goes in.
September 20th, 2011 at 9:27 pm
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/09/was_marx_right.html
September 21st, 2011 at 12:46 am
Risk.Net ‘s equity derivatives house of the year?
No prizes for guessing: UBS!
http://www.risk.net/structured-products/feature/2102176/equity-derivatives-house
You can’t make this up.
September 21st, 2011 at 6:39 am
http://www.businessinsider.com/ron-suskind-book-what-it-says-about-economic-policy-2011-9
including why the stimulus failed (good insights into the bad advice and awful thinking of “advisors”)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110919074256.htm
nanoparticles cause brain injury in fish
http://www.presstorm.com/2011/09/press-release-anonymous-launches-oporwellrewind-to-support/#.Tnkhd_eELbQ.twitter
Anonymous getting involved with the Occupy Wall Street protest movement (incidentally so is another group of protesters, the October 2011 Coalition: http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2011/09/21/october-2011-coalition-vigorously-endorses-occupy-wall-street/)
And, just to make your day:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1091/566/NASA_Whistleblower:_Alien_Moon_Cities_Exist.html
September 21st, 2011 at 8:04 am
Please BR, stop giving light to an obvious shill for the banks like this roche character at pragcap. He’s pushing MMT which is patently disinformation. He does not deserve any recognition except condemnation for spreading lies.
September 21st, 2011 at 8:21 am
[...] dumb, stupid is worse than dull, it always survives. A look at stupid from Science 2.0 (h/t The Big Picture), which examines ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,’ a 1976 essay by Italian economic [...]