My afternoon Salt Lake City to Vancouver plane reading:
• Water is the new gold, a big commodity bet (Market Watch)
• Bridgewater Sees ‘Dangerous Dynamic’ as Largest Economies Slow (Bloomberg)
• Bubbles without Markets (Project Syndicate)
• Fed’s Raskin: No government backstop for banks that do prop trading (IGM Chicago)
• From an Unlikely Source, a Serious Challenge to Wall Street (Rolling Stone)
• In Insider and Enron Cases, Balancing Lies and Thievery (DealBook) Its important to have balance
• Economic Stimulus (IGM Chicago) see also The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham (Bloomberg)
• Study: Awe-Inspiring Experiences Change Our Perception of Time (The Atlantic)
• Yes, Virginia, the Government Invented the Internet (PC Mag)
• USA: State & County QuickFacts (United States Census)
What are you reading?
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I don’t but this, but its a pretty chart: “Home Prices Reflect Strengthening”
Source: WSJ
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Actually, Vince Cerf, one of the founders of the net, gave Al Gore a lot of credit for pushing funding for the net, which is really only what Gore claimed.
It was much like the question in The Right Stuff about what makes rockets go up: funding.
Only in some weird parallel universe did the government not create the Internet
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/wsj-mangles-history-to-argue-government-didnt-launch-the-internet/
Spin is everything, inconvenient facts, such as a candidate’s tax returns, cannot be countenanced
http://slate.me/NtJ9Sg
From the Rolling Stone article about eminent domain:
‘Seized home loans’? Are you kidding me?
Eminent domain traditionally has meant a process in which the sovereign pays cash for condemned real property, not intangible property such as loans.
Dealing with the housing supply glut is a useful idea. But eminent domain already has been seriously abused by condemning private homes and handing the lots over to shopping mall developers. A notorious example was Kelo v. New London in Connecticut:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Given this ugly history, MRP is going have a hard slog not only to overcome constitutional hurdles, but to convince people that it isn’t queueing up similar outrages.
‘Honey, the foxes want to condemn the mortgage on our chicken house.’
Water is not gold. It is more like farmland.
You can put a lot of gold in the back of a MiniCooper and retire comfortably on it. That volume of water would only keep a soccer team going for a weekend tournament.
Water is difficult to transport long distances in large quantity for a number of reasons, including riparian rights on the original water supply. The Great Lakes compact between the Great Lakes States and Canadian provinces means that Great Lakes water generally can’t be diverted outside the watershed. Similar controls exist on other water supplies.
So water, similar to farmland, needs to be of adequate quantity and supply in a region to make it a significant resource. It is difficult to transport outside of that region for technical and legal reasons. Where it is abundant and sustainable, it is relatively cheap; where it is not abundant or sustainable it is either expensive now or will be in the near-future. This is going to be a competitive advantage for states and countries with abundant and sustainable water supplies, similar to high-quality farmland with adequate natural rainfall. Ironically, many of the areas that have both of these are the Rust Belt states that have been hemorraging jobs for the past 30 years. It could be water that ends up bringing many jobs back despite high taxes and stupid state and local government policies. Many of the states the jobs have gone to will be relying on very expensive water sources in the coming decades.
streeteye:
I hear that the GPS system was also a private sector initiative that the military piggy-backed on.
I haven’t heard much from the “privatize everything because government is incompetent crowd” about the London 2012 security arrangements.
@rd ROTFL …
the right loves the military/national security complex, the most autocratic, wasteful, inefficient, non-incentivized bureaucracy there is.
Right about that Streeteye, and anyone who spent some time in the military understands that implicitly.
>> My afternoon Salt Lake City to Vancouver plane reading
You’re slumming it Barry – Cathay Pacific flies non-stop from JFK to Vancouver.
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BR: Crazy expensive ffor business class . . .
obamacare and guns: http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynmcclanahan/2012/07/23/gun-owner-rights-and-obamacare-yes-it-is-in-the-law/
[...] Ritholtz, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi: Something very interesting is [...]
Private industry invented the internet? A child could tear apart this idiot’s argument.
Republicans, this is why you are having trouble defeating Obama, a poor president. Your “beliefs” are always getting in the way of actual facts. This makes you look crazy and stupid at the same time, and it happens ALL THE FREAK”N TIME!
DARPA is, of course, only one example of a long tradition in the US of business benefiting from gov’t support. The whole fiction that the US economy grew or will grow best only when gov’t gets out of the way prevents the more meaningful discussion of what does represent productive support and what does not.
In terms of the macro economy the US has NEVER been a country of business sans gov’t. Making that observation in no way detracts from the tremendous contribution of individual entrepreneurs or excellent business leaders.
http://caracommunity.com/content/bill-caras-blog-jul-25-2012
The IMF resignation letter is a gem (near the end of the web page).
A couple of links to stories about our ethics-free world:
http://www.footnoted.com/buried-treasure/the-family-business/thats-some-pig-at-smithfield/
http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5897
BusSchDean agreed “US has NEVER been a country of business sans gov’t”
must say thats the 1st time in my 55years I’ve seen sans X-serif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif
back to your post .. keeping the public thinking along those lines helps the old school/vested/status quo* IN their position of powerbroker*
here’s another I think will rile this crowd .. letting Middlemen buy commodities that they don’t grow or mine (produce) and will also not remold into something else (produce) is beneficial to the world economy .. it is inflationary and beneficial only to people who sit at desks for a living .. and with the laws on the books is an intergenerational pass on to *
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/weill-calls-for-splitting-up-big-banks/?hp
Sandy Weill – I got mine. Now let’s call the kettle black and break up TBTF.
Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates is not any ordinary mid-sized-town chief. Very impressive resume and experience.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/colorado-shooting-puts-po_0_n_1697666.html
English lit graduate of Bucknell
Law degree from New York Law School, plus licensed atty in several states
Masters in management from NYU
ps .. carry on this thread from the next thread
j6p-plant-in-TBP
all this stuff is inflationary of humans into/onto the planet earth .. and that is not good in this modern day
Venus and Mars & Rock Show – Paul McCartney and Wings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU_2oNF9CZE
Grego658: Well I did fail to put sans in italics “A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans (italics), meaning “without.”
Not sure of your point regarding Middlemen. Depending on the economy middlemen can reduce costs by taking on the distribution, marketing and selling costs, and even sometimes the financing between small sellers and buyers – typically small manufacturers and small retailers. Yes, they do get a piece of the action but that does not necessarily come from the consumer (assuming a reasonably competitive market) as the sellers give up margin to have their products more widely distributed. Of course, these “middlemen” often morph. The very first department store was likely established by one or more wholesalers sharing space and some wholesalers vertically integrate backward into manufacturing (e.g., Sysco) or created voluntary retail chains.
Adelson’s Latest Foray Courts Jews for the G.O.P.
“…has vowed to spend as much as $100 million to defeat Mr. Obama…”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/us/politics/adelsons-latest-foray-courts-jews-for-the-gop.html
If Obama pisses ten of these clowns off, eh’ll have given the economy a $1B shot in the arm. LOL
Sandy Weil thinks Citibank should be broken up
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/25/news/economy/sandy-weill-banks/
Farrell’s article ignores (as usual) the inordinate amount of truly disruptive technology being developed in relation to water supply.
There is some amazing stuff going on out there and it is not decades off.