economy
j7uy5 | January 19, 2010Susanne Sternthal, a writer based in Moscow, has published an article
about the ecology of stray dogs. The article is in Financial
Times, of all places. Why is that?
href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/628a8500-ff1c-11de-a677-00144feab49a.html">Moscow's
stray dogs
By Susanne Sternthal
January 16 2010 00:04
...They also acted differently. Every so often, you would
see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog
would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the
carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a
website…
sastyk | December 30, 2009The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a…
sastyk | December 27, 2009I'm in the process of composing my annual predictions for 2010, and as those of you who were around for my last set will know, let's just say that my number of hits won't be as high as the previous year (the previous year was weirdly correct, this one more normally imperfect). This is not a serious problem for me, since every year I include the basic disclaimer that there's absolutely no reason why you should believe that my predictions are worth anything, but I do like to be right better than being wrong ;-).
The major thing I screwed up was underestimating how successfully the US…
sastyk | December 24, 2009I spend much of my life making the case for changing one's life (and not just one's life - for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing, and periodically I get on a train or a bus or something and go stand up in front of people and make the same case. I know this is a diffcult thing for many people, whose infrastructure envelopes them and pushes them powerfully towards a particular way of life, so I try to make good arguments for doing it now. I make moral arguments, about the use of a fair…
j7uy5 | December 7, 2009I wrote about this before, a couple of times, most thoroughly
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/06/national_infrastructure_protec.php">here.
I was reminded of this topic when I saw that the American Society of
Civil Engineers (ASCE) have updated their
href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">Report Card on
America's Infrastructure.
In 2008, I compared the positions of the two Presidential candidates,
regarding advocacy for infrastructure improvements. Obama was
better. So I was somewhat hopeful that we would see some pretty
big changes, after he won the…
j7uy5 | November 23, 2009The USA still leads the world int he number of scientific papers
published per year. Germany and Japan were essentially tied
for second, for years. According to a recent report by
Thomspon-Reuters ISI, there is a new player at the table:
class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;">
The report is
href="http://science.thomsonreuters.com/info/grr-china/">available
at Thomson Reuters, free registration required.
Note that this says nothing about quality; it is all about
quantity. (HT:
href="http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/11/china_leaps_to.html">…
j7uy5 | October 31, 2009The world's largest shopping mall boasts some impressive statistics:
7.1 million square feet (659,612 square meters) of leasable
space and 890,000 square meters of total floor space; attractions,
including a roller coaster and a Venice-like canal; and over 1,500
shops, with an occupancy rate of 0.8%. That's right.
Although it opened in 2005, 99.2% of the shops are empty.
class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;">
Attraction: A bored
attendant makes a phone call next to the ghost train ride at the mall
(Photo:
href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/…
j7uy5 | October 21, 2009I spend a lot of time working with gang kids.
One of the amusing things, is to see some of these kids strutting
around,
feeling like a million bucks, because they are so smart. In
actuality, they have IQs in the 90-100 range. But the rest of
their crew is down in the 70-80 range. Such is the life of a
genius.
style="display: inline;">
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2009/10/21/the_warning.jpg">
Tonight I watched the PBS Frontline special,
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/">The
Warning. It's about the warning that
href="http://en.…
j7uy5 | October 16, 2009Just goes to show how lobbying reform hasn't gone anywhere near far
enough:
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/10/guest-post-bank-lobbyists-not-only-trying-to-kill-new-regulations-they-are-trying-to-weaken-existing-regulations.html">Bank
Lobbyists Are Not Only Trying to Kill NEW Legislation, They Are Trying
to Weaken EXISTING Regulations
By George Washington of
href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/">Washington's Blog.
Everyone knows that the lobbyists for the financial giants are trying
to kill any tough new regulations.
But they are also trying to weaken existing…
j7uy5 | August 23, 2009Some irreverent souls have taken to Sunday blogging on a freethinking
themes. I choose to Ozymandize* that which we worship the most:
our economic system.
That plant in the middle is
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2009/07/color_of_the_year_mimosa.php">my
mimosa (
href="http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ALJU">Albizia
julibrissin) tree, the one I am growing from seed. It is,
literally, a green shoot (although the leaves close and droop at night).
style="display: inline;">
"They" say that green shoots are everywhere these days. Do we
believe "them"?
href…
grrlscientist | July 23, 2009tags: Gordon Brown, world wide web, WWW, social injustice, poverty, security, climate change, economy, ethics, streaming video
We're at a unique moment in history, argues UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown: we can use today's interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic -- and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy [16:43]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
j7uy5 | July 10, 2009A chart on Clusterstock (great name) by Kamelia Angelova (another great
name) shows what I've suspected for a while: all the jobs created in
the USA, during the Bush II years, were unsustainable. All have
been lost. Meanwhile, the population has increased by about 23
million.
style="display: inline;">
People can argue about what the latest job numbers mean.
href="http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/07/weekly-unemployment-claims-decline.html">Some
see signs of recovery;
href="http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/">others do
not. I say the data are too noisy, but…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2009tags: funny, humor, satire, economy, television news, instapoll tracker, live poll, ONN, Onion News Network, streaming video
ONN is trying out a new feature to give viewers greater involvement in the news: a live popularity poll. Viewers can vote on specific comments as the pundits are uttering them, which gives the pundits the opportunity to kiss ass in real time and while the broadcast is in progress! (Important when talking about the economy) [3:10]
ddobbs | June 16, 2009
What we know, Bill speaks:
I already knew, from my own modest experience installing and paying for installation of insulation and other energy-saving upgrades in my house, that such work is highly labor-intensive -- and so employs a lot of people per dollar spent. When we had our basement insulated, the material cost was perhaps $400; the total bill over $3000. Some of the difference was in equipment, but that was probably fairly modest. The big cost was clearly in paying two or three guys to make racket spraying goop in our basement for 3 or 4 days.
So it stands to figure that a good way…
j7uy5 | June 3, 2009Business Matters has posted interviews
about the financial crisis. these interviews provide a good
overview of the origin of the crisis, plus some clues as to where we
are headed. The first interview is with
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts">Paul Craig
Roberts. Roberts was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan Administration. The second interview is with
Ilargi, one of the pseudonymous authors of the blog,
href="http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/">The Automatic Earth.
They have different perspectives, but similar conclusions.
Basically,…
j7uy5 | May 25, 2009Courtesy of Chart of the Day...
href="http://www.chartoftheday.com/20090522.htm?T">
Click on the graphs to see the Chart of the Day explanations
for the data.
The top chart shows the aggregate earnings, over time, of the companies
in the S&P 500 Index. The second chart shows the ratio
between the aggreagte price of the stock, and the earnings of the
companies.
Oversimplified view: A low price-to-earnings ratio means that you are
not paying much, to get a share of a company that is earning a
lot. A high P:E ratio means that you are paying a lot for
companies that aren't…
grrlscientist | May 12, 2009tags: homelessness, unemployment, poverty, NYC Life, social policy
A homeless woman eats dinner (it looks like "Sheba" brand cat food, doesn't it?)
Image: orphaned.
I awoke this morning at 5am, as usual, and one of the first things I heard on the morning news was Mayor Bloomberg, one of the richest men in the world, saying that the city is charging rent for the homeless to stay in a shelter. Blinking in the darkness, I thought I was listening to the Onion news report instead of NPR. Sure, I heard that Bloomberg was considering this, but never thought he was cruel enough to actually enact…
j7uy5 | May 1, 2009Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money
Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, has a
nice, terse, thought-provoking post on his blog: The Big Picture:
href="http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/05/us-vs-europe-who-is-the-welfare-state/">US
vs Europe: Who is the Welfare State?
By Barry Ritholtz - May 1st, 2009, 10:25AM
Today is May Day, and while International Workers' Day (Labour Day in
the UK), means little in the USA, its a big holiday in Europe. Banks
and markets are closed on the continent, (England celebrates on Monday).
Speaking with Mike…
j7uy5 | April 29, 2009Well, maybe not Malthus, but Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich -- the
1960's-era neomalthusian academicians -- have been right on the
money. There are hard limits to growth, and those limits are
upon
us. This is the contention of Charles A. S. Hall and John W.
Day,
Jr., two systems ecologists who have published a paper in American
Scientist.
The paper is still behind a pay wall at the publication site, but a PDF
copy can be obtained
href="http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf">from
Professor
Hall's web site. (HT:
href="http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5330#more">EROI Guy…
sciencewoman | April 25, 2009ScienceGrandma pointed me to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It's titled "So You Want to Be a Professor?" but I think it should have been called "The Perils of a Ph.D."
The article begins by citing some examples of graduate schools that are reducing admissions of PhD applicants for next year, in what may be a cost-cutting move. As we all know, graduate assistantships cost $25K or more per year, even if the grad student doesn't see much of it and returns those costs to the university by teaching labs, grading papers, and doing other grunt work. Apparently, some universities…