Jot down your weekend thoughts.

Tree that looks like a wind turbine set to silence whiny rurally-based types | NewsBiscuit

Environmentalists are hopeful that a newly discovered breed of tree that resembles a wind turbine could break the deadlock over the controversial power source, as well as silencing some irksome people with nice houses.

The new breed, which was discovered growing in a copse behind a major genetic laboratory, has three pale cream branches capable of rotating at 32rpm in a 10-knot breeze at a height of 146 metres.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Weather is faaaab u luuusssss; physics tutoring in 30 minutes; life is great!

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

keeps µù#à£ing hanging. It destroyed my "marriage" diary a couple of times.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

your attention...

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

Dirty Russian Money - BND cautions against bailout for Cyprus

In a secret report, the Foreign Intelligence Service came to the conclusion that the aid, which the European Union will pay may soon the country would especially benefit owners of Russian black money accounts.

According to the findings of the BND Russian citizens have deposited $26 billion in local banks, reports Der Spiegel. That is more than the annual economic output of the country. These deposits are secured when the banks of the island republic will soon be supported by European bailout funds. In addition, the BND complained that the country still offers opportunities for money laundering.

_{Schengen is toast!}

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

At the Chateau above Nice, trying to get away from the usual media dominance:

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

Dramatic cloud above Nice Theatre:

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

OMG! Yesterday I was walking trough Surfers Paradise here on a Gold Coast with a friend that was visiting me.
We had a drink across the road of this NEW BUSINESS.

OXYGEN STATION!
They are producing OXYGEN tasting like fruit and stuff and you can inhale it on the spot.
They claim that you can use it for DETOX , SPORTS,PARTY,AIRLINE TRAVEL, BEAUTY AND STRESSS.
But I think it is actually mostly for after party hangovers.
Great invention!
Unbelievable...
How healthy it may be to inhale oxygen?

TED Blog | The complexities of the psychopath test: A Q&A with Jon Ronson

Well that's the thing. The most miserable three months of my life was before the financial meltdown. I was commissioned to write a book about credit cards. I'd written a piece about a man called Richard Cullen, who committed suicide because he was out of his depth in credit cards. And so I was going into the areas of, "Is this all a house of cards? Are people too enthralled by the sub-prime market?" My publisher keeps reminding me, that if I had gone through with the book, it would have come out just then.

But I spent three or four months trying to make [the premise] interesting. All the people who worked in the credit industry, all the people I was meeting, who were so important and so controlling over the way we live our lives -- and history proved that some of them were doing really nefarious things. It was probably a weakness of mine, but I just couldn't find a way to make it interesting. They weren't colorful characters. And so that line in the book really was wrenched from my heart. I gave up writing the book. I did say this to my publisher the other day, but in a way The Psychopath Test is the book that I didn't write. It is the credit book in a way.

But yeah, what can I say? In the three or four months I went around meeting list brokers and heads of banks and hedge fund people, I couldn't find a single person who lit the page up. And I completely understand the sort of moral problems of what I just said. It's just the truth of it.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

So, two weeks ago David Cameron stated that he would not reveal the contents of a load of texts exchanged between himself and Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch's primary hench-person.

Now a few of them have begun to leak and, we are now promised, that some of the others are very revealing of the extent to which the British govt was run to suit the aims of News International

keep to the Fen Causeway

Did anyone catch the weird happening at the Guardian today wrt Iran?  I woke up to a story there about Iran suspending uranium enrichment before talks with the USA this week, which both sides had denied.  Later, the Guardian changed the story to say that the Iranians denied this and that it was an error in translation, or some sort of problem to that effect.  Very odd.  

2 really important articles I don't think I have time to diary:

Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About | The Big Picture

To quote  Edward Hadas, "Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns."

Hadas identifies six questions which professionals should stop pretending they can answer:

1) What creates retail inflation?
2) How do financial asset prices affect the real economy?
3) Do big fiscal deficits damage the economy?
4) What does quantitative easing actually do?
5) How much leverage is too much?
6) How to deleverage without damaging the economy?

If economists cannot explain the basic workings of the economy, perhaps we should be relying on them much less for policy advice . . .

A Capitalist's Dilemma, Whoever Wins the Election - NYTimes.com

It's a paradox, and at its nexus is what I'll call the Doctrine of New Finance, which is taught with increasingly religious zeal by economists, and at times even by business professors like me who have failed to challenge it. This doctrine embraces measures of profitability that guide capitalists away from investments that can create real economic growth.

...

 The Doctrine of New Finance helped create this situation. The Republican intellectual George F. Gilder taught us that we should husband resources that are scarce and costly, but can waste resources that are abundant and cheap. When the doctrine emerged in stages between the 1930s and the `50s, capital was relatively scarce in our economy. So we taught our students how to magnify every dollar put into a company, to get the most revenue and profit per dollar of capital deployed. To measure the efficiency of doing this, we redefined profit not as dollars, yen or renminbi, but as ratios like RONA (return on net assets), ROCE (return on capital employed) and I.R.R. (internal rate of return).

Before these new measures, executives and investors used crude concepts like "tons of cash" to describe profitability. The new measures are fractions and give executives more options: They can innovate to add to the numerator of the RONA ratio, but they can also drive down the denominator by driving assets off the balance sheet -- through outsourcing. Both routes drive up RONA and ROCE.

Similarly, I.R.R. gives investors more options. It goes up when the time horizon is short. So instead of investing in empowering innovations that pay off in five to eight years, investors can find higher internal rates of return by investing exclusively in quick wins in sustaining and efficiency innovations.

Krugman blog: Math Is Hard (November 4, 2012)

This shouldn't even be controversial, but of course it is. Partly that's because it's news some people don't want to hear. But I think there's also a math-is-hard problem: a political universe in which there are lots and lots of polls seems to play into some natural failings of our mathematical intuition.

First of all, from what I can see a lot of people have trouble with the distinction between probabilities and vote margins. They think that when I say, "state level polls overwhelmingly suggest an Obama victory", I'm also saying "state level polls suggest an overwhelming Obama victory", which isn't at all the same thing. We have a lot of polls, almost all of which say that Obama will win Ohio; but they don't by any means say that he'll win it in a landslide.

Second, people clearly have a problem with randomness -- with the fact that any poll, no matter how carefully conducted, has a margin of error. (And the true margins of error are surely larger than the statistical measure always reported, since sampling error isn't the only way a poll can go wrong). Specifically, what I think people don't get is the fact that when there are many polls of a state, some of them are bound to be outliers -- not, or not necessarily, because the pollsters have done a bad job, but because there's always noise in any sampling procedure.

...

Oh, and a third point: those margins of error are for any one poll. An average of many polls will have a much smaller standard error. Don't say, hey, Obama may have a three-point lead, but that's within the margin of error; as Pollster points out, the odds that this is a true Obama lead are 99 percent.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

on Paper.li

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Making the eurozone fit for the challenges of the 1990s | A Fistful Of Euros

The fascinating thing here is, of course, that nothing has changed. In many ways, this is because the issues haven't changed. Keynes said that the whole complex problem of European currencies and trade in the 1920s could be reduced to one question: how much of France's war debts would be paid by workers and how much by savers, whether through taxation or through inflation. The answer would set the price level and hence the exchange rate, and how much of a trade surplus Germany could run, and therefore how much of Germany's war debts could possibly be paid.

Similarly, in 1992 the questions was how the costs of German reunification would be split. Taxation was chosen over inflation, capital was privileged over income. Now, arguably, the question is how the cost of the Great Bubble will be split, and you guessed it. Portes is damning on the reasoning behind this:

Twitter / BuzzFeedAndrew: MT @DanTheDaily source familiar ...

MT @DanTheDaily source familiar w/RNC acknowledged main reason they really bought in PA is they couldn't spend anywhere else. airwaves full.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Anyone here have any solutions for typing Spanish characters on a US keyboard? I was thinking of a widget that sits in a corner when I want it that I can click on, but my google-fu isn't coming up with much.

you are the media you consume.

Ari Jokimäki has a link collection here.

Frankly I think it's Big Placebo again... just like electricity sensitivity, mobile phones, and what not. Silly human beings. Hmm... was this Maine study a double blind one? ;-)