Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Cab Thoughts 1/22/14

I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.--deTocqueville

The 10-year Treasury bond yield went higher over the past 18 months. In fact, the 10-year yield has increased a very significant 140 basis points (i.e. 1.4%) since its resistance testing, July 2012 trough.



“I found her smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.” This is Defense Secretary Gates on Hilary Clinton. But he is very critical of Obama. I dislike these guys who go into an administration and then, in the middle of it all, kiss-and-tell.

Four teenagers discovered France's Lascaux cave in 1940 with its ancient wall paintings; the paintings proved to be 17,000 years old. The cave's famous 'Dun Horse' is one of the world's best-known paintings. Other Paleolithic artworks from around the world: Egypt's cave of swimmers (from 10,000 years ago); the images of giraffes, men, and horses in the Acacus Mountains of the Sahara Desert (from 10,000 to 12,000 years ago); and the deer carved on deer antlers in the Turobong cave in South Korea (from 40,000 years ago).
 
Dun horses are both a color and a type. They have a sandy/yellow to reddish/brown coat. Their legs are usually darker than their body and sometimes have faint "zebra" stripes on them. Dun horses always have a "dorsal" stripe, which is a dark stripe down the middle of their back. Sometimes the dorsal stripe continues down the horse's dock and tail, and through the mane. Many dun colored horses also have face masking, which makes the horse's nose and sometimes the rest of the face a darker color than the horse's body.

 
Since Fukushima, oil as a percentage of Japan's energy consumption has doubled, consumption of LNG has almost doubled, and nuclear power has declined to essentially zero.
 
Bill Richardson was Secretary of Energy under Clinton and has referred to out energy grid as "Third World" for years. Here is a section of a recent article he wrote: " ...[ the grid]...is sustained by more than 9,000 generating plants and around 300,000 miles of transmission lines spread around the United States. If this continues unaddressed, it will eventually cause a substantial deterioration in our grid system’s security and reliability throughout the country. If the installed capacity continues to grow, with load-demand increases of around 3 to 4 percent, the current system might prove insufficient to support economic growth and revitalization of the country’s manufacturing industries." But he was Secretary of Energy, wasn't he? Why do these political guys talk about problems under their watch as if they were distant natural disasters?
 
What is.... phylloxera?
 
In American schools, black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended, according to government civil rights data collection from 2011-2012. Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled. The DOJ views this as prima facie bigotry and is creating guidelines to reverse it.
 
Solar can reduce fuel use in power plants, but it can't reduce the overhead costs of building and maintaining those plants in the first place. Prime Time solar is about six hours out of phase with actual demand. The perverse outcome of widespread solar deployment is that huge capital investments in solar result in under-utilized conventional resources, which increases the unit cost of all conventional power.
 
Prima facie: (pry-mah fay-shah): n. at first appearance; at first view, before investigation. plain or clear; self-evident; obvious. 1425–75; late Middle English < Latin prīmā faciē ("first" and "face").
 
A British academic stumbled upon a trove of unpublished letters written by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nora Crook, emerita professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, said that she found the letters at the Essex Record Office. It is astonishing that this kind of discovery happens at all.


Iraqis voted in March 2010 to replace Maliki in favor of an alternative slate headed by Ayad Allawi, a pro-American former interim prime minister. However, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (bizarrely backed by the U.S.) ended up forming a new government. Vice President Joe Biden, the architect of U.S. "policy", proclaimed "politics has broken out in Iraq."
 
In California the CALPERS system, the largest state-run health insurance provider, has gone to reference pricing in some areas – CALPERS gives employees $30,000 for a total hip or total knee replacement and lists the hospitals that charge less than that.
 
The prose of sportswriter Grantland Rice: "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out on the green plain below."

A tribute to models and forecasts: Larry Summers recounts an exercise conducted in the early days of the Clinton administration, when the president's economic advisers assembled a series of long-run economic forecasts. "Japan's real GDP today is about half what we believed it would be at the time," Mr. Summers said.

 
Golden Oldie:

Funds smuggled out of developing nations by tax evaders, corrupt officials and criminals was estimated at $946.7 billion in 2011, according to the latest estimates released today by
a team of economists at the non-profit Global Financial Integrity, an increase of more than 10% over the previous year. For comparison, total foreign aid to developing nations in 2011 was just $141 billion. 

AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnndddd......the "dun horse" of the Lascaux Caves:

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