Saturday, January 25, 2014

Cab Thoughts 1/25/14

Far more important than income inequality is productivity inequality.--Walter Williams


Quantitative easing is seen as the Fed making more money available to the economy. But isn't there another side of it? Can interest rates stay this low forever? Doesn't the Fed have to make money less available at some point and won't that create the obverse of what more available money creates?


British National Archives is digitizing the official diaries kept by army military units during World War I. There are about 1.5 million pages of diary entries.


Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the "10,000 -- hour" rule of thumb says that repetition is only part of the process. "You don't get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal." The secret of winning is 'deliberate practice,' where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration. Where amateurs and experts part ways is the amateur at some point slips into autopilot; he stops analyzing and evaluating his practice. The expert never floats. He is always self-critical. Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. It must be patrolled by concentration and feedback.

In the U.S. a Chinese rooftop solar system can be bought for $1700/Kw but the total cost of a fully installed systems is around $5,000/Kw. Australians are paying $1,700/Kw fully installed with a 1:1 exchange rate; it is similar in most of Europe. The biggest reason U.S. systems cost so much more is the permitting and certification requirements.

For every 1% increase in interest rates, expect the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond to lose 8.96% in price.
A recent scientific paper showed that all 150 drugs tested at the cost of billions of dollars in human trials of sepsis failed because the drugs had been developed using mice. Unfortunately, what looks like sepsis in mice turned out to be very different than what sepsis is in humans.

Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent and that after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stood in 1990.

Income inequality will become a major topic in the next election year because it is superficially easily understood. But, regrettably, production is often connected to income so one might think of ways to promote production among those with less income than others. Walter Williams offers taxis as an example. One can be an owner-operator of a taxi by simply knowing the city and knowing how to drive. That sounds like a reasonable entry point for an ambitious, low-skilled guy. Except. ...Except a license (medallion) for a cab in New York costs $700,000. So.......

Who is....Mikhail Markhasev?


David Crane, an energy company exec., on 60 Minutes raised these two points: First, wind is now the lowest cost source of new electricity power in wholesale markets, second, rooftop solar is cheaper than retail grid power already in more than 20 states. This creates some significant problems in that the consumer is essentially competing with the central supplier for cheap production but defers to the supplier for expensive production and there is no easy storage system yet for the energy that is produced cheaply.

Gov. Christie has attended 127 Springsteen concerts.

Legal Marijuana sales are climbing to more than $2 billion this year. One analyst forecasts the legal Marijuana market will exceed $10 billion in 5 years.

Golden Oldie:


In a world similar to Earth, there are 12 bloodlines, or races. Each bloodline has a champion between the ages of 13 and 17 who is trained as a warrior. When they turn 18, the teen warrior behind them gets promoted. This has been the case for hundreds of years, but no one remembers why — they’re always ready for some sort of battle to take place, but it never does. But the tradition continues. And then one day they’re called to fight, and all the bloodlines but the winner's will be exterminated. They’re fighting to be the last race. This is the outline of "Endgame," a quasi-Hunger Games creation. Fox, Google HarperCollins are all involved in this project. So is over 2 million dollars. The author? James Frey, who wrote the "memoir" A Million Little Pieces, famous for its totally untrue content. How the righteous are rewarded.

In 1850 the State of Massachusetts created compulsory education. An estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population resisted--sometimes violently; the last resistance in Barnstable on Cape Cod surrendered in the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

An interesting problem has occurred with the aims of having the home interact with the utility. The utilities do not want the homeowner to be banking the solar energy when the price is cheaper and then selling it back to the utility during peak pricing.

AAAAnnnnnndddddd......a poem, "The Deluded," by Juan Gelman translated by Joan Lindgren:
hope fails us often
grief never.
that's why some think
that known grief is better
than unknown grief.
they believe that hope is an illusion.
they are deluded by grief.

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