"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
Last
year, Ben Bernanke was still serving as the head of the Federal
Reserve—the most powerful central banking position in the world. Now,
he's going to work for a hedge fund. Is that how we want this to run?
In April 1977, President Carter famously warned, "We are now running out of gas and oil," and unless things change, there were only enough oil reserves to last until about 1990.
Four decades later, President Obama made the same claim, telling the country, "We cannot sustain a future powered by a fuel that is rapidly disappearing."
U.S. oil reserves dropped 52% between 1970 and 2008. Over those same years, domestic oil production fell about 47%. Both facts prompted a lot of talk about "peak oil" and how $2-per-gallon gasoline was a thing of the past.
But starting in 2008, domestic oil production exploded. By 2014, the U.S. produced 894 million more barrels of oil than in 2008. The trend is expected to continue. In fact, the Energy Department says that by 2028, net oil imports will fall to zero for the first time since the 1950s.
And yet, over these same years, proved oil reserves have been climbing — they're up 78% from 2008 to 2013. The key to the change is in the definition of "Proved Oil Reserves." "Proved oil reserves" measures only the oil that companies are currently, actively drilling for in existing fields. Unused reserves are not counted.
There is probably a good reason to make the oil reserves seem less than they are.....Who is.....Louise Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun?
Jim Leff is the founder of Chowhound and an interesting blogger. This is his take on a current news tempest:
"The CEO of a tech start-up decided employees need to make at least $70,000/year to be happy, so he slashed his own salary and restructured the business to make it so. The company's average salary had been $48,000 year, so 70 employees will get raises, and 30 of them will double their pay. Sounds good, right? No, it isn't...at all. This means employees will be earning far more than their market value, and capitalism abhors such distortions (see the story of the hell I was put through when I tried to share Chowhound's acquisition pay with our two most hard-working volunteers). It's a recipe for unintended consequences.
The big problem is that these employees will quickly adapt to the extra income, and their overhead will rise accordingly. They'll soon come to depend on it, with at least two ghastly results: 1. Serious peril if the company ever goes under (or if they're laid off). They'll be forced to withstand a crippling 50% cut in pay when they take employment elsewhere. With lifestyle and overhead engorged far above what their true market value can support, this won't amount to a simple matter of resetting to a previous status quo. It will be a catastrophe. 2. The workers will essentially be slaves to their employer. Since they can't ever leave, they can't ever say "no". To anything. The boss will effectively own these workers. Worse, every manager will effectively own his/her underlings. And we all know how graciously a certain proportion of our species is prone to handle power.
The CEO should have taken all this into account. The fact that he didn't makes him a poor leader (leadership is all about considering contingencies)."
In April 1977, President Carter famously warned, "We are now running out of gas and oil," and unless things change, there were only enough oil reserves to last until about 1990.
Four decades later, President Obama made the same claim, telling the country, "We cannot sustain a future powered by a fuel that is rapidly disappearing."
U.S. oil reserves dropped 52% between 1970 and 2008. Over those same years, domestic oil production fell about 47%. Both facts prompted a lot of talk about "peak oil" and how $2-per-gallon gasoline was a thing of the past.
But starting in 2008, domestic oil production exploded. By 2014, the U.S. produced 894 million more barrels of oil than in 2008. The trend is expected to continue. In fact, the Energy Department says that by 2028, net oil imports will fall to zero for the first time since the 1950s.
And yet, over these same years, proved oil reserves have been climbing — they're up 78% from 2008 to 2013. The key to the change is in the definition of "Proved Oil Reserves." "Proved oil reserves" measures only the oil that companies are currently, actively drilling for in existing fields. Unused reserves are not counted.
There is probably a good reason to make the oil reserves seem less than they are.....Who is.....Louise Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun?
Jim Leff is the founder of Chowhound and an interesting blogger. This is his take on a current news tempest:
"The CEO of a tech start-up decided employees need to make at least $70,000/year to be happy, so he slashed his own salary and restructured the business to make it so. The company's average salary had been $48,000 year, so 70 employees will get raises, and 30 of them will double their pay. Sounds good, right? No, it isn't...at all. This means employees will be earning far more than their market value, and capitalism abhors such distortions (see the story of the hell I was put through when I tried to share Chowhound's acquisition pay with our two most hard-working volunteers). It's a recipe for unintended consequences.
The big problem is that these employees will quickly adapt to the extra income, and their overhead will rise accordingly. They'll soon come to depend on it, with at least two ghastly results: 1. Serious peril if the company ever goes under (or if they're laid off). They'll be forced to withstand a crippling 50% cut in pay when they take employment elsewhere. With lifestyle and overhead engorged far above what their true market value can support, this won't amount to a simple matter of resetting to a previous status quo. It will be a catastrophe. 2. The workers will essentially be slaves to their employer. Since they can't ever leave, they can't ever say "no". To anything. The boss will effectively own these workers. Worse, every manager will effectively own his/her underlings. And we all know how graciously a certain proportion of our species is prone to handle power.
The CEO should have taken all this into account. The fact that he didn't makes him a poor leader (leadership is all about considering contingencies)."
There
are no racial majorities in Hawaii. Haoles or Caucasians, constitute
about 33% of the population, Japanese about 33%, Filipino-Americans
about 16%, and Chinese-Americans about 5%. Most of the population has
mixed ethnicities.
Chicago
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has hectored a $5 billion pension fund into
divesting its holdings in companies that manufacture firearms. Now he is
urging two large banks to deny financing to such companies “that profit
from gun violence.” (TD Bank provides a $60 million credit line to
Smith & Wesson, and Bank of America provides a $25 million line to
Sturm, Ruger & Co..) Seven of Chicago's employees’ and retirees’
pension fund have cumulative unfunded liabilities of $25 billion and are
projected to run dry by the end of the decade but first things first.
Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is
the most highly-praised and still the best-selling of her two dozen
books. Lessing has described it as an attempt "to break certain forms of
consciousness and go beyond them"; she has also said that the novel
became "an albatross" hung around her neck by a feminist misreading.
Silhouette:
N: The image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a
solid shape of a single colour, usually black, its edges matching the
outline of the subject. A traditional silhouette is an
outline drawing, or a profile portrait cut from black paper. The word
arose in the late 1700s when Etienne de Silhouette, a French minister of
finance, imposed high taxes on the French upper classes during the
Seven Years War. Because painted portraits were too pricey and
photography hadn't been invented yet, these profile cut outs were an
inexpensive way to immortalize a face. At the time, Silhouette's name
was synonymous with anything made cheaply, but for these paper portraits
the name stuck to this day.
So taxation impaired art.
Hillary Clinton's "Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners."!!!! (Krauthammer)
And, in honor of the Marie Antoinette tour: Vigée-Lebrun began painting portraits professionally in her early teens and went on to have a long and successful career. In 1779, she was summoned to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette, whom she would paint at least 30 more times. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, she fled France and traveled abroad, finding acclaim and prominent sitters wherever she went.
And, in honor of the Marie Antoinette tour: Vigée-Lebrun began painting portraits professionally in her early teens and went on to have a long and successful career. In 1779, she was summoned to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette, whom she would paint at least 30 more times. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, she fled France and traveled abroad, finding acclaim and prominent sitters wherever she went.
In
1849, Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln attempted to introduce a
bill for gradual emancipation of all slaves in the District of Columbia.
Although the District's slave trade ended the following year, his
emancipation attempt was aborted by Senator John C. Calhoun and others.
Writing
about Tax Day in the U.S., an AP reporter writes, “...it’s not that
bad. Aside from the complicated forms, tax season generates $300
billion in tax refunds each year, a significant boost to the U.S.
economy.” But if the economy is boosted when such funds are returned to
the taxpayer, surely the economy was earlier dragged down when government initially seized these funds. Even if one were to ignore the supply-side effects of taxes - which always
are a drag on taxed activities - how is it that people increase the
amounts they spend when they become more liquid but do not decrease the
amounts they spend when they become less liquid?
Golden oldie:
Only 456 copies of Sister Carrie
were sold, earning Theodore Dreiser $68.40 and triggering a nervous
breakdown that kept him from novel writing for a decade. There was,
perhaps, a silver lining: When returning from England in 1912, Dreiser
was too poor to afford the Titanic, and sailed a few days earlier on a less expensive boat.
A
brew of science fiction and fantasy, Christian theology and a hint of
politics, Madeleine L’Engle's “A Wrinkle in Time” has long been
considered influenced by the Cold War. It explores the dangers of
conformity, and presents evil as a world whose inhabitants’ thoughts and
actions are controlled by a sinister, disembodied brain. The book’s
dark planet Camazotz—a regimented place in which mothers in unison call
their children in for dinner—has been thought to represent the Soviet
Union. But a three page passage cut before publication and recently
discovered by L’Engle’s granddaughter presents a more nuanced worldview.
The heroine, Meg, is discussing Camazotz with her father Mr. Murry,
after her escape. He says that yes, totalitarianism can lead to this
kind of evil. (The author calls out examples by name, including Hitler,
Mussolini and Khrushchev.) But it can also happen in a democracy that
places too much value on security, Mr. Murry says. “Security is a most
seductive thing,” he tells his daughter. “I’ve come to the conclusion
that it’s the greatest evil there is.”
Every
day, the heart creates enough energy to drive a truck 20 miles. In a
lifetime, that is equivalent to driving to the moon and back. Or so they
say.
Campus pressures: The
Environmental Protection Agency alone has spent more than $333 million
on sustainability fellowships and grants. Anti-capitalism is explicit:
Markets “privilege” individuals over communities. Indoctrination is
relentless: Cornell has 403 sustainability courses (e.g., “The Ethics of
Eating”). Sustainability pledges are common. The University of
Virginia’s is: “I pledge to consider the social, economic, and
environmental impacts of my habits and to explore ways to foster a
sustainable environment during my time here at U-Va. and beyond.”
Sicily
is the "promised land" for thousands of migrants and refugees making
the desperate journey from North Africa to Europe's Mediterranean coast.
More than 10,000 people have arrived from Libya since last weekend
alone, according to the Italian Coast Guard.
Despite
surprisingly mediocre grades, T. S. Eliot was admitted to Harvard as a
kind of legacy student — and nearly flunked out as a freshman. In 1909,
he happened upon the work of Jules Laforgue. Electrified by what he
read of Laforgue in Arthur Symons’s “The Symbolist Movement in Literature,” the
Harvard undergrad ordered the French poet’s “Oeuvres complétes” from
Paris. By the time of his graduation, Eliot had begun his
self-metamorphosis into an academic powerhouse. Following a studious
year in Europe, he returned to Harvard to work toward a PhD in
philosophy. There he met and married the vivacious but totally
crazy Vivien Haigh-Wood. "Vivienne ruined Tom as a man, but she made him
as a poet," Eliot's sister-in-law, Theresa, said. It is said that while she wrecked his life, she stimulated "The Wasteland."
The
USS Independence has been re-found. It was sunk in the Farallon
Islands Radioactive Waste Dump -- a vast region overlapping what is now a
marine sanctuary where the federal government dumped nearly 48,000
barrels of low-level radioactive waste between 1946 and 1970. It lies
about 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. The ship also was loaded
with radioactive contamination. How many drums of radioactive material
are buried within the ship is unknown -- perhaps a few hundred. But it
is doubtful that they pose any health or environmental risk. The barrels
were filled with concrete and sealed in the ship's engine and boiler
rooms, which were protected by thick walls of steel.
China’s
boom-to-bust luxury landscape is strewn with devalued commodities like
black Audis, Omega watches, top-shelf sorghum liquor and high-rise
apartments in third-tier cities. Some are the victims of a slowing
economy, while others are casualties of an official austerity campaign
that has made ostentatious consumption a red flag for anticorruption
investigators.
One of those commodities is the
Tibetan Mastiff that, during the height of the goofiness, was bought and
sold for as high as $200,000. They are now worthless and are being sold
to slaughterhouses.
AAAAaaaaannnnndddddd...... a picture of the one-armed spiral galaxy NGC 4725 (with a second, two-armed, in right background):
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