Cab Thoughts 7/30/14

"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying,


Panama is a very successful Central America country and economy. Why don't the illegals go there? It's closer and the trip safer. Why not?

Over the last half-dozen years, companies from around the world including General Motors have bought licenses for a lithium-ion electrode that promised to deliver the next big step in making electric cars competitive with conventional vehicles. The companies and outside researchers have worked feverishly to optimize the electrode, including an assault on a flaw that gravely undermined its performance.

But in recent weeks, researchers working on the problem have gone public with a conclusion that the electrode, invented contemporaneously at Dalhousie University and at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, won’t realize the hopes to bring alive a mass-market electric-car age. They say the problem is at the heart of the physics of the electrode, an amalgam of nickel, cobalt and manganese (NMC) that achieves remarkable capacity after a jolt of unusually high voltage, and does not seem fixable.

What is....Ogallala Aquifer?

A public inquiry will be held into the death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, the UK Home Secretary Theresa May has announced. Litvinenko was a former KGB officer who had became a British citizen. He was poisoned with radioactive polonium in 2006.

2006!

The small-cap Russell 2000 Index meaningfully underperformed the S &P 500 this year, causing them to give back all of their 2013 outperformance, and sending it's price ratio relative to large-caps all the way down to 2011 levels. This is a tremendous hit, especially in a loose money environment.

ISIS has been tearing down holy sites throughout the past month, including the believed tomb of the prophet Jonah, several other Sunni holy sites in Mosul and seven Shiite ones in the city of Tal Afar, reported Human Rights Watch.

The ACA being overturned because the subsidies for insurance were unequal, available only through state-created exchanges, is being accepted with shock, as if the distinction was not purposeful. I think it is likely the distinction was made to force the state governments into opening up exchanges, even if they opposed them, because they would make themselves easy "they hate the poor" targets in the next election if they did not. Malice sown, malice reaped.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-dont-do-nuance-george-w-bush.html

This is the first year when the Man Booker Prize, the U.K.'s most prominent award in literature, is open to any writers of literary fiction written in English; previously it had been open only to the Commonwealth and Ireland. Five American writers have been included.

"You don't have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government," Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. An interesting take on the concept of separation-of-powers.

In the last few years, our ability to edit genomes has improved at a shockingly rapid clip. So rapid, in fact, that one of the easiest and most popular tools, known as CRISPR-Cas9, is just two years old. Researchers once spent months, even years, attempting to rewrite an organism’s DNA. Now they spend days.

Soon, though, scientists will begin combining gene editing with gene drives, so-called selfish genes that appear more frequently in offspring than normal genes, which have about a 50-50 chance of being passed on. With gene drives—so named because they drive a gene through a population—researchers just have to slip a new gene into a drive system and let nature take care of the rest. Subsequent generations of whatever species we choose to modify—frogs, weeds, mosquitoes—will have more and more individuals with that gene until, eventually, it’s everywhere.--PBS Nova

We are now producing more gas and oil than anyone else in the world. Yet gasoline prices are up. We have not built a refinery in over 30 years. Could there be a relationship?

Factitious \fak-TISH-uhs\, adjective: 1. Produced artificially, in distinction from what is produced by nature.2. Artificial; not authentic or genuine; sham. From Latin facticius, "made by art, artificial," from the past participle of facere, "to make."

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a Russell Sage Foundation study.  
The study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years.  

AAAAAnnnnnnnnddddddd......a graph: