Cab Thoughts 12/17/14

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. --michael crichton



A for-profit Florida college used exotic dancers to recruit students and faked high school diplomas and attendance records to qualify its pupils for millions in federal financial aid, according to a civil complaint. From 2009 to its closing in June 2012, FastTrain, the for-profit educational entity, received some $35 million in federal funds, including Pell Grants, providing federal aid to the neediest families.

“To generate as much revenue as possible, FastTrain would fill its classes with ineligible students,” the complaint said.

The school's recruiting tactics included employing exotic dancers, authorities said, and encouraging attractive women to dress provocatively when going to recruit young men.

It turns out that vlogger Zoe Sugg's novel Girl Online, which just broke the record for first-week sales of a debut author in the U.K., was at least partially ghostwritten. Sugg's publisher confirmed to The Sunday Times that a team of writers helped her compose the book, and The Independent notes a blog post by freelance writer Siobhan Curham that explained how she'd written a novel in just six weeks — a novel now suspected to be Girl Online.

Who is.....Christiana Figueres?

In recent weeks, many Hezbollah officials and senior members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard have publicly boasted about the advanced ground-to-ground missiles which Iran supplied Hezbollah and which allow the terror group to threaten almost any target within Israel. Sooner or later, the Puritans will have a nuclear weapon to destroy Evil. 

Charles Shumer, Democrat Senator from New York, delivered a scary speech a few weeks ago. He said that while most people thought the ACA helped the poor, most thought it damaged the middle class. His overall point was that the Obama plans attack problems that are ideological, not practical. Health care was not a crisis in 2009 nor are climate change and amnesty for illegal immigrants now. 

These problems are hardly the top priorities of a working/middle class whose median income declined as much during the Obama recovery as during the Great Recession. Worse, only 15% of the uninsured minority vote. Shumer is arguing that Obama policies are driving the middle class away from the Democrat Party.
If that is true, it is a lot bigger a story than whatever the Rube-publicans are doing.

Michael Sam, has been named Man of the Year by men's magazine GQ,

Buccaneers: The pirates of the Caribbean derived their name from the Arawak Indian word buccan, referring to a wooden frame used for smoking meats. The French changed this to boucan and called the French hunters who used these frames to cook and preserve feral cattle and the offspring of Columbus' pigs on the island of Hispaniola boucanier. English colonists anglicized the word to buccaneers.

The labor force participation rate remained at a 36-year low of 62.8 percent in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Milton's agreement for Paradise Lost with printer Samuel Simmons -- five pounds at signing, another five for each 1500 copies sold on a first edition of 4,500 -- is the earliest preserved author's contract.

Jim Grant, the harsh critic of easy money, on our PhD obsessed culture (looking back from the future):
"My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and to fix interest rates.
We put the cart of asset prices before the horse of enterprise.
We entertained the fantasy that high asset prices made for prosperity, rather than the other way around.
We actually worked to foster inflation, which we called 'price stability' (this was on the eve of the hyperinflation of 2017).
We seem to have miscalculated."

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/12/old-new-years-problems.html

The God of Small Things was an elegant book written by Arundhati Roy, her first book. It won the Booker prize and she was looked to as a new breed of writer, not just from India, but a huge talent with an exciting future. Everyone waited for the next fiction. It never came. Instead Roy did an abrupt turn and became an activist. Nor was she any activist; she supported homicidal Maoist groups.
She began writing non-fiction, championing reforms in India, especially aimed at the caste system. And her positions were more than controversial, they were offensive. In The Doctor and the Saint she presented two different visions of reform: Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s. Gandhi wanted to abolish the designation of “Untouchables”, the lowest caste that is today referred to as Dalit. But Ambedkar wanted to get rid of the caste system in its entirety. Gandhi emerges as a traditionalist, an egomaniac who had to be dragged into modernity by the more ambitious and radical Ambedkar.

Part of the U.S.-China global warming deal is that we, the U.S., will have to contribute money to China and India to help finance their shift away from carbon. The first payment is apparently $10 billion. The United Nations' climate change spokeswoman, Christiana Figueres, dismissed the U.S. commitment of $10 billion as "a very, very small sum." What is needed to decarbonise the global economy, she said, is “$90 trillion over the next 15 years”.
90 trillion dollars! Who are these people and who do they talk to every day?
For some perspective, the total Gross Domestic Product of the WHOLE WORLD is 71 trillion dollars and the total world debt is $223.3 trillion. That is 313% of global gross domestic product.
So where, exactly, is the 90 trillion dollars to fix the carbon economy going to come from and what is the world going to look like when it does?

There are an  estimated 100,000 near-Earth objects, such as asteroids and comets, which can cross Earth's orbit and are large enough to be dangerous. Only about 11,000 have so far been tracked and cataloged. this according to Vladimir Lipunov, a professor at Moscow State University. I don't suppose this has anything to do with the world's first Asteroid Day.

One of the lessons learned in 2008 was that regulators waited too long to sound the alarm about the systemic risk posed by the sharp increase in real estate-backed debt. When they did act by limiting banks' exposure to commercial real estate loans to 300% of capital, most banks were already above the limit. So the regulators' action closed the credit spigot abruptly, throttled the real estate industry and helped precipitate the crisis. (Jim Bauerle)

AAAaaaannnnnndddddd.....a picture of a German tank off a Russian bridge, July 4, 1941: