I will not be posting until about September 1, 2008. I need to refresh and recharge.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
James Grant from WS Journal Op-ed
Excerpt:
Long ago and far away, a brilliant man of letters floated an idea. To stop a financial panic cold, he proposed, a central bank should lend freely, though at a high rate of interest. Nonsense, countered a certain hard-headed commercial banker. Such a policy would only instigate more crises by egging on lenders and borrowers to take more risks. The commercial banker wrote clumsily, the man of letters fluently. It was no contest.
The doctrine of activist central banking owes much to its progenitor, the Victorian genius Walter Bagehot. But Bagehot might not recognize his own idea in practice today. Late in the spring of 2007, American banks paid an average of 4.35% on three-month certificates of deposit. Then came the mortgage mess, and the Fed's crash program of interest-rate therapy. Today, a three-month CD yields just 2.65%, or little more than half the measured rate of inflation. It wasn't the nation's small savers who brought down Bear Stearns, or tried to fob off subprime mortgages as "triple-A." Yet it's the savers who took a pay cut -- and the savers who, today, in the heat of a presidential election year, are holding their tongues.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121642367125066615.html
Long ago and far away, a brilliant man of letters floated an idea. To stop a financial panic cold, he proposed, a central bank should lend freely, though at a high rate of interest. Nonsense, countered a certain hard-headed commercial banker. Such a policy would only instigate more crises by egging on lenders and borrowers to take more risks. The commercial banker wrote clumsily, the man of letters fluently. It was no contest.
The doctrine of activist central banking owes much to its progenitor, the Victorian genius Walter Bagehot. But Bagehot might not recognize his own idea in practice today. Late in the spring of 2007, American banks paid an average of 4.35% on three-month certificates of deposit. Then came the mortgage mess, and the Fed's crash program of interest-rate therapy. Today, a three-month CD yields just 2.65%, or little more than half the measured rate of inflation. It wasn't the nation's small savers who brought down Bear Stearns, or tried to fob off subprime mortgages as "triple-A." Yet it's the savers who took a pay cut -- and the savers who, today, in the heat of a presidential election year, are holding their tongues.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121642367125066615.html
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Curmudgeon News
My friend Jim was reading The Traveling Curmudgeon. He reports:
“The Traveling Curmudgeon” says “The nightlife in Bombay is roughly on par with that of Schwenksville, Pennsylvania”.
My father was born there and my grandfather had an egg farm there that I remember. He worked the farm alone with his dog and a few horses. The dog only understood Dutch since that is all my grandfather spoke. I recall him being taken to a hospital about 30 miles from there and about 30 miles from Philadelphia. It was the first time in his life that he had Jello and the first time he saw an African American. I know both sound hard to believe but it is the truth. So I guess I can attest to the quote.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
"Getting more people to buy porn was probably the last thing Bush had on his mind when he came up with his 'stimulus package,' but we'll take it."
NEW YORK, July 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.
According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, "Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market."
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Found: A skeptical registered Democrat
Excerpt:
My confidence in the inability of climate models to predict the future comes from knowledge of models in general, not because of what I know about climate models in particular. In fact, I don't know anything about climate models, but I do know a lot about serious attempts to model the behavior of complex systems in general. It is a very useful endeavor (for reasons I won't go into here), but predicting the future behavior of that complex system is not one of them. They just can't do it, and there is no reason to believe that it will be different when it comes to climate models.
I'm not sure why people don't discuss the more general issue of modeling the behavior of complex systems (like the brain or the economy) when they discuss the particular issue of climate models. It could be that climate scientists are vastly more brilliant and infinitely more capable than neuroscientists or economists, so their models are uniquely able to accurately predict the behavior of a complex system. But that just seems incredibly unlikely to me. Hence, my skepticism.
http://tinyurl.com/6d7jz3
My confidence in the inability of climate models to predict the future comes from knowledge of models in general, not because of what I know about climate models in particular. In fact, I don't know anything about climate models, but I do know a lot about serious attempts to model the behavior of complex systems in general. It is a very useful endeavor (for reasons I won't go into here), but predicting the future behavior of that complex system is not one of them. They just can't do it, and there is no reason to believe that it will be different when it comes to climate models.
I'm not sure why people don't discuss the more general issue of modeling the behavior of complex systems (like the brain or the economy) when they discuss the particular issue of climate models. It could be that climate scientists are vastly more brilliant and infinitely more capable than neuroscientists or economists, so their models are uniquely able to accurately predict the behavior of a complex system. But that just seems incredibly unlikely to me. Hence, my skepticism.
http://tinyurl.com/6d7jz3
How to Be Friends With Someone Who Attempted Suicide
Just testing to see if you're paying attention.
Friday, July 04, 2008
How much do you want?
The young woman who walked into Pinnacle's Vienna office in 2004 said her boyfriend wanted to buy a house near Annapolis. He hoped to get a special kind of loan for which he didn't have to report his income, assets or employment. Mortgage broker [Kevin] Connelly handed the woman a pile of paperwork.
On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.
Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing. As it happened, he was freed that day. Still, Connelly said, "that was one of mine that goes down in the annals of the strange."
On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.
Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing. As it happened, he was freed that day. Still, Connelly said, "that was one of mine that goes down in the annals of the strange."
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Commie Mints
Revolutionize your breath just like Lenin and the Bolsheviks revolutionized Mother Russia! Each 2-1/4" round tin contains one hundred mints.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
How to Collect Money From People Who Owe You - wikiHow
wikiHow: This article offers some insight on how to collect money that you're owed without getting into a conflict. So, if someone owes you money, you can collect without it becoming unpleasant.
http://tinyurl.com/5czong
http://tinyurl.com/5czong
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Don't let facts get in the way
Fudge factors are invented variables whose purpose is to force a calculated result to give a better match to what happens in the real world.
To suggest that other calculations may include a "fudge factor" may suggest that the calculation has been somehow tampered with in order to make the results give a misleadingly good match to the experimental data.A common feature of "fudge factors" in science is their arbitrariness, and their retrospective nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_factor
To suggest that other calculations may include a "fudge factor" may suggest that the calculation has been somehow tampered with in order to make the results give a misleadingly good match to the experimental data.A common feature of "fudge factors" in science is their arbitrariness, and their retrospective nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_factor
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