Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
JP Morgan FERC fines.
JP Morgan FERC fines.
Electricity Market Rules Did Not Provide A Worthy Opponent For JPMorgan’s Brainpower � Dealbreaker: Wall Street Insider – Financial News, Headlines, Commentary and Analysis – Hedge Funds, Private Equity, Banks
Electricity Market Rules Did Not Provide A Worthy Opponent For JPMorgan’s Brainpower � Dealbreaker: Wall Street Insider – Financial News, Headlines, Commentary and Analysis – Hedge Funds, Private Equity, Banks
Why Tom Friedman Is the Ayn Rand of Our Times | Alternet
Why Tom Friedman Is the Ayn Rand of Our Times | Alternet
Monday, July 29, 2013
Book Review: The Sports Gene - WSJ.com
Bu from the comments: " The 10,000 hour goal is certainly no guarantee, but what each of us does with God's gifts are what counts. Trying and practicing may not make me better than the next person, but it will make me the best I can be."
Book Review: The Sports Gene - WSJ.com
Sunday, July 28, 2013
You Can't Teach Speed: Sprinters Falsify the Deliberate Practice Model of Expertise by Michael P. Lombardo, Robert O. Deaner :: SSRN
You Can't Teach Speed: Sprinters Falsify the Deliberate Practice Model of Expertise by Michael P. Lombardo, Robert O. Deaner :: SSRN
Budging (Just a Little) on Investing in Gold
Budging (Just a Little) on Investing in Gold - NYTimes.com
The Charitable-Industrial Complex -
"Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left."
The Charitable-Industrial Complex - NYTimes.com:
This Buffet realizes he won the gene lottery: "Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in."
PowerPoint Is Evil
By Edward Tufte
Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil
Evil if used as a crutch to replace good presentation of data.
Edward Tufte - FT.com
One of my favorite books. Should be on everyone's shelf.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1982
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems - Issue 3: In Transit - Nautilus
Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems - Issue 3: In Transit - Nautilus
Was America’s Economic Prosperity Just a Historical Accident?
The top .01% has figured out how to retain more.
Was America’s Economic Prosperity Just a Historical Accident?
Number of Catfish Inspectors Drives a Debate on Spending - NYTimes.com
Red States for bigger government and more regulation: Mississippi catfish growers want to add 14 million a year and more bureaucrats to help reduce competition.
Number of Catfish Inspectors Drives a Debate on Spending - NYTimes.com
Japanese Minister Proposes More Active Military Presence in Region - NYTimes.com
Japanese Minister Proposes More Active Military Presence in Region - NYTimes.com
Thursday, July 25, 2013
U.S. Attorney Alleges 'Rampant Insider Trading' at SAC - WSJ.com
U.S. Attorney Alleges 'Rampant Insider Trading' at SAC - WSJ.com:
The government will seek forfeiture of about $10 billion from SAC
ataxingmatter: Senators promised 50 years of secrecy on their tax reform proposals
ataxingmatter: Senators promised 50 years of secrecy on their tax reform proposals
Corporate investment: A mysterious divergence - FT.com
Corporate investment: A mysterious divergence - FT.com
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Want A Simple, 3-ETF Portfolio? Here Are 25 Of Them
Want A Simple, 3-ETF Portfolio? Here Are 25 Of Them | ETF Database
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
China Moves Send World Shares Higher, Dollar Softens - NYTimes.com
China Moves Send World Shares Higher, Dollar Softens - NYTimes.com
Monday, July 22, 2013
Regulators Not Happy With Guy Whose Algorithm Tricked Some Other Algorithms � Dealbreaker: Wall Street Insider – Financial News, Headlines, Commentary and Analysis – Hedge Funds, Private Equity, Banks
Quote of the year about Wall Street.
An important element of any Wall Street education is figuring out what shady practices will win you a reputation as a genius, what shady practices will win you a reputation as a scumbag, and what shady practices will win you a prison sentence. There is substantial overlap
Is this goodbye to Lonely Planet? | Bronwen Clune | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/22/lonely-planet-melbourne-staff
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Rise of the Warrior Cop - WSJ.com
Department of Education's SWAT team? American's love affair with guns extends into the government.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Friday, July 19, 2013
Bakken activity: How wide is the ripple effect? - fedgazette - Publications & Papers | The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Bakken activity: How wide is the ripple effect? - fedgazette - Publications & Papers | The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Thursday, July 18, 2013
The Case for Paying People More - Justin Fox - Harvard Business Review
The Case for Paying People More - Justin Fox - Harvard Business Review
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Morgan Stanley is having an identity crisis
Morgan Stanley is having an identity crisis - Quartz
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Harvard Swaps Are So Toxic Even Summers Won’t Explain (Update3) - Bloomberg
Harvard Swaps Are So Toxic Even Summers Won’t Explain (Update3) - Bloomberg
Monday, July 15, 2013
Nantucket and Malibu, Disappearing: The Environmental Factors Destroying the Summer Enclaves | Vanity Fair
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/08/end-of-malibu-nantucket-erosion
Ask a Korean!: Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes [feedly]
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
The Whitewater Scandal and Our Two Americas in the Raw, by Tom Junod - Esquire
The Whitewater Scandal and Our Two Americas in the Raw, by Tom Junod - Esquire
Who Ruined the Humanities? - WSJ.com
Books took me far from myself into experiences that had nothing to do with my life, yet spoke to my life. Reading Homer's "Iliad," I could feel the uncanny power of recognizing the emotional universe of radically alien people. Yeats gave me a special language for a desire that defined me even as I had never known it was mine: "And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun."
Who Ruined the Humanities? - WSJ.com
Friday, July 12, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Yes, Barry Goldwater and Rand Paul--Like Stephen Douglas and Roger Taney--Don't Think African-American People Are Fully Fellow Americans. Why Do You Ask?: Thursday Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Bang-Query-Bang-Query Weblogging [feedly]
Jeff Weintraub sends us to Matt Yglesias:
I've been in a long and winding multi-front Twitter exchange over… my assertion that Paul's opinion that democracy "gave us Jim Crow" relates to his white supremacist inclinations… evidenced by, for example, his previous stated opposition to key provisions of the Civil Rights Act…. Charles C.W. Cook taking the view that Paul is right and the Civil Rights Act is bad while David Freddoso thinks that the Civil Rights Act is good but associating Civil Rights Act opponents with racism is slander. So to return to the beginning, there's no plausible meaning of "democracy" in which democracy gave us Jim Crow.
Even if you take "democracy" to relatively narrowly mean "majoritarian voting procedures" this doesn't work. In the period between the Civil War and World War II, African-Americans were a majority in quite a few southern states and would have been a large—and potentially decisive—voting bloc in the others. If, that is, they were allowed to vote… African-Americans were disenfranchised via a systematic campaign of terrorist violence… that gave us the Jim Crow social system. The point of the Civil Rights Act, including its provisions regulating private businesses, was to smash that social system. And it succeeded…. I think the Cook/Paul view that we should somehow regret this and pretend that everything would have worked itself out on its own is bizarre.
But it's not only bizarre. It seems to me that it necessarily has to stem from not taking the interests and history of African-Americans seriously to even be comprehensible. The "respectable" thing to say about people like Paul or the late Barry Goldwater, I suppose, is simply that they are ideologues rather than people driven by some kind of racial animosity. But I think it's selling free market ideology short to suggest that opposing government regulations meant to undo the outcome of a century long campaign of terrorist violence is just a straightforward consequence of a general support for free enterprise. You need to combine that ideology with a sincere indifference to black people's welfare… just as you need to combine Paul's ideology with genuine indifference to the history of race in America to reach Paul's conclusion about democracy's relationship to
And Jeff sends us to David Frum:
"How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?" Rand Paul posed that question in his speech last week at Howard University. Coming from him, it does seem a singularly naive question. He might have found an important piece of the answer at RonPaul.com, where he will find this statement by his own father on the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, explaining the Texas congressman's continuing opposition to that law:
[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society....
Goldwater's platform issues were anti-communism and anti-statism. Yet we make a mistake if we forget, or choose to forget, that he not only opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but also the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its subsequent enforcement by the Eisenhower administration….
It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that is both wise and just for negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority. I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving toward that goal. That is their business, not mine.
In assessing those words, begin with this one fact. Until the 1920s, both Mississippi and South Carolina had black majorities. In the year Goldwater published, blacks made up more than 40% of the populations of the two states. In what sense can we say that "the people" of a state have adopted a decision if the majority or near-majority of those people have by violence and threat of violence been excluded from participation in that decision? Goldwater probably never thought very hard about that question, but the logical implication of his words is that their author… did not consider black people as belonging to "the people."
I think Frum is wrong: I think Goldwater thought about the question--and concluded that of course African-Americans did not fully belong to "the people".
Drones in Niger Reflect New U.S. Tack on Terrorism - NYTimes.com
Drones in Niger Reflect New U.S. Tack on Terrorism - NYTimes.com
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Stephen Holmes reviews ‘The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ by Mark Mazzetti � LRB 18 July 2013
‘Killing was the preferred course of action in Somalia,"
Stephen Holmes reviews ‘The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ by Mark Mazzetti � LRB 18 July 2013:
A brand-new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan. And nobody to use it. - The Washington Post
"The building will probably be demolished.”
A brand-new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan. And nobody to use it. - The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Tell-all telephone | Data Protection | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE
This is all that is done with your telephone data, nothing to worry about.
Tell-all telephone | Data Protection | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE
Not Like Ike - NYTimes.com
One of Ike' great quotes
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Pakistan's Bin Laden Dossier - Al Jazeera English
A rare opportunity to see from the other perspective.
The Pakistan report on the Bin Laden raid.
Pakistan's Bin Laden Dossier - Al Jazeera English
Monday, July 08, 2013
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Geithner joins top table of public speakers with lucrative appearances - FT.com
Geithner joins top table of public speakers with lucrative appearances - FT.com
Saturday, July 06, 2013
Friday, July 05, 2013
Mind Over Matter - Debunking Alternative Medicines - NYTimes.com
Mind Over Matter - Debunking Alternative Medicines - NYTimes.com
Thursday, July 04, 2013
Fed delays swaps rule for Goldman Sachs - MarketWatch
Fed delays swaps rule for Goldman Sachs - MarketWatch
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Monday, July 01, 2013
Simons Strategy to Shield Profit From Taxes Draws IRS Ire - Bloomberg
Even one of the good guys succumbs to excessive greed. The main business of equity departments on Wall Street is swaps. And swaps are used either to; hide losses or convert short term capital gains to long term capital gains.
Simons Strategy to Shield Profit From Taxes Draws IRS Ire - Bloomberg
At Nation's Oldest Institution for the Disabled, 13 Lives in Limbo - WSJ.com
At Nation's Oldest Institution for the Disabled, 13 Lives in Limbo - WSJ.com