By DAVID POGUE
Published: December 30, 2009
Wow, what an opportunity! Imagine having a newspaper column published precisely on the last day of the year. What a chance to step back, look ahead, sum it all up!
Or else I could just trot out my usual end-of-year silliness, better known as the Pogie Awards.
These honors, now in their fifth consecutive year, aren’t meant to identify the best products of the year; that’s way too obvious. Instead, the Pogies celebrate the best ideas of the year — great, clever features that somehow made it past the obstacles of cost, engineering and lawyers.
Kindly turn off your cellphones and refrain from flash photography. All right, then, let’s begin.
DROID DOCKS The Motorola Droid, of course, is an app phone (that is, an iPhone wannabe with a black rectangular touch screen, etc.). It’s generally a very good one, with slide-out keyboard, excellent speed and the Verizon network.
The winner here isn’t the phone, though — it’s the docks. One $30 plastic dock suctions to your windshield. When you slip the phone into it, hidden magnetic sensors automatically fill the Droid’s screen with Google’s new GPS navigation software, complete with turn-by-turn driving directions, spoken street names, color coding to indicate traffic, map icons (for parking and so on), satellite view and more.
Or buy the $30 home dock. When you insert the Droid, the screen becomes a handsome, horizontal-layout alarm-clock/weather display, complete with buttons that let you access your music or even dim the screen for sleepy time. You have to charge your phone overnight anyway, so why shouldn’t it be doing something useful in the meantime?
ITYPE2GO In 2009, the risks of text messaging went mainstream. Statistics made it clear that texting while driving was shockingly common — and incredibly dangerous.
But what about texting while walking? You’re looking down as you flail away on your keyboard; next thing you know, you’ve crashed right into a person, a tree or a fence. Trust me: It’s hard to look cool when you’ve just face-planted on a No Parking sign.
Fortunately, iType2Go (a $1 iPhone app) is a funny idea that really works. It superimposes what you’re typing over a live camera view, so you can see where you’re going even while you’re focused on the screen.
With the touch of a button, you can also direct your typing output to an e-mail message, Facebook page or Twitter update. And you can rotate the phone to get the widescreen keyboard, if you prefer. (Similar for Android phones: Droid Text’n’Walk, $4.)
MIFI. It’s not often a company invents an entire new category with one fell press release, but that’s what Novatel did. The MiFi ($100 from Verizon or Sprint; monthly fee required) is a tiny, credit card-size, personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot. That’s right: you now have a Wi-Fi hot spot in your pocket, purse or laptop bag.
In many ways, it’s better than those U.S.B. cellular modems that jack into your laptop. On the MiFi, five people can connect at once. There’s nothing to connect or disconnect and store. And the MiFi can handle more things than laptops; Wi-Fi netbooks, cameras, game gadgets, iPhones and iPod Touches can get online, too.
SAMSUNG DUAL-SCREEN CAMERA The front of Samsung’s DualView TL220/TL225 ($300/$350) looks completely shiny and black. But when you tap the empty spot next to the lens, a small screen lights up, right there on the front of the camera.
Having a front screen is great for framing self-portraits, for letting your subjects see what they are going to look like, for displaying a self-timer countdown, or for displaying a happy face as a “Smile!” cue when you’re taking a group photo. The screen can also display a choice of cartoon animations that keep younger subjects riveted, smiling and facing the camera. The camera itself isn’t so great, photographically speaking. But what a great idea.
NIKON PROJECTOR CAM You can’t mention great camera feature ideas of 2009 without bringing up Nikon’s Coolpix S1000pj ($430). It’s another so-so pocket camera with a killer hidden feature: a built-in projector.
When you want to show your pictures or videos to friends, no longer must you crowd them around the camera’s little built-in screen. Now, with a single button press on the top of the camera, you can turn on the projector. The image is beamed straight from the front of the camera onto a wall, a ceiling or a friend’s T-shirt. Nobody’s going to confuse the image (40 inches, max) with an Imax movie. But especially when the lights are low and the wall is nearby, the projected image is perfectly adequate and really something to see.
BING POP-UP PREVIEWS The actual search results from Microsoft’s new Bing.com service may not always be as good as Google’s. But Bing has a few incredibly juicy features, like the one that lets you point to any search result in the list without clicking. A popup balloon shows you the first few paragraphs of text on it. Without leaving the results list, you know if it’s going to be helpful. You really miss this trick when you return to Google, where you have to click a link to see what’s behind it.
PALM PRE DATA CONSOLIDATION Palm’s latest app phones, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, offer a software trick that’s satisfying both in concept and execution: it consolidates the different sources of your life’s information.
For example, you get to see the appointments from your online Google or Yahoo Calendar, your Outlook work calendar and your Facebook events, all on a single color-coded calendar. Ditto with your various online address books, your various e-mail accounts and your various chat program buddy lists. Simple is a good thing; we like simple.
FIND MY PHONE. Your cellphone, obviously, knows where it is, especially if it’s a model that has built-in GPS functions. So why do we wind up losing our cellphones so often?
That’s the question that Apple answered with its Find My iPhone feature, an incredibly useful aspect of its $100-a-year MobileMe service. On the me.com Web site, with a click you can see where your iPhone is on a zoomable map.
If it’s just lying in your house somewhere, the Web site lets you make it beep loudly for two minutes, so you can hunt it down among the couch cushions. If the phone is in the hands of some stranger, you can make the phone display a message (say, “Return my phone! It’s covered with deadly germs!”) or even erase the thing completely by remote control, so at least your personal life is protected.
The only thing that could be better than Find My iPhone would be a free version. That’s what you get with certain Motorola phones, like the Droid and Cliq. May this one catch on with every phone company.
READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.
You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.
You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.
Hello Friends here we come up with another write up on “Commodity Corner Series”.
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Topic is RUBBER ………… “STRETCHING & MOVING ON THE WAY AHEAD”
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RUBBER - STRETCHING & MOVING ON THE WAY AHEAD
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We would touch upon aspects like the investment scenario of rubber in India and price movement of the rubber in Indian market.
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We would also read about the gap in the demand and supply of the rubber in the market.
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Rubber is springy & has the potential energy of getting stretched.
These properties are also seen in the price movement of the prices.
The year 2009, has given stretchable & phenomenal return on investing in rubber futures.
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INDIAN SCENARIO :
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The four-month period between October and January is the peak season of rubber output in the country.
The total area of plantations in the country is 662,000 hectares of which 92-93 per cent is in Kerala.
Tripura is the second-largest rubber planting state in India after Kerala.
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DEMAND & SUPPLY GAP –Walkthrough 2009:
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As we know that profit increases when the difference or the gap between the cost price & the selling price increases.
This immense gap was witnessed in rubber prices.
Tight supply & tracking the rise in Asian markets like Tokyo and Singapore gave momentum to the prices to rise through out the year.
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The Indian industry consumed 356,400 tonnes of natural rubber (58 per cent of the total domestic consumption) during April-November.
In April-November, natural rubber production in India dropped 6.5 per cent at 538,125 tonnes against an increase of 3.5 per cent in consumption at 614,600 tonnes.
So there was a gap of 76,475 tonnes in production and consumption.
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PRICE MOVEMENT “Focus on the journey, not the destination”:
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The spot prices at the benchmark Kochi had begun its journey at Rs.67.23/Kg & touched the high of Rs. 139.19 within a year.
Strong appreciation in prices in all major global markets which touched Rs 130.48 per kg, made the domestic market bullish.
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Similarly, the futures at MCX posted a gain of 78.94% as of 22nd December, 2009.
This spike was also supported by the increased gap between production & supply.
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Next Blog we would read about the impact of the shortage of rubber industry on major industries and the scenario of the rubber production in other countries.
Stay Tuned for more on this.
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Note : For More Latest Industry, Stock Market and Economy News and Updates, please Click Here
Almost every part of a new home can be obtained at lower cost through using recycled goods and bartering. The concept is very simple. Someone, somewhere likely has an excess of what you’re looking for and will gladly trade or sell those goods at below market cost.
For instance, plumbers replace sinks and bathtubs routinely. Busy plumbers have so many old ones that they can barely give them away fast enough. While some fixtures will be in poor condition, many are replaced because they have a small chip or because people want something new and more fashionable.
You can buy recycled building materials from Salvation Army or Habitat Restores and similar thrift stores. This makes shopping convenient because there’s a large selection under one roof.
Often the lowest prices can be found by dealing directly with people who have items they no longer need. It’s amazing what can be scrounged from remodelers, dumpsters, trash haulers, demolition companies and curb sides (drive around at night in affluent neighborhoods). Workers at city dumps typically sort out items of value and sell at very low cost. And don’t forget about yard sales and Craigs List.
You can use the same process to find low cost earthbags (sandbags). Network with farmers and feed stores in your area to locate used grain or feed bags in good condition. Make sure they are comparable in strength to new sandbags and have been stored away from sunlight. You could buy one new sandbag for comparison, and fill and tamp one sample bag before buying a large quantity.
I know artists who have built their homes with recycled materials, and the end results are stunning. One of these artists mixed various colored 4”x4” tiles using leftovers from tile workers and made the most beautiful countertop I’ve ever seen.
Not sure if this has been discussed here. http://www.courier-journal.com/article/2009912220363
This article discusses how many ’seminaries’ are looking to decrease the number of students on campus and go to long distant/internet education formats. I know Jody Apple works with VBI, there is OABS, East Tennessee School of Preaching is looking to this format, and I am sure there are others. With the probable economic collapse in the next few years, do you see preaching schools (and degreed programs) having trouble surviving and others going to other teaching formats?
Using factor analysis to derive a measure of religiosity, Martin Paldam (Aarhus University) and Erich Gundlach (Kiel Institute for the World Economy) find that religiosity is negatively correlated with per capita income.
The figure below shows the relation between religiously and income:
Economics used to be so much easier when things were about growing food and bending metal. When we were trading sheep for grain and grain for horseshoes, the more sheep, grain and horseshoes we made for each other, the better off we were. As we’ve worked our way up the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, figuring out what’s valuable and what’s not gets wickedly complex.
Thought experiment:
If you have $10, there are all kinds of things you can do with your hard-earned, Federal Reserve-endorsed, green portrait of Alexander Hamilton. If you use it to buy a sandwich (sure, an expensive sandwich), you’ve engaged in a transaction that has benefitted both you and the gal selling you the sandwich. Everyone’s happy. Economic value has been created.
But if instead a gal steals your $10, we can all agree that no economic value was created. It’s simply a wealth transfer; no one has created anything and you’re certainly not happy. The act of stealing also has the negative externality of reducing your trust and thus future economic activity.
These are the extremes on either side of a value continuum; there are a whole lot of fuzzy stuff in-between. Consider gambling. Let’s say you play the slots in Vegas with your $10 for an hour and eventually lose your money. Was economic value created? Hard to say. Casino gambling combines two functions: entertainment and insidious wealth extraction. The casino can argue that they provided you an entertaining service, which included drinks and time in their ornate, oxygenated room protected from the sun’s harmful UV rays and any distracting indication of time. You can argue back that you thought you were going to make money — do a little wealth extracting of your own — and you did not intend to lose your $10.
How about spending $10 to see a movie? Remember, economics is the system of how we provide for each other the things that will enhance our well-being. If you find the movie highly enjoyable, it has enhanced your well-being as much as a sandwich, and the people who sold you the movie are happy you saw their film. Everyone’s happy. Economic value has been created.
But what if the movie was bad? How about if it was really, really bad? It’s hard for me to say if economic value was created, though GDP did go up as a result of that transaction. How about if you paid $10 for a movie, but when you went into the theater, it wasn’t a movie at all, just a blank screen for two hours? Isn’t that the same thing as a gal stealing your $10 bill? Or more interestingly, how’s the blank screen different from a bad movie? Or… how, in a very technical economic sense, is a blank screen purported to be a movie even different from a great movie that enhanced lives?
The difference is people’s well-being. I submit that economic value is created only if everyone involved in the transaction is satisfied with what they got out of it. Unfortunately, traditional economic metrics just measure the back-and-forth activity regardless of how much lives were enhanced. I.e., economics treats the blank screen and the good movie the same.
I’m not arguing for some type of goofy Bhutanesque gross national happiness index, and I’d rather see GDP go up instead of down. I’m arguing that as economies become less about feeding, clothing, and sheltering people, goods become more about improving people’s mental and emotional lives. For poor countries that are hustling to make more sheep, grain and horseshoes, GDP is a wonderful proxy for the well-being of a nation. But as rich countries’ economies become more about the exchange of ideas that make us feel better, the exact percentage of year-to-year changes in GDP aren’t nearly as important. We shouldn’t pretend it is.
Christmas just wouldn’t be complete without a last-minute visit to the post office. This afternoon was our day to send overnight packages to far away friends and family. It is a lovely day on the West Coast, with nary a cloud from San Diego to the Bay Area. Imagine our surprise when the postal clerk at the counter in Huntington Beach told us when sending a package to a son in San Francisco that “Due to the weather we are not guaranteeing overnight delivery. It will most likely be delivered Monday morning”.
Now I understand hubs and spokes and shipping centers, etc, but this is a simple package delivery 300 miles up the coast. You see the Post Office trucks and FedX trucks and UPS trucks going up and down the 5 all night long. It doesn’t matter how the package gets there as long as it gets there on time and 1-2 days is standard. Except, I guess, for the Post Office’s Overnight Mail. They’ll take your money for Overnight Delivery, of course, but no guarantees. I wonder what FedX and UPS would say?
And these are the people who want to take over our health care?
Suppose that some rogue state, such as North Korea, entered the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit and effectively shut it down due to its unwillingness to participate with the rest of the world in light of its own economic concerns … what would be the appropriate recourse from the global community?
I usually think that these non-participatory rogue states, whose actions have the potential to harm other peoples around the world, should be sanctioned.
But unfortunately this time it is not Iran or North Korea, etc., but it is us, and I cannot help but think that on a fair playing field we, America, might need a threat of sanctioning posed against us by the rest of the world.
“Grifter – A person who swindles by means of deception or fraud”
Pork barrel politics has a long and mixed history. Fighting for Federal dollars has long been a part of the process. But lately, it’s gotten completely out of hand. Senator Ben Nelson’s (D- Neb) decision to support one of the most flawed bills in our history in exchange for hundreds of millions in Medicaid support exclusively for the citizens of Nebraska, along with Senator Dodd’s $100 Million grift and Senator Mary Landrieu’s $100 Million price tag will in the end foist trillions of dollars in debt on every taxpayer in the country. These have to be the most expensive votes in the history of graft. Then there is $300 Million for California Medicaid payments, $10 Billion for the Unions in a reinsurance program, Vermont & Massachusetts’ payoffs for their underfunded state programs that haven’t worked out very well; a $7 Billion tax payoff for Blue Cross/Blue Shield and other “nonprofit” health insurers, the Big Pharma payoff, Bernie Sander’s (Socialist – VT) $10 Billion free clinic fund, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as Yul Brynner said in The King and I.
Nelson sold his lifelong anti-abortion stance down the river, while Dodd makes no bones about a simple grab because the grabbing was good. He would have voted for the bill regardless. Landrieu simply exhibited pure hypocrisy after posturing for months about the cost of the bill.
The latest version of the bill was released only 3 days ago and is 2,000 pages. The Congressional Budget Office graded it as revenue neutral, and yet there are so many gimmicks and gimcrackeries no one knows the real cost. How can the CBO have fully analyzed the bill in 3 days? As their previous scores were, even with the accounting tricks, clear about the hit on the federal budget, it seems now someone has told them to toe the party line.
None of the common sense cost solutions are in this bill. No limits on outrageous malpractice awards. No increased competitiveness. No efficiencies of scale or service. On the one hand it’s a money grab, and on the other it’s a power grab. Plain and simple.
By sleight of hand and in the middle of the night we are losing even more of our freedom and government will expand even further. And we will have unprincipled grifters like Nelson, Landrieu, and the rest to thank for it.
Imperial Overstretch: American hegemony and the historiography of empires in decline
The idea of imperial overstretch is not new to modern history. Perhaps the most famous of all texts in this vein is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which attributes the collapse of Rome to the outsource of its security forces and the accompanying decline of cohesive civic virtue among its citizenry.
Indeed, the fascination of with the decline of major empires, according to British historian Joel Mokyr, is a “slightly sadistic intellectual schadenfreude.”[1]
Aside from the sheer complexity of explaining the constant flux of global power dynamics, any discussion of this subject is made more challenging due to the problematic nature of what empire actually means. Historian Charles Maier struggled with the definition even as he attempted to explain their relative rise or decline in his work, Among Empires. Maier argued that the term was so polarizing, it led to an oversimplification of the varied experiences great powers could have on the world stage.[2]
The other major issue in any exploration of the historiography of imperial overstretch is the methodology various authors have employed to describe it. For many historians, a broad narrative incorporating many countries was appropriate. The problem with this approach is that these histories are open to criticism that they are too vague, and are subject to a kind of historical shorthand that misses the nuances of large dynamic shifts. This is not a new challenge to the study of international history, which naturally includes the interstate interactions inherent to the examination of all empires. The other approach is less comparative; this leads to a concentration on a particular country’s imperial experience, which then can run the risk of becoming myopic. Both methods can be useful, as this essay will demonstrate, in explaining the reasons behind imperial decline.
Imperial overstretch was popularized by Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which signified a successful attempt to explain the imperial experience of western powers since 1500. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, who Kennedy could claim as a predecessor, he saw an emergent bipolar world, dominated by Russia and the United States.[3] Both Kennedy and Tocqueville explain that this paradigm had its seeds in the 19th century, in the form of laying claim to vast continental territory with the potential for massive industrial capacity.
Kennedy, for his part, was astutely aware that the bipolar world of the post war era could only last so long. His analysis of earlier imperial experiences in the previous four centuries led him to conclude that “unusually rapid shifts in the centers of world production during the past two or three decades cannot avoid having repercussions upon the grand-strategical future of today’s leading Powers…” [4] The encapsulation of this argument is that economic hegemony, which precedes military and political dominance, can change quickly and unpredictably leading to shifts in the global balance of power.
As an aside from Kennedy’s detailed analysis of how international affairs led to the bipolar geopolitical situation of the mid 1980s when The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was published, Kennedy’s predictions of the inevitable decline of large political/territorial blocs, particularly the Soviet and American empire, due to ever increasing military expenditure, would become the legacy of his work.
Kennedy saw an increasingly fractured world, in which smaller political units would emerge within the vacuum of such a decline. This analysis rests on Kennedy’s observation of what he perceives as the seeds of a multi-polar global environment, which began with leaders such as Tito, Nasser, and Nehru, who symbolized the refusal to align themselves with either the U.S. or U.S.S.R. This, along with the Sino-Soviet split, demonstrated that the monolithic power arrangements that had been solidified in the years following World War II up into the 1980s would not remained fixed.
This assertion rests on Kennedy’s thesis that no state has ever had a long term monopoly on power, be it the Habsburg’s “bid for mastery” in the 17th century, the equilibrium of imperial powers after Napoleon in the 18th century, nor Victorian England in the 19th century. Essentially, his only consolation for the American audience of his work, being the inheritors of global hegemony, is that the Soviet Union appeared to be in much worse shape – which was validated by its collapse only two years after Rise and Fall’s publication.
A major opponent of this view was Walt Whitman Rostow, who argued against the inevitability of this change in power dynamics. Rostow, responding to Kennedy’s work at the time of its publication, (which was still before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the U.S. military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan) argued for a steadiness and continuity of American policy, rather than the classic expansiveness normally associated with empire that Kennedy alludes to. Paradoxically, Rostow wants to avoid an American geopolitical retraction, which he warns would mirror Britain’s alleged failure to maintain its own hegemony after World War II. This, of course, could translate as the continuance of exactly the type of imperial dominance that Kennedy is warning about. Rostow embeds this type of policy in the language of partnership (particularly with Europe) and balance of power rather than hegemony, avoiding the subtext of American dominance in such a relationship. [5]
This problem of maintaining a balance of power from an imperial perspective is elucidated well by Michael Doyle’s Empires, which defines this concept as a battle of relative weight. Essentially, Doyle defines an empire’s failure to grow as evidence of its decline.[6] He asserts that changes in the relative balance of power between large nations can be indicative of future geopolitical developments.
Doyle, like Maier, also found the definition of empire challenging, and produced his own explanation to describe it. He states that empire is “…a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another.”[7] Employing a comparative method of incorporating many different empires into his narrative, as Kennedy does, Doyle describes the relative dominance of the various hegemonic powers as dependent on the characteristics of the peripheral territory they are trying to control. Essentially, his explanation is that the relative strength of these territories determines the depth of multi-polar competition for these areas, as well as whether or not they would be subject to direct rule by an imperial power.[8]
Vaclav Smil has also elaborated on the unpredictability of international power dynamics, demonstrating the stark differences between the geoeconomic experiences of Russia and China in the last four decades. Smil points out that perceptions in the West as well as within Russia and China themselves, ran counter to projections of how economies would develop in the Communist world. In this case, Smil states that the rapid ascendancy of China was a surprise to policymakers.
Smil predicts that even though the U.S. may be aware of growing trends of imperial overstretch and changing geopolitical and macroeconomic dynamics, they may be powerless to shape these movements to their advantage. Smil states, “In the West, our wealth, the extent of our scientific knowledge, and major areas of our lives where we have successfully asserted our control over the environment mislead us into believing that we are (or ought to be) more in charge of history than we can ever be.”[9]
David Kaiser’s alludes to imperial overstretch in American Tragedy, which chronicles American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kaiser’s main point is that the decision to escalate in Vietnam was based on the conviction that the U.S. could support further projections of its hegemony abroad based on its past experience. Kaiser states, “The Vietnam War was the logical, but not essential consequence of the previous thirty years of American History.”[10] Kaiser appears to be in line with Kennedy in suggesting that America’s faith in its hegemony blinded it from the obvious risks of overstretching its power in an unwinnable war.
Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 by Patrick Karl O’Brien & Armand Clesse argue with Kennedy’s main assumption about the British Empire, stating that it was overstretched after World War I as opposed to before it. The main point of the O’Brien and Clesse text, however, is not to lament the waning of British hegemonic power, but to celebrate the ascendance of the United States. The text contains many comparisons of Britain at its heights to the U.S.; however, the authors argue that the U.S. is a far more dominant hegemony than Britain ever was.[11]
The obvious title worth mentioning in this discussion is Imperial Overstretch by Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell. This text matches Kennedy’s postulation that as an empire grows, its natural inclination is to expand its economic base to fund the military administration of the territory under its influence.[12] Burbach and Tarbell argue that decline begins when its economy can no longer meet the needs of its administrative costs. The authors’ criticism of the use of imperial power is particularly withering in the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which they contend are unsustainable and evidence the inevitable decline of American hegemony.
Hannes Adomeit has also written about this concept, as is apparent in his similarly titled work, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev. Adomeit’s principal thrust is that Soviet Russia became overstretched when it chose to occupy Eastern Germany, which he characterizes as unplanned, but followed the imperial logic of a need for peripheral territory as a buffer against rivals. Nevertheless, this resulted in grave political liabilities that eventually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system.[13] Adomeit’s most forceful analysis comes toward the end of his text, where he demonstrates that the U.S.S.R. under Gorbachev was unable to divorce itself from its responsibilities as a hegemonic power despite the understanding of a need for comprehensive reform.
Contrary to Kennedy, Niall Ferguson argues in The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000, that both Britain of the 19th century and the United States in the present time are experiencing imperial “understretch” as a result of their own uneven and discriminating style of engagement with the rest of the world.[14] Ferguson contends that this problem is derived from a lack of understanding in the U.S. that economic progress does not always lead to democratic reform. The author laments that the U.S. lacks the political will to see beyond its own democratic orthodoxy and use its economic power to generally improve the world financial system. Ferguson’s opinion is that the under-regulation of world financial markets acts as a hazard to international growth because of their contagion effect in financial panics, which has obvious echoes to the current global financial crisis.
Addressing Ferguson’s desire for the U.S. to take control of its destiny, the book Empires, Systems and States by Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and Ken Booth demonstrate that Western nations have little choice in altering the current geopolitical and macroeconomic policies at the current time. As Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver point out in the text, “The fall is likely because the leading states of the West are prisoners of the developmental paths that have made their fortunes, both political and economic. The paths are yielding decreasing returns…but they cannot be abandoned in favour of the more dynamic path without causing social strains so unbearable that they would result in chaos rather than ‘competitiveness.’”[15] The authors note that although the hegemony of the U.S. is of a magnitude never before seen in world history, the maintenance of such power has actually been undermined by the removal of the bipolar paradigm in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arrighi and Silver note that the conclusion of U.S. and Russian rivalries of the post war era has actually created a less stable geopolitical system, which is now more turbulent and uncertain.[16]
Other assessments of the potential U.S. imperial role during the last several decades are more critical. Historian Odd Arne Westad noted that the Cold War experience of the Third World, which contain some of the emergent economies of today, witnessed “…results of America’s interventions [which] are truly dismal. Instead of being a force for good-which they were no doubt intended to be-these incursions have devastated many societies and left them more vulnerable to further disasters of their own making.”[17] Westad goes on to argue that the U.S. was at least partially responsible for isolating non-aligned Third World countries, and attempting to suppress their political and social development.[18]
Other works also occupy the space of American hegemony within the historiography of the Cold War. The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present by Christopher Layne also deals with the U.S. hegemony, arguing that current U.S. foreign policy must be understood within its Wilsonian, liberal “open door” roots. Layne argues that this policy included not only suppressing the influence of the Soviet Union where it could, but also ensuring the preponderance of American influence. Because of this policy, Layne contends that the U.S. now faces the problem of political, economic, and military overstretch due to its history of restraining Third World powers that could have helped with regional stability in areas the U.S. must now expend resources to maintain.[19]
The current major issue in a discussion of American hegemony is the current global economic crisis. Both the twin fiscal and account deficits of the United States as well as the costs of its open ended military commitments abroad, have resemblances to other overstretched empires of the past. Nouriel Roubini, a well known economist and academic, recently commented that because over half of all US Treasury bonds were owned by non residents, America faced the real possibility of losing its hegemonic dominance to its competitors, who would use this situation to their advantage.[20]
The parallels between America and other collapsed empires have also been explored by political scientist Jack Snyder, who noted similarities between the recent U.S. preemptive military actions and those of the British, Japanese, and German empires of the past. Snyder notes, “…imperial rulers feared that unchecked defiance on the periphery might cascade toward the imperial core. Repeatedly they tried the strategy of preventive attack to nip challenges in the bud and prevent their spread.”[21]
It is now clear that the resultant U.S. triumphalist view in the wake of Soviet collapse drowned out voices like Kennedy’s, who argued that neither empire could shoulder the military and economic costs of maintaining their sphere of influence indefinitely. Thus, a new historiography will likely come into view that reflects the current shift in global power, in which the U.S. is just one of many actors in an emergent multi-polar world.
[1] Joel Mokyr, “Review: On the (Alleged) Failures of Victorian Britain,” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 89-95. In this article, Mokyr argues that it was the challenge of implementing technological innovation on a national scale, akin to Joseph Schumpter’s Creative Destruction that caused British decline during the Victorian era.
[2] Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 3, 106, 115.
[3] Alexis de Tocquville, Democracy in America (First published in 1835 – New York: Random House, 2004) “Of Discipline in Democratic Armies,” Vol. 2, Book 3, Chp. XXV, pp. 820.
[4] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 437.
[5] Walt Whitman Rostow, “Book Review Essay: Beware of Historians Bearing False Analogies,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 66 (Spring, 1988), pp. 863-68.
[6] Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 27.
[7] Ibid., pp. 45.
[8] Ibid., pp. 130. Doyle’s description of the nature of imperial domination of peripheral states is situated within a larger discussion of three conditions the author states are necessary for the maintenance of empire. They are: A highly integrated central metropole, a periphery that is fractured enough not to provide any reasonable competition, and a common interest (religious, military, political) that can integrate the periphery with the metropole.
[9] Vaclav Smil, “The Next 50 Years: Unfolding Trends,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 605-643.
[10] David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Boston: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 9. See also Kaiser’s blog, “History Unfolding” for further discussions on American empire. http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2008/04/britain-united-states-and-middle-east.html (accessed December 13, 2009)
[11] Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 (Surrey: Ashgate & Aldershot, 2002). See also Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 15, 138, 242.
[12] Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell, Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire (Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2004).
[13] Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev An Analysis Based on New Archival Evidence, Memoirs, and Interviews (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998).
[14] Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
[15] Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and Ken Booth, Empires, Systems and States: Great Transformations in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 278.
[16] Ibid., pp. 240, 293.
[17] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 404.
[18] Ibid., pp. 394. Westad argues that this is particularly true within the context of U.S. interactions with Africa.
[19] Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
[20] Noriel Roubini, “The Decline of the American Empire,” Roubini Global Economics, August 13, 2008. http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/253323/the_decline_of_the_american_empire (accessed December 13, 2009). See also Macro Market Musings, “The End of American Hegemony?” August 17, 2008. http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-american-hegemony.html (accessed December 13, 2009).
[21] Jack Snyder, “Imperial Temptations,” The National Interest, (Spring, 2003), pp. 29-30.
In a move that was best described by Norm at TQ (a “rude gesture”), Tim Kaine is proposing to balance the budget with an income tax increase (Washington Post). Virginia Republicans, led by Governor-elect McDonnell (WaPo) are already busy tearing it apart, but one thing that has been lost is the damage an income tax does to incentives to work and invest. Especially in Virginia, which has a heavy technology sector, a tax that slwos down work and investment is a double-whammy.
One interesting factoid about this sent me into other directions (Richmond Times-Dispatch):
Virginia’s income tax, currently 5.75 percent, has not been raised since 1972.
Two things jumped out at me. First, that Kaine basically got this idea from the last Governor who did it – his father-in-law, Linwood Holton.
Secondly, Holton just happens to be the first Republican elected Governor in the history of Virginia (a Readjuster was elected in 1881 and called himself a Republican in 1884). In my travels as a candidate for office, I found legions of older Spotsylvanians who opposed tax increases and runaway spending – and supported me – while still calling themselves Democrats. Now I know why.
New podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse discussing marriage and family. You can skip through the first 5 minutes because it’s just introductory. This is a great interview – highly recommended! There is a fair amount of Catholic stuff in the interview, so be forewarned. The interviewer just goes through some of her essays and asks her about them.
When I hear a woman who has this much of an understanding about what marriage is about and what forces are arrayed against marriage, it just makes me want to run out and get married, because she makes it sound so interesting that I want to try it out and see if everything she says is really true. She has such a good understanding of who her opponents are and what they think and what they are trying to accomplish. A very serious woman.
The MP3 file is here. (54 minutes)
Topics:
Why are socialists so hostile to the natural family? (essay)
socialists oppose monogamy
socialists view marriage as a structure that oppressive because of gender roles
socialists favor “group marriage”
socialists believe that children should be raised by the collective, not by parents
socialists intend to achieve this by imposing their vision through government power
How does the welfare state discourage people from having children? (essay)
high taxes make having more children unaffordable
state regulation of marriage and parenting opens door to risk of legal trouble
welfare payments to individuals means that relationships can be exited easily
e.g. – women can divorce and substitute welfare for a husband/father
What is the sandwich generation? (essay)
boomers complained about having to take care of children and elderly parents
with the normal timing for having children, this doesn’t happen
but if child-bearing is delayed, then this problem occurs
also, there are fewer siblings available to help with aging parents
this opens up the need for government to take over care for dependents
women are encouraged to focus on education and career during fertile years
What is the effect of welfare states mandating high minimum wages? (essay)
minimum wage laws increase unemployment rates
if you require employers to pay high wages, then employers offer fewer jobs
young people are just not productive enough to get those jobs
so young people stay in school more and delay adulthood and child-bearing
welfare states also make it hard to fire people, causing more unemployment
when government raises minimum wages and benefits, it hurts young people
when young people finally get a job, they are already in their 30s
How do Catholics respond to the socialist emphasis on equality? (essay)
making everyone equal requires the abolition of differences between people
for example, feminists try to make men have the same careers as men
but this requires women to diminish the fact that they want children
Catholics don’t want to make everyone equal, but to defend the weak
Christianity supports private property (thou shalt not steal)
Christianity supports the family as being ordained by God
Rerum Novarum says that inequality and imperfection in society is OK
Who is excluded from socialism’s drive for equality? (essay)
children are excluded from equality because they are dependent
children impose obligations on people to take care of them
Sherriaz writes: Let’s look inside this jobless situation a little more, shall we?
Wal Mart, the largest retailer in the WORLD, now has a HIRING FREEZE in place. As people leave, they are NOT being rehired. The company also made the stores lay off their temps, most this week and the rest next week. Many cried as they were told the news, since this had been their first job in quite some time.
Many people working at Wal Mart have been managers in other industries, laid off from high paying jobs. These folks were making $45-50K and up and are now lucky if they are making $10-13 per hour. (Obviously, they are thankful to have jobs but their standard of living has been dramatically altered and many may still end up losing their homes. The banks, meanwhile, continue to do NOTHING, to help most Americans in these situations and have no problem with foreclosing and selling the properties at a loss- thanks to the taxpayer bailouts that fattened their bottom lines).
Now, if a company as successful as Wal Mart, who has continued to make money throughout this recession, is spooked enough to lay off people and stop hiring, what does that say about the REAL state of this economy?
There is NO WAY that we are even close to getting out of this recession, despite what banks and the stock market are reporting. I firmly believe that there is a lot of manipulation going on and that the market will tumble again. Jobs lagging by 4-5 YEARS is not acceptable and certainly doesn’t mean the end of a recession. BHO and the Dems are flooding the news outlets with garbage trying to prop up their efforts, which are dismal failures.
Just ask anyone who has been out of work for a year.
Editor’s note: Giving a comment its own page is a first for Seeing Red AZ, but in light of the current severe economic conditions, this one merits extra attention.
WASHINGTON — On the 17th day of Senate debate on health legislation, it came down to this: A rock-ribbed conservative physician from Oklahoma squared off against a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont who was hoping for a full-throated debate on his proposal to establish a system of “Medicare for all growing cactus.” The Oklahoman, Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican, had propounded a unanimous-consent request, stipulating that no amendment could be offered unless it had been publicly available for 72 hours, with an estimate of its costs.
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senate Republican leader, said Democrats were in a “blind rush.”
A blog from The New York Times that tracks the health care debate as it unfolds.
More Health Care Overhaul News Health Care Conversations
Share your thoughts about the health care debate.
Top Discussions: The Public Option | Medicare and the Elderly | A Single-Payer System
Living Story Health Care Reform
Recent developments on the struggle over health care with background, analysis, timelines and earlier events from NYTimes.com and Google.
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, objected.
Minutes later, Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, called up his amendment. “For the first time in American history,” Mr. Sanders said, “the Senate will debate a proposal to create a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system.”
Not so fast.
Mr. Coburn objected to Mr. Sanders’s request to dispense with the reading of the 767-page amendment.
So a relay team of Senate clerks b Hot News: Economic Scene: If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow
What’s a few Trillion Dollars between friends? It’s Christmas!
The Fed kept base rates at 0.25% (of course) but people were more interested in the rhetoric. Bloomberg headline states “Fed Keeps ‘Extended Period’ Pledge, Sees Improvement”, which begs the question. If they see improvement in the economy, why are they pledging to keep monetary policy extremely accommodative for an extended period?
Poor old Chris Martenson, he’s been rolling around in agony at the state of our government debt problem and our seemingly unstoppable deficits. His last piece he shows a nice picture of how the public debt picture has been evolving over the course of a month. Say the last month, November.
Source: ChrisMartenson.com
Hmmm… does that look like a deficit “in control” to you? That’s just one month… oh and by the way, those large numbers are called “Trillions”!
I quote (emphasis mine):
The bottom line is that a crisis rooted in debt cannot be solved with more debt. Jim Rogers put it very well recently when he said, “Papering over the problem is not going to solve America’s problem. The idea you can solve a problem of too much debt and too much consumption with more consumption and more debt defies belief. I cannot believe that grownups would stand there and say that.”
It will be an interesting election cycle, and I am mindful of the idea that there could be some significant upsets at the polls if the current leadership does not appreciate the extent to which we “get it” and wish to see our nation put back on a safe and sound path towards sustainable and true prosperity.
So I will keep a close eye on how the debt-ceiling debates and outcome are managed. If it turns out to be yet another “in the dark of night” act that gets passed by an embarrassed group of legislators at a moment designed to shield it from public view, then I will take that into consideration when casting my vote.
Don’t worry Chris, as Reuters report today; The House agreed to raise the debt limit to only 12.4 Trillion Dollars. Phffaa!! That’s pittance, pocket change, a drop in the ocean. What are you, Scrooge? Let the filth have their boondoggles and pork-barrels. Heck, why not make it a cool $13 Trillion while we’re at it? Keep your trap shut, Humbug, it’s Christmas, we’ll think about funding it next year – or perhaps even next generation.
While we’re on Chris Martenson (I actually really like his work – I’m of course joking about him being a Scrooge), I found his little hairdresser story embedded in “adjustable rate nation” quite sweet:
In early 2004, I was warning people as loudly as I could about a future housing crisis. No, I am neither an economist nor an all-knowing seer of the future. I am simply able to spot when something does not make sense and trust that things have a way of working themselves out over time.
It did not make sense to me that a hair stylist in Las Vegas should be able to amass a portfolio of 19 homes that were all being rented for less than their mortgage payments, if they were even being rented at all (this is a true anecdote).
Why was this an obviously broken story that had to end in tears? Because it simply did not make any economic sense. It even defied common sense. After all, if it were possible for everyone to get rich through the miracle of rising asset prices with no value creation, then clever people in the Roman Empire would have figured it out 1500 years ago, and your native tongue would be Latin.
The economic mistake for the hairstylist was in overlooking the fact that cash flows in have to exceed cash flows out, or eventually bankruptcy results. Clearly, things are a bit different for a government with a printing press over the short haul, but over the long haul, the story is the same. It’s not possible to continually live beyond one’s means forever.
If you’d like an optical perception on how our economy looks from the point of view of adjustable rate mortgages, you might just want to glance at this graph, courtesy of Agora Financial.
Source: AgoraFinancial.com
Hmmm… we’d better have some serious growth and inflation back in the economy by mid 2010 otherwise this consumer strike ain’t going away.
Macro Data to Watch:
Hong Kong Jobs Numbers
Swedish Jobs Numbers
US Jobs Numbers
Markets
You have to feel for passengers of BA, some of the poor blighters will not get back for Christmas, meanwhile on the other side of the World the two US juggernauts American Airlines and Delta fight over potential ownership of Japan Airlines. The five year stock price of JAL tells a story, not a very good on at that (see below).
Source: Bloomberg
Japanese Bank stocks went to the moon yesterday: SMFG up 14% and Mizuho up 16%! On news that they won’t have to reach new capital requirements for another 10 years… aahhh, phew… that’s given a bit of breathing space. No wonder the stock price spiked.
Deutsche Bank set itself an ambitious target for earnings for 2011 and the stock spiked 5.5%. Perhaps we should all do that?
Global Stocks to Watch:
Everything I said above – so financials and airlines;
When you choose a career, two of the biggest factors to consider are your benefits and your salary.
If you’re the kind of person looking to make $500 million a year (a la Michael Milken), stay in the private sector. But for the rest of us, becoming a government employee seems like a more lucrative option.
According to the BLS, total employer compensation costs for civilian workers, which include private industry and state and local government workers, averaged $29.40 per hour worked in September 2009.
Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $27.49 per hour worked in September 2009.
State and local government employers spent an average of $39.83 per hour worked for total employee compensation in September 2009.
But the killer part lies in the benefits. Health benefit employer costs were $4.43 per hour worked for state and local government and $2.01 in private industry. Ouch!
The Greek economy is in serious trouble. Its travails have been recounted in the financial press and the popular press alike. The BBC has reported popular discontent in Greeks fear times will get tougher. Greek debt is frightening investors, and last week this had the consequence of what the Financial Times called a “spectactular collapse” of the Greek bond market.
The Euro has remained stable, despite these developments, as though blissfully unconcerned (or unaware) of events in the Balkans. But Europe ignores the Balkans at its risk, as history has shown. I find it rather problematic that membership in the Eurozone confers so few benefits in the time of crisis.
Many are the advantages of being a member of the Eurozone; some nation-states are obligated to join as soon as they can meet the entry requirements; other nation-states are clamoring to join at their earliest opportunity. With membership in the Eurozone a nation-state acquires access to one of the world’s great markets with a uniform currency and a uniform code of commercial standards to facilitate trade. This is a powerful position for any nation-state that can gain acceptance.
But is the Eurozone to be a fair-weather friend? If a member state can no longer meet the standards of the Eurozone is it to be unceremoniously ejected from the union and cast aside as though this profitable association, once unprofitable, means nothing? Many Eurozone economies already run budget deficits far in excess of the three percent that is supposed to the limit for member states. Thus, while entry to the club is highly restrictive, no immediate action is taken to eject those states that fail to comply with its requirements. In this sense, the Eurozone is seen to be rather too lenient to its member states.
But leniency in economic discipline can definitely go too far, and especially if that leniency allows sufficient latitude for the Greek economy to “implode” as suggested in the Financial Times. I am no student of the Eurozone, so I don’t know if there are formal mechanisms for putting to right the sort of problems that are appearing in Greece, but if there are no such mechanisms, there ought to be.
Greece, for the moment, shows the problems of the Eurozone in their starkest form, but these problems are not limited to Greece, and if they are not stopped in Greece they will threaten to spill over into the next least stable economies. If the European Central Bank does not step in and take decisive action in a matter so central to the interests of the European economy, it will only add to the image of European dithering.
The Greek bond market has come under great pressure; the bond markets of Ireland, Spain, and Portugal are also under pressure. While I would not expect a chain reaction collapse of bond markets like the chain reaction of currency collapses in Asia during the Asian currency crisis of 1997, similar forces in the investment world are in play. The economies of Europe are far more robust than those of Thailand and other Asian Tigers whose currencies were systematically shorted by speculators. Nevertheless, while there is not going to be spectacular collapse of the entire asset class of Eurozone bonds, if decisive action is not taken, this asset class certainly will suffer.
Failure to take such decisive action could be interpreted as unwillingness upon the part of Eurozone members to come to the aid of one of their own. It is ironic at this point in history, when the Europeans have made such a point over the past few years of emphasizing the virtues of collective security, that there should be so little interest in collective financial security. Collective action on behalf of the Greek economy would be in the interests of the entire European economy; implosion of the Greek economy will prove that a Eurozone economy can collapse and no one will come to the rescue.
Classes are over, finals are finished, papers are complete… and I’m finally on winter break! For the next three and a half weeks I am off. This will give me plenty of time to reflect on the Q1 and make the necessary adjustments to be more successful in Q2.
Favorite class: Managerial Economics with Professor Campbell.
Least favorite class: Data Analysis.
Overall, this quarter was amazing. I met a lot of great individuals and I really stretched myself by taking subjects in which I had no prior knowledge. Accounting was tough, but I survived. I hear Cost Accounting next quarter is even harder, so that should be fun. My professional speaking class really improved my public speaking skills and I feel much more comfortable speaking in front of large audiences.
I’ll reflect more on Q1 a little later. Now it is time to relax. I should also have plenty of time to blog over the next three weeks… although I won’t have anything to blog about. Stay tuned, I’m sure something will come to mind.
-Joseph
This post was republished from Joseph Fahrendorf’s Fisher College of Business blog.
It is an apt title for the news coming out of Scandinavia this week. On Monday, after much ado, the UN Climate Change Conference finally got under way in Copenhagen as an early blizzard prepared to sweep through most of the United States in what has already been dubbed the “December to remember.” The subsequent cold wave that dropped local temperatures below zero got a lot of people asking “What global warming?” Of course, the politically correct terminology has learned to sidestep paradoxical weather patterns by further obscuring the alleged crisis under the alias of “climate change.” With reports that earth’s temperature has stabilized and last month’s controversial revelations from East Anglia University, the United Nations conference comes at a time of heightened scrutiny and skepticism.
For some time, my parents have been encouraging me to watch Ben Stein’s Expelled. So, last night, I sat down with them to see it. While the movie hoists the banner of Intelligent Design, its thesis that true scientific progress can only be accomplished through the unfiltered analysis of data applies equally across all fields of study, including climate change. Once a hypothesis is taken for granted, adopted by politicians, and promoted in the media – once a movement is created – proposing an alternate interpretation of the facts becomes risky business with serious consequences that have nothing to do with science. Even the Speaker of Denmark’s own Parliament, Thor Pedersen, recently remarked on the danger of mistaking theory for truth.
For my part, and for what it’s worth, despite a personal interest in climate studies, I don’t think that climate change – or lack thereof – should be what motivates public policy. Without denying the observable trends (for example, see the “NSIDC” link in the blog sidebar), there are simply too many unknowns to conclusively interpret existing data on such a broad scope. Greenhouse gases may or may not be significantly contributing to those trends, but whether they are or not shouldn’t keep us from rethinking the degree to which we are comfortable with polluting the planet. The number of detrimental effects that have already been proven should be enough to point us in that direction without having to push an agenda that is based on doubtful theories about how much humans are effecting climate change.
I speak in degrees because pollution is inevitable. The ramifications of a citizen, corporation, or country attempting to reduce its so-called “carbon footprint” reach quickly down from global ecosystems into respective societies and economies. Restrictions on emissions should not, therefore, be mandated from the top down – as the UN appears to be proposing – but grown predominantly from the bottom up, as exemplified by the Pickens Plan. This approach engages the general public, considers the needs of individual communities at local, provincial, and national levels, and solves a broader scope of problems than can be accomplished by a narrow focus on the inscrutable phenomenon of climate change. Though perhaps for reasons different than his own, I think President Bush was right for not committing us to the Kyoto Protocol, but rather making room for voluntary participation by local governments.
In other news, we head north from Copenhagen to Oslo, where President Obama arrived on Thursday to accept his controversial Nobel Peace Prize. Many – including the president himself – were surprised by the announcement that came in October. While living in Norway, however, I witnessed first-hand the admiration Norwegians had for the senator while he was still on the campaign trail. The induction of his new administration followed several years in which Norway had felt increasingly ignored by the United States. As inappropriate as the setting may be, given Norway’s relatively few means of international influence, the prize appears to be Oslo’s invitation to Obama for renewed relations. So far, he is off to a wobbly start: while several of my Facebook friends were clearly excited just to welcome the president, headlines told a different story of many who were hoping for a bit more gratitude. Honestly, it’s hard not to take a little offense myself.
On the same day Obama arrived in Oslo, reports started coming in from the city of Tromsø that a strange blue light had appeared in the sky. Norwegians who live that far north would certainly recognize the northern lights when they saw them. But what was this? Was it a meteor, a UFO, a celestial omen signifying the arrival of Obama as the new savior? It turns out, Russia had it’s own plan to welcome the Peace Prize laureate: by test-firing an intercontinental ballistic missle. The photos and videos (bottom) on this page capture the frighteningly beautiful display Norwegians woke up to just before the dark hour of eight o’ clock.
I’ve just unveiled my first zero energy house — Zero Energy One — at Earthbag House Plans.
Zero Energy One Earthbag House
Unlike most zero energy houses that cost a small fortune (around $250,000), Zero Energy One earthbag house can be built for about $10/sq. ft. exclusive of the energy systems. This design minimizes net energy use, embodied energy in building materials, labor and cost. No other design that I am aware of accomplishes all these things. Complete plans are available through Dream Green Homes.
Guiding zero-energy housing strategies:
1. Build small
2. Efficient use of space
3. Low-embodied energy building materials (primarily locally available, natural materials)
4. Superinsulation
5. Balance of mass and insulation
6. Multiple use features (serve more than one purpose)
7. Lifestyle change of inhabitants
8. Maximum solar design
9. Appropriate technology
10. Energy-efficient appliances and fixtures
11. Energy and resource-efficient shape
12. Safe and healthy design
Finally, the admin has addressed the need for jobvs on Main Street, they have already made Wall Street more profitable and now they want us normal people to go back to work….a helluva idea…..it is about time……he is in a hurry noiw because the Dems are losing support and will most likely lose one House of Congress in the next election…..but what does he propose…..
Obama is proposing initiatives to help small businesses grow and hire new staff, spend money to modernize roads, railways, bridges and tunnels, airports and seaports and a new program to provide rebates for consumers who retrofit their homes to become more energy efficient, such as weatherization measures, a White House official said. The official didn’t release further details.
How does that sound to you lowly workers? Time magazine composed a list for the admin to consider:
Target an Industry and Stimulate Demand
Pay Companies to Hire People
Hire More People to Work for the Government
Boost Access to Credit for Growing Businesses
This is a lame attempt, in my opinion…….pay companies to hire people? What will that accomplish if unemployment is still high there will be NO demand for the product and with an increase in inventories….lay-offs will follow…..I am still working on this one…..what good is a rebate to weatherize one’s home if one has NO job to afford the materials to weatherize?
And then there are the ideas that the Repubs have onb fixing the job market……Cut regulations. Freeze spending. Cut taxes. No new taxes…..gee the same crap that they propose for every situation that needs a fix….don’t you just love the originality?…..
Let’s pause, for a second, to appreciate the brilliant rhetorical framing. A no-cost jobs plan! Without adding a single dime to the deficit, the Republican’s plan will ameliorate the worst unemployment crisis in 30 years. One wonders how a political party capable of such innovative thinking ever lost its hold of power. (thanx to Andrew Leonard for the observation)
And the Repubs just keep saying that the Obama technique has failed and failed miserably….but the CBO does not agree with that assessment……that it had added 1.2-3.2 points of GDP growth that would otherwise have not occurred and added 600,000 to 1.6 million jobs……So without the stimulus, judging from the CBO report, one can assume that the economy would still be contracting, and unemployment would be higher than it is now.
I will agree that it is jobs, stupid…..but things are not looking like these will be a long term sustaining answer to the problem…..neither party is doing what is needed to put Americans back to work….
Harold Meyerson – Obama’s pitch for a second stimulus could be his FDR moment – washingtonpost.com
tags: Economics
In putting forth a second stimulus, the administration is acknowledging the limits (while not disputing the necessity) of the top-down economic revival strategy that Congress and the Bush administration adopted by enacting TARP — chiefly, a program to aid major banks — last fall. The Obama White House has made the same discovery that Franklin Roosevelt’s White House made 75 years ago: that propping up banks is not sufficient to get the economy moving again so long as banks look at a deeply beleaguered economy and see nothing but a sea of risk. By adamantly refusing to lend to small businesses, banks — for that matter, capitalism itself — compel the government to create the economic conditions that would entice them to begin lending again. So the government becomes the de facto banker to a small-business sector abandoned by private-sector banks, even though those banks have received massive public assistance. A more frontal challenge to conservative ideology, and a more difficult one for conservatives to oppose, is hard to imagine.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
In July 2007, the U.S. economy looked fairly healthy. There had not been a recession in more than five years, and the unemployment rate was under five percent. Housing prices had been rising at an unsustainably rapid rate, but this was generally seen as a containable problem. Then, almost out of the blue, came what will probably turn out to be the longest and deepest U.S. recession since the Great Depression…….
Megan McArdle talks with Russ Roberts. A few points
I disagree with many of Russ’s substantive points but the one we are in complete harmony about is that Social Security and Medicare are not liabilities. They are promises and they are promises that will be broken.
These promises are little different from me telling my wife that one day I will take her on a three month long cruise in the South Pacific. Its an enormous future expense. We could try to budget for it, but this would just be engaging in an extended fantasy. There is really very little chance that this is going to happen.
Indeed with Medicare I think its important to point out that most of the things we have promised to buy future generations do not even exist yet. We are projecting that sometime in the future some new way to spend money will be created and then we are promising that we will buy it.
On the other hand, I don’t see the current debates as simply proxies for “whether we become more or less like France.” I don’t see any serious push for greater government ownership over major industries. I don’t see a push for radical new labor laws. The support for union backed card check regulations is weak.
The size of government is expanding but this is primarily driven by rising health care costs and shrinking health care coverage. There is a massive debate over the externalities associated with carbon emissions. These, however, are specific issues that carry a lot of import themselves.
On New Keynesianism in general. Russ acknowledges that people are holding more cash. He said he “didn’t doubt” Posner’s contention that the purchases of personal safes had skyrocketed. McArdle herself, is detailing a cash holding strategy that is increasingly popular. Yet, he seems to doubt that the conduit between savings and investment has broken down.
If the extra cash is not forgone consumption and investment, then what is it?
This advertisement represents the Chinese Government’s new campaign to reshape the image of their exports. Among other merchandise, it featuring clothing with tags that read, “Made in China with French designers.” The initiative’s headline slogan is “Made in China, Made with the world.”
Chinese products have received a great deal of criticism, although as Louisiana family found out, living without “Made in China” remains quite difficult.
DDB Gouan, a Beijing media company, created the ad last year. China’s recent milk scandle, which resulted in two executions, delayed its debut until two weeks ago. Thus far, Chinese audiences have expressed positive support for the campaign, and foreign markets are currently screening the advertisement.
Americans have gone collectively insane. Like sheep being led to the slaughter, no one could imagine the terror that is about to be visited on millions of unsuspecting innocents. The health care bill is an instrument of selective death. Seniors will be prematurely sacrificed so that millions of poor Americans (many of them illegal immigrants) can get mediocre government care.
So begins the John Griffing article in American Thinker. Do yourself a favor and read it. Knowledge is power.
Company insiders, including top management and promoters, have sold shares in their firms worth about Rs.14,950 crore in the past three months.
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This was most perhaps done to cash in on the steep rise in prices during the recent rally and signaling that the market may be fully valued.
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“Insiders are cashing out some part of their shares.
That shows the market is no longer undervalued,” says Jagannadham Thunuguntla, head of research at SMC Capital Ltd.
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Since the Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark hit a low of 8,160 points on 9 March earlier this year,
the 30-stock Sensex, India’s most widely tracked index, has risen 103.81%
as foreign investors injected $15.42 billion (Rs 72,165 crore) into the markets, enticed by the prospect of economic growth.
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While major Western economies are barely emerging from a deep recession,
India’s economic output is expected to expand at least 6%, according to estimates by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), making it the second fastest growing major economy.
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Insider sales include those by promoters, top management such as chief executive officers and chief financial officers, as well as sales of treasury stock.
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While insider trades are reported to the stock exchanges, only the number of shares is disclosed.
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Often, such sales take place over a period of time.
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SMC Capital has played a role in the compilation of the data.
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Insider transactions also include share purchases.
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On an overall basis, company insiders bought shares worth around Rs 5,194 crore during the same period, or around one-third of the Rs 14,950 crore of shares sold.
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A large part of these have happened in the last six months because people are still sceptical about the sustainability of the recovery.
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“No one has any conviction on how long this bull market will last,” said SMC’s Thunuguntla.
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Indeed, with the pace of economic recovery in the West still under question, a potential debt default by Dubai government-promoted entities rocked global markets last week,
sending the Sensex down 3.3% in just two days of trading.
“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, they tell us. And we know how the Feds love our tax dollars. They love spending so much that they spend a LOT more than they make. It’s a shame they don’t have debtors’ prisons anymore or we could simply lock up the government and be free from their misfeasance.
Still, one may be astonished to discover the ‘certain’ thing used to only be death. Before the First World War there was no income taxes (except for a few “special” times like the Civil War – but Lincoln was good for that sort of thing) to feel ‘certain’ about. The tax was supposed to help finance the war… but you know how the government is: once they feed on a funding source, they require more and more. It is like they have a growth disorder… or an addictive habit with a docile supplier.
And being permitted to spend like some compulsive consumer in a snake oil paradise, they can drive us further and further into debt.
The “oversight” committees, who are supposed to make sure there is no government waste, have been “out to lunch” for the last four score and seven years.
You wonder how the government could have survived for its first 120 years without income tax. Very simple: they did not throw money around like a drunken sailor in a whore house. But as the robber barons got more and more of a hold on the federal purse strings, the trough has gotten deep and wide. (Remember: they are called robber barons, not robin hood barons.)
The best thing for the country financially, other than a complete reconstitution of the government, would be a flat tax (NO deductions – everyone pays exactly the same percentage). The result would be that the middle class would have LOWER taxes.
Let me show you what I mean.
Years ago, when Rockefeller had the confirmation hearing for vice-presidential appointment, people were amazed that he paid over two million dollars in taxes. Many reporters said that it proved the rich DO pay their fair share… God! You just gotta love the media for spreading their wild insinuations! Admittedly, two million dollars is far more than most of us could pay, but I looked at the percentage of income his taxes equaled. His income for the year was over two hundred million, so he paid just under 1% in taxes!! That year my taxes amounted to 28%. Imagine how little I would have paid if HIS percentage had been raised. Hell! One tenth of one percent more for Nelson would have been ten times what my taxes were.
The Federal trough would be even fuller if the wealthy were taxed on a flat rate basis, but that is never going to happen. At least not while the rich are in control. Who do you think has their snout pressed deepest in the public trough?
What is a fiscal conservative? Ask several people and you may get different answers, but for the purposes of this post I will define one as someone who: (1) supports low taxes and tax cuts; (2) supports “pro–business” government policies; and (3) supports deregulation and a reduction in red tape. It is a complete fantasy to think that those three things are always the correct course of action. However, since most Republicans support those economic policies, I will grant for the sake of argument that they are the way to go.
Opposition to same–sex marriage goes directly against fiscally conservative principles. Here’s why:
Same–sex marriage is good for the economy. In New York, legalization would bring in $210 million dollars for the state’s economy (cite). Marriage equality in Iowa will boost its wedding and tourism industries by at least $160 million in the first three years (cite). In Vermont, 700 jobs will be created and the tourism and wedding industries will be boosted by at least $30 million dollars. These economic effects will be happening in the middle of a recession, when the economy needs boosting. There is no way to be pro–business and while at the same time being pro–marriage inequality.
The costs of being a same–sex couple are really high. Using a hypothetical “average” lesbian couple, an analysis estimated that the lifetime cost of being an unrecognized same–sex couple range from $41,196 to $467,562 (cite). By having their marriage recognized, the couple could save all this money. Wouldn’t allowing them to save that much money be the economic equivalent of giving them a tax cut? And if tax cuts always stimulate the economy, then legalizing same–sex marriage will stimulate the economy. One cannot coherently believe that tax cuts stimulate the economy while at the same time refusing to give one to same–sex couples. In addition, by not having to search for workarounds to get some of the rights different–sex couples, it will decrease the amount of red tape.
There is one possible objection to my second point. The objection argues that LGBT people are really a tiny, over–affluent minority who don’t “need” tax cut. Unfortunately for this objection, the idea of “gay affluence” is a myth (cite, cite). And even if it is, this objection fails. Remember trickle–down economics. If a tax cut for rich different–sex couples or rich single persons causes beneficial impacts due to trickle–down effects, the exact same thing would happen with same sec couples.
For these reasons, fiscal conservatives should support marriage equality. Opposition to it is deeply compromised and goes against their core principles.
Tom Hayden, an icon of the Left and Jane Fonda’s former husband, wrote today in The Nation that he utterly disillusioned with the president’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. He has announced to the world that he is immediately and forthwith removing the bumper sticker he put on his car during the election. It’s sort of like the Pope saying that sin is bad, I guess. After all, Hayden made his reputation as one of the most prominent leaders of the antiwar movement in the 60’s. I guess bumper sticker removal substitutes for marches on Washington under the new rules. It echoes the U.N.’s declaration during the Bosnia crisis that they would just have to pass a stronger resolution if the Serbians didn’t stop their predations. Is it just me, or is the world going mad?
The President has been condemned on all sides for his vacillation and for his logically inconsistent Afghan decision. The growing Climategate scandal is being swept under the rug by our government. The Health Care bill is a complete mess. The Cap & Trade Bill will do nothing to address CO2 emissions. Our government is more interested in protecting the rights of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Maj. Nidal Hasan than they are with combatting terrorism. Congress seems to find one more reason to spend every day it is in session. A number of states are on the verge of bankruptcy and unemployment is at 17+%. We got problems right here in River City and our leadership is fiddling away. All of this sounds like the evil Bearded Spock Universe anyway you look at it.
Look at any of the polls now. A growing majority of the people of the United States feel the country is on the wrong track. And yet, when Joe the Plumber or your Aunt Mary the bookkeeper peacefully protest the policies of the government, supposedly moderate people like EJ Dionne decry the lack of civility as his colleagues far and wide call them teabaggers. For the record, teabagging is a term referring to an explicit sexual act which originated in the gay community. It can be considered obscene under any standard you wish to choose, and yet it is in common use on the Left these days. Chris Matthews referred to West Point last night as “the enemy camp” when reporting on Obama’s choice of venue. And is the right being impolite?
There is a growing derangement and shrillness on the Left. So much of what we are seeing just doesn’t make sense and yet the locomotive is accelerating towards the cliff. Even after being rocked on our heels by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we are seeing a complete lack of logic and common sense. We are by no means out of the woods yet, and the conduct of our leadership seems increasingly schizophrenic.
Yep, evil Bearded Spock Universe. But this time, it’s not on TV.
The Centre’’s fiscal deficit more than doubled to Rs 2.45 lakh crore in the first 7 months of 2009-10.
With this, fiscal deficit during April-October, 2009 reached over 61% of the targeted level of over Rs 4 lakh crore for the current fiscal.
However, the government projected fiscal deficit of 6.8% of GDP for the current fiscal while with GDP likely to increase with a high growth rate of 7.9% recorded in Q2, there is more room to contain the fiscal deficit within the targeted level.
Meanwhile, the fiscal deficit already crossed over 87% of the targeted amount for entire 2008-09 as the government was expecting fiscal deficit of just 2.5% of GDP at this point of time last time.
Notably, Fiscal Deficit is a economic phenomena when a government’s total expenditures exceed the revenue that it generates (excluding money from borrowings).
Deficit differs from debt, which is an accumulation of yearly deficits.
Moreover, when excise duty was cut by 6% and service tax by 2% from December onwards and plan expenditure rose as part of stimulus package, the government revised its target to 6% of GDP, which later turned out to be 6.2%.
The rise in fiscal deficit could be gauged from the fact that tax revenues decreased by around 8% to 2.13 lakh crore till October this fiscal against Rs 2.32 lakh crore a year ago.
The Centre’s revenue deficit, which is a gap between revenue receipts over revenue expenditure like salaries, rose by 138 per cent to stand at Rs 20.76 lakh crore during April-October, 2009.
In my previous blog Remixing Lawrence Lessig’s REMIX, I used a rhetorical question Lawrence Lessig asked in his book REMIX: MAKING ART AND COMMERCE THRIVE IN THE HYBRID ECONOMY to reflect on what made big government distrusting conservatives think the government was capable of running a foreign country/society?
Of course that was not Lessig’s purpose in asking the question. He was simply pointing out that faulty thinking in believing the government can use power and then more power to create or control a democracy. That same faulty thinking is being used to try to control ‘digital piracy’ in the Internet age. Lessig favors a policy of less control on copying material and concentrating law more on how copy is used as the way to insure artists get paid for their work while simultaneously encouraging further creativity in culture.
He is concerned that the pressure from the entertainment industry on government to control piracy/copying is actually counterproductive and doomed to failure.
It is counterproductive because it makes teens and amateurs who want to be creative with materials made available to them electronically and through the Internet into pirates. Since this digital piracy by kids is in fact not being stopped by government crackdowns (Brafman and Beckstrom in THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER: THE UNSTOPPABLE POWER OF LEADERLESS ORGANIZATIONS argue in any case it is not possible to stop Internet file sharing), it exacerbates disobedience and disrespect of authority in our young people because they see the laws as being morally unjust which leads them to see all law and all society in that same way. The corrosiveness of this cynicism can only be anarchy. Lessig offers some ideas to change the direction we are heading in this societal “war.”
“But as history has taught us again and again, morality in motive does not guarantee morality in result. Good intentions are a first step. Responsibility requires considering, and reconsidering, every step after that. …. however right the motive, means are always subject to measure.” (p 287)
Why is the entertainment industry so pursuing a legal war against young people who electronically copy materials? Lessig postulates:
“The simple reason we wage a hopeless war against our kids is that they have less money to give to political campaigns than Hollywood does. … Our government is fundamentally irrational for a fundamentally rational reason: policy follows not sense, but dollars. … our government is irrational because it is, in an important way, corrupt.” (p 294)
Politicians need money to finance their campaigns; political parties need money to finance their politicians. Hollywood is willing to meet that need in the hopes of enriching itself. Lessig argues for a different way one that does not let the media industry determine the importance and purpose of copyright law.
“…let’s get on to the hard problem of crafting a copyright system that nurtures the full range of creativity and collaboration that the Internet enables: one that builds upon the economic and creative opportunity of hybrids and remix creativity; on that decriminalizes the offense of being a teen.” (p 294)
The war on digital piracy will enrich the lawyers, though not the pirates. Lessig as a teacher of law knows this, and perhaps he is opposing that form of piracy! His ideas are to not allow industry and attorneys to hijack the creative playground which the digital world has opened to all.
By DAVID POGUE
Published: December 30, 2009
Wow, what an opportunity! Imagine having a newspaper column published precisely on the last day of the year. What a chance to step back, look ahead, sum it all up!
![[MapUS.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkIS119G5uEFqP6e8bKSvOB-FQUPXzzYl2AHTyG0wWqg7jw3yYGGxRSD3ySJQkFwMfpk4gQdjFHYSdEyZkBBcf2IKTssWnJsOM_oi5ve8XffYPtqUyccFuM84CSCM4OiK8GhtQJqYYdoo/s1600/MapUS.jpg)
And it looks like the strategy is well on its way…
In my previous blog Remixing Lawrence Lessig’s REMIX, I used a rhetorical question Lawrence Lessig asked in his book REMIX: MAKING ART AND COMMERCE THRIVE IN THE HYBRID ECONOMY to reflect on what made big government distrusting conservatives think the government was capable of running a foreign country/society? 
“The simple reason we wage a hopeless war against our kids is that they have less money to give to political campaigns than Hollywood does. … Our government is fundamentally irrational for a fundamentally rational reason: policy follows not sense, but dollars. … our government is irrational because it is, in an important way, corrupt.” (p 294)