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Readings: Debt, Energy, Scrip, Slump, Transitions, Dipshits, Lithium, etc.

 

An Aging World

From GE, a nifty visualization of our aging societies around the world. (Note that the applet is slightly larger than the space available here, so go to the GE site if you want to see it with all controls working properly.)

The whole thing is big, so … after the jump.

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Readings: Cars, Morality, Food, CPK, etc.

 

[T] Facebook as Cattle Chute

I’m inordinately fond of this quip of mine from earlier today:

Facebook is an information cattle chute: All curves and distractions on the way to getting a bolt in brain.

 

Readings: China, VC Performance, CRE, Housing, Startups, etc.

 

Canadians Tag off U.S. on Whole Real Estate Thing

Awfully kind of Canada to tag off the U.S. and carry on with the whole real estate bubble thing without us. Such nice and helpful people. And polite too.

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Some Venture Capital Mythbusting

I gave a talk last week wherein I tried to bust a few venture capital myths. Here are some samples:

 

John Turturro on Playing “Jesus” in The Big Lebowski

If you’re a fan of The Big Lebowski (and we fans of the Dude can spot each other at 1,000 yards), you’ll enjoy this segment of John Turturro talking about the creative process behind him developing his classic “Jesus” character.

And the original “Jesus” scene is after the jump.

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Malcolm Gladwell on Success

Good (and funny) discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Krulwich on success.

[via Radiolab]
 

[T] Niall Ferguson (2003) vs Niall Ferguson (2010)

Matt Yglesias puts together a Niall Ferguson vs Niall Ferguson debate, then and now. The 2003 Ferguson is in boldface, and the 2010 Ferguson is in italics:

Guns or butter: this is the choice historians conventionally say that governments face. The administration is currently engaged in an audacious — some would say reckless — experiment to disprove this theory. To judge by his actions, the President’s response to the question “Guns or butter?” is: “Thanks, I’ll take both.” This, in short, is the guns and butter presidency.

Are there precedents for such a combination? What’s to say this deficit-spending won’t work? Keynes would tell us that in the current environment we must boost aggregate demand.

Certainly. Long before Keynes was even born, weak governments in countries from Argentina to Venezuela used to experiment with large peace-time deficits to see if there were ways of avoiding hard choices. The experiments invariably ended in one of two ways. Either the foreign lenders got fleeced through default, or the domestic lenders got fleeced through inflation.

But the United States has broken the guns or butter rule before. Under President Ronald Reagan, substantial increases in military spending coincided with comparable increases, relative to gross domestic product, in personal consumption — that proportion of G.D.P. that the public, as opposed to the government, spends. The crucial point, of course, is that in the short term at least, fiscal policy is not a zero-sum game.

More here.

 

iPhone Now, and Then and Then and Then

Four generations of iPhone compared:

Four Generations of the iPhone from Chris Pinnock on Vimeo.

 

Readings: Hospices, Japan, Debt, Mosquitoes, Faber, etc.

 

Montier: Austerity as the Road to Ruin

I’ll confess that these austerity/stimulus arguments are mostly on-beyond-boring for me, but James Montier is such a muscular writer that this is worth a look:

GMO Montier 26Jul [via Zero Hedge]
 

Fetters of Gold and Paper: How Fixed Exchange Rates Can Kill You

New paper from Barry Eichengreen on that Barbarella relic, or was that barbarous?

Fetters of Gold and Paper

We describe in this essay why the gold standard and the euro are extreme forms of fixed exchange rates, and how these policies had their most potent effects in the worst peaceful economic periods in modern times. While we are lucky to have avoided another catastrophe like the Great Depression in 2008-9, mainly by virtue of policy makers' aggressive use of monetary and fiscal stimuli, the world economy still is experiencing many difficulties. As in the Great Depression, this second round of problems stems from the prevalence of fixed exchange rates. Fixed exchange rates facilitate business and communication in good times but intensify problems when times are bad. [Emphasis mine]

 

Beautiful Data: Martin Wattenberg on Data Visualization

Good presentation from data visualization guy Martin Wattenberg talking at MIT about data/text visualization.

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