Latest Stories

• Trouble with Airline Codes
• Natural Gas: The Future.
• BMW Apps Demo
• Fact-Checking the Apocalypse
• Skier Outjumps Avalanche

 

Programs! Programs! You Can't Tell Your Currency Wars Without a Program!

The BBC's Paul Mason has a helpful list of all the currency wars worldwide currently under way:

China versus the USA: in which the US wants China to allow the RMB to rise against the dollar, weakening China's competitiveness by raising the price of Chinese exports.

There is the USA versus the Emerging Markets: in which the USA's quantitative easing policy is seen to be exporting inflation, again forcing the currencies of Brazil, South Korea and other export giants to rise against the dollar.

...There is the Euro versus the dollar. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that the entire negative impact of European austerity programmes in 2010 could be offset by a fall in the Euro's exchange rate to parity with the dollar: to the extent that this does not happen, Europe bears the cost of its own crisis.

Then there is north Europe verus south Europe. The Eurozone is locked into one exchange rate but peripheral Europe has, over a nine year period lost competitiveness against the core industrialised and export-led countries above all Germany. Southern Europe cannot devalue, so it is being forced to impose an internal devaluation by the Eurozone authorities - which means massive austerity, wage cuts and the erosion of welfare state provision.

Then there is Japan versus America. When America did QE, so did Japan - in part justifying the move on the grounds that QE was an act of exchange rate competition.

Finally there is Britain versus the rest of the world. Sterling underwent a 25% devaluation during the Lehman crisis, stabilising at a net 20% fall against the currencies of its main trading partners. In this way Britain has offset the cost of the crisis, avoiding double-digit unemployment but amplifying the impact of the commodity price inflation that has now taken off.

 

Waste Land

"Waste Land" is a documentary about the people populating Rio's largest garbage dump. The trailer follows:

WASTE LAND Official Trailer from Almega Projects on Vimeo.

 

Net Fiscal Stimulus During Great Recession

From a new NBER paper, net fiscal stimulus around the world during the "great recession". Turns out that U.S. was in bottom third:

This paper studies the patterns of fiscal stimuli in the OECD countries propagated by the global crisis. Overall, we find that the USA net fiscal stimulus was modest relative to peers, despite it being the epicenter of the crisis, and having access to relatively cheap funding of its twin deficits. The USA is ranked at the bottom third in terms of the rate of expansion of the consolidated government consumption and investment of the 28 countries in sample. Contrary to historical experience, emerging markets had strongly countercyclical policy during the period immediately preceding the Great Recession and the Great Recession. Many developed OECD countries had procyclical fiscal policy stance in the same periods. Federal unions, emerging markets and countries with very high GDP growth during the pre-recession period saw larger net fiscal stimulus on average than their counterparts. We also find that greater net fiscal stimulus was associated with lower flow costs of general government debt in the same or subsequent period.

 

America in the World

From Charles Blow's weekend NYT column on the U.S., an "Empire at the End of Decadence":

 

Dear George, Love Carlos. Wait, Strike That.

Strange excerpt from a Telegraph profile of the world's richest man, Mexico's Carlos Slim:

We sweep through the streets, while Mr Slim on speaker-phone dictates a letter in heavily accented English to the film director George Lucas via his secretary, Silvia.

“It was great to see you so unexpectedly the other day,” he says. “You should come to Mexico, and we can spend some time together.” Then, correcting himself: “No, change that. That sounds too gay.”

More here.

 

 

 

Field Notes: Radar, Evolution, Los Alamos, etc.

• Sweeps Weak In Human Evolution (Source)
• Adaptation and niche construction in human prehistory: a case study from the southern Scandinavian Late Glacial  (Source)
• At the Fault of Modernization | Los Alamos gets a New START (Source)
• Weather Radar Clutter Is Boon for Biologists (Source)

 

Ferguson: How the West Became Dominant

While Niall Ferguson's increasing screechiness drives me more than a little batty, now and then his analysis is still worth reading. Here he is pumping the main drivers of growth that he talks up in his new book/series on the rise of the West:

1. Competition: a decentralisation of political and economic life, which created the launch pad for both nation states and capitalism.

2. Science: a way of understanding and ultimately changing the natural world, which gave the West (among other things) a major military advantage over the Rest.

3. Property rights: the rule of law as a means of protecting private owners and peacefully resolving disputes between them, which formed the basis for the most stable form of representative government.

4. Medicine: a branch of science that allowed a major improvement in health and life expectancy, beginning in Western societies, but also in their colonies.

5. The consumer society: a mode of material living in which the production and purchase of clothing and other consumer goods play a central economic role, and without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable.

6. The work ethic: a moral framework and mode of activity derivable from (among other sources) Protestant Christianity, which provides the glue for the dynamic and potentially unstable society created by apps 1 to 5”

More here.

 

Tracking Precip at Mammoth CA

Epic week at Mammoth CA, with almost eight feet of new snow. While that's not yet entirely reflected in the following figure, it is worth a look.

 

Brazil Discovers Flipping Game

I'm sure this will work out fine. Or not. Brazil discovers the condo-flipping game:

Alexandre, a 37-year-old textile engineer from Morumbi, a smart neighbourhood of São Paulo a few miles north of the city’s Jardim Angela favela, has bought a penthouse apartment that is still being built but he is already thinking of selling it.

“I bought my first place in Morumbi in 2006 for R$100,000, sold it for double in 2010, signed up R$500,000 for this place in September and it’s going to get even higher when it’s finished,” he explains. “If I keep doing this I won’t even have to go to work any more.”

More here.

 

Fred's Five Rules for Product/Market Fit

Love this: Fred Wilson's five rules for product/market fit at startups. I can almost always spot the MBAs pitching me -- there's zero obsession.

1. Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.
2. Hunches come from being a power user of the products in your category and from having a long standing obsession about the problem you are solving.
3. Domain expertise to the point of obsession is highly correlated with the most successful entrepeneurs in our portfolio.
4. Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.
5. Monetization should be native and improve the experience for users.

 

Field Notes: Apple, Wealth, Roads, etc.

• The Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth (Source)
• NOAA: Another Spring of Major Flooding Likely in North Central U.S. (Source)
• The Psychological Consequences of Money (Source)
• Urban road networks -- Spatial networks with universal geometric features? A case study on Germany's largest cities (Source)
• Apple is blowing it (Source)
• Parsing the Brent/WTI spread (Source)

 

Ducks are Immortal

Lemma: You never see a dead duck in parks/lakes/etc.

Lemma: All ducks looks the same.

Lemma: The idom "dead duck" dates to 1829 -- "Never waste your powder on a dead duck".

Lemma: The "dead duck" expression was almost certainly spread by ducks playing dead to throw off hunters.

Lemma: Long-lived ducks would be most likely to spread this expression.

Theory: Ducks are immortal.

 

Today in Google Voice Haiku

Today in Google Voice haiku:

I presume nice

Go away

I had to the success of exhibitors

 

Field Notes: Rio, Mayans, Carbon, Space, Cindy Crawford, etc.

• A tour of Rio's largest favela (Source)
• Excavating the Origins of Maya Civilization in Guatemala - NYTimes.com (Source)
• A reduced estimate of the strength of the ocean's biological carbon pump (Source)
• Credentialism, elite employment, and career aspirations - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (Source)
• NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center (Source)
• 'Apple just f***** over online music subs for the iPhone' -- Last.fm co-founder on Apple's 30% cut (Source)
• Cindy Crawford in a Bar (Source)
• Turks and Caicos: Caribbean Hangover (Source)

 

Field Notes

• Taibbi:Why isn't Wall Street in Jail (Source)
• Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups (Source)
• What Really Causes Runner's High? (Source)
• Study Links Rise in Rain and Snow to Human Actions (Source)
• New Ways to Gauge the Finite Atmosphere (Source)
• Economics, Volcanoes, and Phanerozoic Revolutions (Source)
• Dumped drugs lead to resistant microbes (Source)
• Michael Lewis dissents from the FCIC report's dissent (Source)