Buried in meetings and travel, so a few quick links:

• The truce between humans and fires has burst in an era of megafires (American Scholar)
• Controversial stuff on VGchartz as NPD usurpers in market research (Radar)
• Special issue on angel investors, including good Ron Conway interview (TheDeal)
• How Keith Olbermann is changing TV news (New Yorker)
• A shakeout in hedge fund industry -- or not, depending on how much you trust the figures here (WSJ)
• Profile of Lehman-slayer David Einhorn (New York Magazine)

You've almost certainly seen it: Every time an analyst on CNBC comes on to talk about a stock there is The Screen. We find out whether they own the stock, their family owns the stock, their firm owns the stock, their pet owns the stock, etc.

More often than not, the answer is "none of the above": They don't own the stock they're talking about, and neither does anyone they know.

I say these people with no conflicts shouldn't be trusted. How am I to take seriously someone in the financial services business who tell people to own a stock, but doesn't own it themselves? They have no skin in the game, and in a business entirely built around wealth creation, self-interest and greed, that makes me suspicious. Granted, I don't want them self-dealing, but I do want to know that their interests are directly aligned with mine.

Do others feel differently? Or is this just another sign of analysts' utter irrelevance?

Eye-popping chart up over at The Oil Drum showing the extent of China's current cement fixation. Amazing stuff.

What in the world are these people building?

And if someone wants to put this into a Google Sheets animated bubble graph, all the way back to 1999 (with this and this data), I'll send them a copy of O'Reilly's Visualizing Data book. And me-thinks it would be a good idea to convert this to per capita too.

[via TOD]