Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

• Bizarre flying over upstate New York and seeing ski hills with artificial snow surrounded by bare ground and open lakes. #
• 2/3ds of US quake risk is in CA, but only 10% of homes have quake insurance. I'm sure that will work out fine. http://t.co/tt0jJGtr #
• Graphically comparing US White Christmas probabilities, 1961-1990 vs 1981-2010 – http://t.co/GchD0IJd #
• Love Gary. RT @nytimesbusiness: In the future, @Shteyngart tells @nickbilton, "There will be Wi-Fi and bad coffee." http://t.co/06CUzqEE #
• Kelvin-Helmholtz Wave Clouds Over Alabama – http://t.co/32VTSo2a #

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THE HOBBIT Trailer HD – YouTube.

• Say what you will about sovereign debt, Europe has excellent snow conditions. http://t.co/2sa0aznq #
• Looks like crunchy open for RIMM. This should be amusing. #
• RIMM open? Off a mere 12%. Good golly. Value traps get 'em every time. #
• People are posting some nutty guesses for Zynga's open/close today. You kids. #
• Btw, am on Bloomberg TV today around 3pm pst talking about hair tonics, etc. #
• SInce there is nothing much to be said about Zynga's unimpressive $11 opening, I will point out that at least it's prime. #
• .@robfdaniel Well, the issue is structural on many recent IPOs with so much latent pressure taking off by pre-IPO secondary market activity. #
• I bet colleague earlier this year that IPO class of 2011 would see low pops, in part because of pre-IPO secondary market sales. #
• Alert: Turns out we're not talking about hair tonic on @BloombergTV today at 3pst. Seems Zynga is gaming company, not hair product. #
• Anecdotal empiricists drive me absolutely nuts. #
• Yes, clever no? RT @leighblue: @pkedrosky you're deducing that from personal experience? #
• Fun day: Zynga now down around $9, while Tim Hortons just passed RIMM's market cap. Donuts over doodads! http://t.co/1aS1n8TC #
• Spectacular Atlantic photo set: The Year in Volcanic Activity – http://t.co/bqN3RE2F #
• I'm freezing at 16C in San Diego. I am so screwed next week in Toronto. #
• Gearheads: Any Arc''teryx Thera AR users? Like it? Need new shell. #
• How having @herbgreenberg as a customer kills cellphone companies http://t.co/TDYfy0FX #
• On @BloombergTV at 3pst. Let's run on-air experiment: I'll think of a number between 9 and 11. You guess & send it to me telepathically. #
• Shh, don't tell me yet. RT @GregCook2011: @pkedrosky @BloombergTV 10.10571 #
• 9+i <= x <= 11+i RT @EpicureanDeal: @pkedrosky Can the number be in the imaginary plane? #
• Accepted. RT @EpicureanDeal: @pkedrosky Counterpropose 9 ± ni ≤ x ≤ 11 ± ni, where 0 ≤ n ≤ ∞ #
• Reuters quoting tiny asset managers about RIM is like asking a duck about the company – http://t.co/9p6KSuLf /cc @felixsalmon #
• Today in uber-bullishness: ‘Raging Bull’ Powers Citigroup U.S. Stock Call: Chart of the Day – http://t.co/nMOdNJ2u #
• Today in strange medical syndromes I only just heard of: Münchausen syndrome by proxy – http://t.co/Slz8xHkI #

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• Say what you will about sovereign debt, Europe has excellent snow conditions. http://t.co/2sa0aznq #
• Looks like crunchy open for RIMM. This should be amusing. #
• RIMM open? Off a mere 12%. Good golly. Value traps get 'em every time. #
• People are posting some nutty guesses for Zynga's open/close today. You kids. #
• Btw, am on Bloomberg TV today around 3pm pst talking about hair tonics, etc. #
• SInce there is nothing much to be said about Zynga's unimpressive $11 opening, I will point out that at least it's prime. #
• .@robfdaniel Well, the issue is structural on many recent IPOs with so much latent pressure taking off by pre-IPO secondary market activity. #
• I bet colleague earlier this year that IPO class of 2011 would see low pops, in part because of pre-IPO secondary market sales. #
• Alert: Turns out we're not talking about hair tonic on @BloombergTV today at 3pst. Seems Zynga is gaming company, not hair product. #
• Anecdotal empiricists drive me absolutely nuts. #
• Yes, clever no? RT @leighblue: @pkedrosky you're deducing that from personal experience? #
• Fun day: Zynga now down around $9, while Tim Hortons just passed RIMM's market cap. Donuts over doodads! http://t.co/1aS1n8TC #
• Spectacular Atlantic photo set: The Year in Volcanic Activity – http://t.co/bqN3RE2F #
• I'm freezing at 16C in San Diego. I am so screwed next week in Toronto. #
• Gearheads: Any Arc''teryx Thera AR users? Like it? Need new shell. #
• How having @herbgreenberg as a customer kills cellphone companies http://t.co/TDYfy0FX #
• On @BloombergTV at 3pst. Let's run on-air experiment: I'll think of a number between 9 and 11. You guess & send it to me telepathically. #
• Shh, don't tell me yet. RT @GregCook2011: @pkedrosky @BloombergTV 10.10571 #
• 9+i <= x <= 11+i RT @EpicureanDeal: @pkedrosky Can the number be in the imaginary plane? #
• Accepted. RT @EpicureanDeal: @pkedrosky Counterpropose 9 ± ni ≤ x ≤ 11 ± ni, where 0 ≤ n ≤ ∞ #
• Reuters quoting tiny asset managers about RIM is like asking a duck about the company – http://t.co/9p6KSuLf /cc @felixsalmon #
• Today in uber-bullishness: ‘Raging Bull’ Powers Citigroup U.S. Stock Call: Chart of the Day – http://t.co/nMOdNJ2u #
• Today in strange medical syndromes I only just heard of: Münchausen syndrome by proxy – http://t.co/Slz8xHkI #

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New paper:

Empirical confirmation of creative destruction from world trade data

We show that world trade network datasets contain empirical evidence that the dynamics of innovation in the world economy follows indeed the concept of creative destruction, as proposed by J.A. Schumpeter more than half a century ago. National economies can be viewed as complex, evolving systems, driven by a stream of appearance and disappearance of goods and services. Products appear in bursts of creative cascades. We find that products systematically tend to co-appear, and that product appearances lead to massive disappearance events of existing products in the following years. The opposite – disappearances followed by periods of appearances – is not observed. This is an empirical validation of the dominance of cascading competitive replacement events on the scale of national economies, i.e. creative destruction. We find a tendency that more complex products drive out less complex ones, i.e. progress has a direction. Finally we show that the growth trajectory of a country’s product output diversity can be understood by a recently proposed evolutionary model of Schumpeterian economic dynamics.

via [1112.2984v1] Empirical confirmation of creative destruction from world trade data.

Tim Hortons donuts market capitalization just passed that of Research in Motion. Happy day for donut lovers. Not so much for Blackberry lovers. Timbits vs RIMbits.

Tim Hortons Market Cap Chart by YCharts

• Google Zeitgeist 2011: How the world searched – http://t.co/dtMFMeq9 #
• How US steers oil suppliers away from democracy. Wait, I may have that backward. http://t.co/1ieY8Q3k /via @nouriel #
• Happy New Year 1998 to S&P! RT @BloombergNews: France braces for cut in AAA debt rating – http://t.co/Esa8T17D #
• Right. Lucky Canada! RT @HighlySalassee: @pkedrosky so supplying oil to the USA has increased Canada's democracy score? #
• Dear Facades: Cease glittering. My read of journalism is that your problems always start there. Helpfully, P. #
• JPM: Top 25 online retail sites represented 70% of total eCommerce sales in November, up from 67% share last year. #
• Legal Language Explorer: Like Google Ngram meets US Supreme Court. Fascinating. http://t.co/39YDgWTk /by @computational #
• Copyright as the new patents: LLE look at copyright vs patents in US Supreme Court – http://t.co/5x2US9cz #
• Word of day: "Banker's dozen", where customer receives 11 of the product for the price of 12 – http://t.co/fwqIDihz /cc @ritholtz #
• So, having seen, like, three hours of TV in 2011, I somehow saw one of GQ's best episodes of year: GoT S1E6 – http://t.co/ue0iveSG #
• Great new SNL skit mocking Rick Perry's pious pandering on religion. Wonder who that guy is playing Perry. http://t.co/oNvP6wDa #
• In RIM’s Waterloo, the stakes ‘have never been higher’ – http://t.co/CSkiFUWR #
• Reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Pulphead” – http://t.co/1ckQzetX #
• Congrats to my friends at @liftopia for launching their ski conditions/deals app. Nice. Now, snow please. http://t.co/xo8txvoX #
• Hugely amusing that Zynga just updated its IPO filing to say that its CEO Mark Pincus has been called "fearsome". http://t.co/vqw9byLF #
• Comparing the pre/post "fearsome" Zynga IPO filings with track changes on. Just 'cause it amused me. http://t.co/wwuEBUK6 #
• Apparently @runkeeper thinks my trail running is like punctuated teleportation. Or there are GPS issues. Either one. http://t.co/ZxdjMfer #
• Shaking head at RIMM's results tonight. How can one company so consistently under-deliver on bad expectations. It isn't easy. #
• I just mixed up Blofeld and Goldfinger. There goes my Bond baddie secret spy decoder ring and lapel button. #
• Anyone know whether Zynga has IPO plans? Just heard of them and they sound hot, somethig to do with cellular phones. #
• The sudden media we-knew-it-all-along-ishness about RIMM is annoying. No, you didn't. You only got smart when it was obvious. #
• Timely call. RT @arrington: @pkedrosky by the way, i remember how much this pissed everyone off back in 2008. http://t.co/brW6dMGq #
• Fun Bloomberg graph showing how RIMM analyst ratings have trailed after its share price all year. http://t.co/BQu089g5 #
• I blow my nose at you, so-called "Arthur King": French central banker says UK should be downgraded first http://t.co/HaASpCXr #
• Reality gets better and better: Pair of Robbers Want Only iPhones, No BlackBerries – http://t.co/stnSCLt0 #
• Remarkable reading: A Minute By Minute Breakdown of MF Global's Last Week On Earth – http://t.co/3WhqR5iB #
• The six stages of screwed products: Stage 1 – Stuff you can sell at a premium #
• Stage 2: Stuff you can only sell at market prices #
• Stage 3: Stuff you can only sell at a discount #
• Stage 4: Stuff you have to give away #
• Stage 5: Stuff you can't give away. #
• Stage 6: Stuff people won't steal. #
• Rick Perry tonight likely meant an overfly zone over Solyndra, not Syria. Easy mistake to make. #
• November 2011 US precipitation anomaly map. Most of West's mountains running <50% of normal – http://t.co/P7Yz4xeJ #

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Terrible news, truly, and not made an iota better by being less than unexpected.

• The MF Global Black Box: A Minute By Minute Breakdown Of The Doomed Broker’s Last Week On Earth (Source)
• Pair of Robbers Want Only iPhones, No BlackBerries  (Source)
• French banker says UK should be downgraded first (Source)

On that second-last RIMM story (full disclosure, I’ve been short all year), here is the precedence of failing products:

1. Stuff you can sell at a premium
2. Stuff you only sell at market prices
3. Stuff you can only sell at a discount
4. Stuff you have to give away
5. Stuff you can’t give away
6. Stuff people won’t steal

Somehow, and this is sort of unprecedented, RIMM has reached Stage 6 of product. That’s almost unprecedented.

Somehow RIMM managed to disappoint analysts again tonight — not an easy task — so I thought it would be good to look at what the analysts had been saying this year. Turns out they’re dutifully tracking the stock downward. Can we cut some analysts’ pay now?