Rational Economentary

gop just don't add up

2008-09-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

- can't escape arithmetic -
for me it's gop numbers never add up, which with most americans struggling to balance overwork and life much less a checkbook or saving (it officially hovers around 0% after all), it probably doesn't matter until it does, then we overreact sideways.

we've already a 1 trillion hole right now arising from the 2 huge tax cuts and/during 2 all-out wars, borrowed with interest from china. mccain wants to double-down on the tax cuts so we've another 3.3 trillion piled on. and for all his talk of cutting Washington pork to pay for the wars and a tax cut double-down, so far he and palin have managed to come up with 17 billion of earmarks to cut. 4.3 trillion – 17 billion. it'd be funny if it wasn't so serious.

it's not possible to escape the basic arithmetic. folks can dogmatically assert that tax cuts solve all economic problems big or small but the evidence say otherwise. despite blazing worker productivity and resulting corporate and market growth, during the past 7 years, wages have fallen drastically behind year-over-year net inflation. Aka empty growth, as benefits accrued to investors. no pay raise for 7 years has never happened before. growth supported not by healthy wage-based growth, rather through the not-so-filling credit and financial bubble kind that is now surreally collapsing right before us.

lop-sided tax cuts for rich spurred an overflow of investments that were shunted to capital markets, much of it overseas, for the best returns as rich don't spend (thus rich). and now we've a gluttony of financial and credit assets going through a firesale w/ prices tanking. and consumer demand, 2/3 of economic activity, has dried up w/ no wage growth or bubble credit left. main street's neglect is now the curse of wall street and the wealthy.

the world is not black and white. if it was, the past 8 years have been utterly pointless, never-ending excuses and right-wing trolling notwithstanding. we deserve so much better.

- past and present -
first time ever in history we go at it with 2(!) full-scale wars simultaneously. and borrowing with interest [for our children] to fund it all. with the bulk of those monies from a hostile power that's outcompeting, out educating, and outsmarting us. and we're now borrowing even more to bail out freddie to fannie to aig. and folks wonder why the u.s. dollar has become monopoly money, worth as much as it was 8 years ago. since w, it has dropped 30%. now with the recent financial crisis, it's worth half. we are the new peso.

and it was mccain's "it's a mental recession you nation of whiners" econ advisor then sen. phil graham who chaired, wrote, and rammed financial deregulation through with an all-gop congress that tied the hands of all financial regulators. and now, it's supposedly the government's fault despite the gop neutering the depression-era forged glass-stegall rules to begin with. yet they are at it again smearing and doing a wholly false rewrite of history, while the fed and treasury are now picking up after their original sin of negligence, rescuing the American economy from an imminent meltdown.

this year alone with 8 straight months of rising unemployment now @ 6.1%, a total of 605,000 net jobs lost (it takes 110,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth, which we've not had for god knows how long), and for the first time since sept 2002 unemployment has infected all economic sectors and education levels, beyond just financial and construction, for both college and high school graduates (in fact, fresh college graduates have another record high 15% unemployment rate).

not to mention the lowly fact that there's been almost $3,000 a year average loss of families' incomes under w, in contrast to the $7,000 a year bump under clinton.

- here we go again -
ignorance is often bliss. republicans won't own up to 8 years of failure. they know to win is to double-down with more excuses, distractions, and blame. always about toughness, smarts be damned. so not surprisingly, back in the real world, it's been all talk with zero delivery (measurable ones anyway).

right wingers keep making up a storyline a day to distract and demagogue their way to another 4 years, hoping to run down the clock, keeping palin in seclusion, away from scrutiny as if she should on faith be slotted automatically into the 2nd most powerful job on earth. after less then 1 week of mccain's go-with-his-gut vetting, and a few years of shux i'm like you a small 5,000 folk town mayor and 1.5 years as governor of alaska that osmotically provided russian expertise. move over condi & her elitist stanford russian creds; here's one ready out of the box who's been soaking it up naturally.

on the big issues that matter, republicans offer the same ol'. tax cuts for all economic problems big and small. bleed the government and allow markets to be free for all at beckon whim of the rich, while allowing middle-class wages to anchor drop 7 straight years in a row.

Eod, republicans are repackaging the same ol' dogma they've been proffering for 3 decades. and it always takes wonky democrats to come in and fix the wholesale havoc that the republican fraternity bring about every time they bluster their way into power with empty rhetoric and one-lining agendas.

enough.

Numbers That Matter: A Precipice

2008-09-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

So we are at a precipice – an awful 6.1% unemployment - #3 says more. Unfortunately, it’s truly a bad dataset that’s a recessionary signal of what’s to come, record debt & -30% weaker dollar notwithstanding. If it isn’t arrested by the next term end, it can turn depressionary. On the other end of matters, we have around $1 trillion deficit now. So far, McCain has identified $18 billion worth of earmarks to cut. 2 months to go & he’s yet to identify the rest. Obama’s numbers actually add up; a stark difference. That’ll be subject next time.

Don’t let the extreme yell-/bag-fest now get in the way of these [Three] Fundamental Facts
(pass it on or as response to any viral scare mails, particularly ones with un-sourced facts)

Here’s straight-up data of the record to inform and to make a case with facts and reasoning, not extremist emotions and fear, for moderate Democratic economic management. One informed by mainstream economics, not decades-old trickle-down dogma – dogma as there is no proof of its success yet to-date (e.g. that it even pays for itself, aka pay as you go).

[#One], Democrats for the past 60 years have run the American economy better, and statistically significantly so. Professor Bartel of Princeton data from 1948 to 2007 demonstrates, which article and chart show. When Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, average annual growth of real gross national product was 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.

That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.

[#Two], 95% of all American families get [even up to double] tax cuts w/ Obama’s plan. Below breaks it down for everyone. It’s sad to see McCain’s folks voting against their own economic interest, taking his word at face value when it’s a direct lie. Unless McCain’s supporters are just top 5% of income earners. But they’re about half the country. And you can see below that squarely half the country is actually just left out of McCain’s tax relief, getting less than a measly 1% tax cut.

The obvious facts of the matter are McCain’s tax plan is way lop-sided versus Obama’s (this dataset and more can be found in the authoritative economic analysis that the respected bi-partisan Tax Policy Center did just mid-Aug. The last 4 columns of each respective table summarizes the full tax schedule for both candidates’ tax proposals, which the media tend to tease of course with bits & pieces as red meat to draw eyeballs and fatten up their ad buys). You can see for yourself below how Obama rebalances the tax code for everyone, especially folks that actually [need to] spend the money.

And even that doesn’t bring it back to pre-W/Clinton-era rates for the rich, when there was kick-ass growth. So don’t worry, the rich are still pretty rich. Just not dirty rich at the expense the rest of the country gets poorer. Consider that 75% of all income gains during the Bush Administration have gone to the top 1 percent of earners. Another decade perpetuating this kind of distorted rewarding of the pie, we’d have a real class revolt on our hands.

End of day, Obama’s plan is mainstream and prudent, though not a slogan-friendly, economic policy.

[#Three], now it’s 6.1% unemployment, up from 5.7%; economists were expecting 5.8%. 4/10 a point is a huge jump for this brief time period. It’s the highest rate since the jobless recovery of Sept 2003. Spiking so high so fast is a very nasty sign of what’s to come. What makes it an even graver dataset now is that behind the top number, for the first time in each and all categories that follow, it also affected:

- all races,

- all economic sectors (not just financial and construction),

- both college and non-college graduates (15% of college graduates could not find a job, another new high),

- % of workers part-time, at all time high resulting from record number with no full-time work,

- and is the 8^th straight month of [big] job losses this year.

Republicans are offering more ambiguous excuses, fairy tales (e.g. no macroeconomic numbers support as it doesn’t have any big positive economic impact other than record debt, so extremists hand wave w/ a lot of personal anecdotal stories), and try to share the blame even though Dems’ no power, and GOP’s no cohunes to own up to their 7 straight years of failures. They are the ones that want to continue the same ol’ tax cutting dogma of the last 7 years, debt-financed w/ love to China; now they own our $1.48 trillion tab to show for it.

We’ve two terms of way out of balance economic non-policies: debt-funded tax cuts for the top 1% to record spending we or our children don’t have anything to pay back with, in our or their lifetimes. Now with burst-bubbled credit markets and financial sector band-aid as dried up as worn out Arizona desert prunes, root problems are now coming to surface.

Enough.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26546938

Bleak jobs data keep economy at center stage - Jobless rate spikes to 6.1%, pressuring candidates to address economy

Job losses are expected to continue for the remainder of the year, according to Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers.

“We do view the economy as facing very significant challenges in the second half of the year,” he said, “particularly the consumer sector where house prices are still falling, equity prices are low, gasoline prices, while falling recently, are still high, and labor income, given these employment reports, is falling.”

So far this year, the economy has held up surprisingly well, given all the headwinds.

One reason may be the continued gains in productivity of American workers. The Labor Department reported Thursday that in the second quarter productivity rose at an annual rate of 4.3 percent.

But it’s not great news for American workers who are, in effect, working harder for the same wages. In fact, the report showed than unit labor costs fell a half-percent in the second quarter. The number of hours worked shrank by 0.8 percent, and wages, when adjusted for inflation, fell by 1.3 percent. That helps explain why, even as the economy has been able to post weak growth this year, American workers feel like they’re losing ground.

[Is America’s promise now really to expect more productive work and to expect and get less in return?]

When All Else Fail, Shout

2008-03-21T20:52:00.001-07:00

Swift boating’s officially started. After his race speech, Obama’s now a “reverse” racist. Wonders never cease. Also dismal and depressing.

A Question:

Americans are so funny!! Democrats (as stated in the posts) would rather vote for McCain than Obama even if it means that you loose more men and women in Iraq Even if your economy falls. Even if you can't find jobs or get to remain in the US. Speaking as a proud Caribbean native. We here in the beautiful tropics know that your country is in trouble. How come you all over there can't see it?

An Answer:

At the end of the day, that all goes to conveniently cover over the hard facts that we're 3 trillion peso-dollars in a shattered, flooded bloody red economic hole; 4,000 troops have died for God knows what; households now earn more than a thousand dollars a year less in the 7 years W took office – the first time ever in American history.

It's a typical right-wing scheme which people fall on the sword for time and again. Recall gay marriage or the flag amendment. Or abortion and ban on stem cell research. The GOP did nothing on those "keystone" issues after the elections. It did get them elected. So not surprisingly, the catcalls continue.

When speaking of morality – count the cratefuls of conservative hypocrites and criminals who have been exposed and prosecuted these past 7 years even with W's lame-duck Justice Department.

Or tally how much crap communist China get away with under the guise of free (certainly unfair) markets with W at expense of American consumers and lives.

And now Republicans are for the “Patriot” Act. In just 7 short years, the immemorial conservative mantra of "keeping government out of people's lives" is dead and buried along with Goldwater and Buckley.

Europe was entangled with fascism and Nazism. And I suppose we're bound to have conservative folks who are rightly scared for their families, livelihood, and futures get easily misled into the fire by for all intent and purpose Republican subsidiary Fox Corp, propelling the nation straight into 2nd-rate irrelevance.

There's obviously many a tons to be said about these past 7 years. It’s Obama’s moment to stand up and not be tied down to these emotionally charged and hallow issues. And straight-up continue to tell it like it is and how it's gonna' be with a new sheriff in town.

Got omega-3? Not so much

2007-11-12T01:06:00.000-08:00

Love this quote: There's no need to buy "manufactured kibble" spiked with omega-3 fats…

A lot of the omega-3 adverts is misleading. Most of these packaged foods have plant-based omega-3s, which draw on inefficient conversion process by body, yielding a small fraction the benefit of fish.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/painter/2007-11-11-yourhealth_N.htm

Got omega-3? Not so much

By Kim Painter, USA TODAY
Getting plenty of heart-healthy omega-3 fats used to mean eating fish or taking supplements.

But grocery aisles these days are packed with food labels boasting of omega-3 content. You can buy milk, eggs, yogurt, cereal, orange juice, butter substitutes, mayonnaise and other products that carry the claim.

Behind the boom: studies that show certain omega-3 fats can help prevent fatal heart attacks and offer other heart benefits; less conclusive research hints at brain and eye benefits and possible anti-cancer effects.

But don't cross fish off your shopping list yet, nutrition watchdogs say. That's because many of the new products contain little or none of the omega-3 fats backed by the most scientific evidence: DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid).

"The numbers are tiny, but the claims they are making are huge," says Katherine Tallmadge, a Washington, D.C., registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

"It's all very confusing," says Bonnie Liebman, a nutritionist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She reviewed omega-3 food claims for a recent newsletter article (at cspinet.org).

Her conclusion: Consumers are in real danger of being misled. Even a careful label reader won't learn, for instance, that a carton of Breyers Smart DHA Omega-3 yogurt has less DHA than a teaspoon of salmon.

And that bottle of Hellmann's mayo proclaiming the product is "naturally rich in Omega-3 ALA"? True enough, Liebman says: Most mayonnaise is made with soybean oil, which is a source of ALA (alpha-linolenic acid). But that kind of omega-3 fat, found most abundantly in flaxseed, has not been proven to convey the same health benefits as DHA plus EPA, she says.

One study even suggested high intakes of ALA might increase the risk of prostate cancer. But that finding "doesn't make any sense to anyone at this point" and needs more rigorous study, says William Harris, a heart researcher at the University of South Dakota.

Harris, who has advised companies making omega-3 products, says he sees little downside to the grocery-store glut as long as consumers know what they are getting. "But if the label just says omega-3 and makes no mention of DHA and EPA, there's a good chance it's ALA. So it can be a little deceptive."

Tallmadge's advice: "Eat fish." Those concerned about mercury, including pregnant women, can choose low-mercury varieties such as salmon and sardines, she says. Walnuts, ground flaxseeds, tofu and other whole foods containing ALA also are great additions to any diet, she adds, even if the evidence for that fat is not as compelling. There's no need to buy "manufactured kibble" spiked with omega-3 fats, she says.

Vegetarians can take algae oil supplements to get DHA, she says. Others who just don't eat enough fish can take fish oil supplements. But read the labels carefully, she warns, looking for levels of DHA plus EPA.

Studies suggest an average of 500 milligrams a day is beneficial, Liebman says. You can get that much by following the American Heart Association's advice to eat fish, particularly fatty fish, at least twice weekly. The association says patients with coronary heart disease should get 1,000 milligrams of DHA plus EPA daily.
HOW MUCH OMEGA-3 FAT? All food sources of omega-3 fats are not created equal. Here are the amounts of DHA and EPA, the omega-3 fats backed by the most promising studies, in some foods:

Food DHA+EPA (mg)
Atlantic salmon, farmed (6 oz. cooked) 3,650
Coho salmon, farmed (6 oz. cooked) 2,180
Swordfish (6 oz. cooked) 1,390
Bumblebee salmon (Red, Pink or Blueback, 3 oz.)1,200
Sardines in vegetable oil, drained (3 oz.)840
Fish sticks (6) 680
Shrimp (3 oz.) 270
Smart Balance Omega Plus Buttery Spread (1 tbsp.) 160
Land O Lakes Omega-3 Eggs (1) 150
Breyers Smart DHA Omega-3 yogurt (6 oz.) 30
Horizon Organic DHA Omega-3 milk (1 cup) 30
Silk Plus Omega-3 DHA Soy Milk (1 cup) 30

Source: Center for Science in the Public interest (cspinet.org)

There's fish oil then there's fish oil

2007-11-12T00:23:00.000-08:00

Another missive on fish oil, a pretty impactful one (in addition to just exercising). You may take fish oil already.

It’s certainly changed my life.

However, you may not “feel the difference” even though it’s suppose to be a naturally powerful brain booster.

Here’s some reasons why fish oil are less effective today than ever before:

- Times have changed; we now get “stripped-down” fish oil. Not the fish’s fault but our own obviously. Nowadays, we have to use molecular distillation to remove PCBs, mercury, and other heavy metals from all the fish we need but have polluted. Since the impurities’ molecular weights approximate that of the matrix of natural omega-3 fats (e.g. phospholipids, like our brain’s) that houses fish oil’s active DHA and EPA ingredients, distillation removes this natural fatty housing. This leaves a stripped down “triglyceride” form of fish oil.

- And we don’t eat fish oils with fatty meals to compensate. Low absorption of DHA and EPA result because both require binding to the right profile of fats for transport through the blood-brain barrier and for integration with our brain’s matrix of phospholipids (the 60% of brain matter that is omega-3 fats)…Phospholipids are the most natural and absorbable for our brain.

Only 30% absorption
So there’s roughly a 30% absorption rate for distilled fish oil capsules and liquids, which is boosted roughly by 5-10% by taking it with a fatty meal. Thus, if you’re taking 2 capsules a day, your body is likely, at best, using half that. Long story short, you usually have to take a lot more to feel the difference, as I do. And fish burps and digestion problems often get in the way.

Then there's Krill
Krill are small shrimp-like fish (blue whales eat 8,000lbs a day) found in great abundance, more easily replenished at the Antarctic, is low on food chain and thus are naturally pure (free of heavy metals, mercury etc.). Most importantly, they are naturally housed in a matrix of omega-3 phospholipids which our brain’s also based. Take with breakfast for better digestion; within 15 minutes you’ll feel the difference. You may be surprised how you lived without “real” fish oil for so long. It improves brain function, mental/emotional balance, memory recall, awareness / alertness. And so forth:

- For Men and Women Lipid Management - supports healthy blood lipids.
- Brain Nutrition - contains ultra-potent marine lipids which enhance brain function.Additional Benefits For Women
- Menstrual Discomforts - relieves emotional and physical menstrual discomforts.

Link below is replete with the science. Bottom line, krill’s the most natural, ultra-potent omega 3 to-date. Even though one capsule has the industry-average total DHA+EPA (240mg), it is an order magnitude more effective. And even though the small capsules do smell like, well, krill, there’s actually no fish burps as your body absorbs it entirely. Just don’t sniff the bottle and you should be fine J

Very highly recommended folks give Neptune krill oil a try; this is particularly safe and suitable if you’re pregnant or nursing.

Neptune Krill Oil
You can get Jarrow’s Neptune Krill Oil at a good price, with the usual hard core quality standards that Jarrows brings to the table. Some people have asked, so just to be clear, I’ve no affiliation with Jarrow.

Matter fact, FWIW, he was a Democrat who switched to be a right-wing Republican in order to support a less regulated supplements industry. More on point, he runs a tight ship, and his products are just one of the best, bar none. Neptune is the Canadian company that brought clean, abundant krill to the masses. Canadians have nurtured an entire industry and technology base for this, rivaling even Europe and Japan. Because of the pharmaceutical industry’s heavy influence, the US is a laggard here.

Jarrows and others redistribute Neptune’s krill product. Jarrow’s Neptune Krill Oil is about 33 cents a capsule online. It’s also at most health / supplement stores (except GNC) though the one near our house was sold out…krill oil seems popular these days.

You can check out a colorful end-to-end piece on Neptune Krill that is fairly accurate (you can also see a YouTube version here). For the science-minded, here's an ORAC measure:

Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn't understand about climate change.

2007-10-24T19:27:00.000-07:00

Gosh, I felt "Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn't understand about climate change." (reposted below) was a rather simplistic article, particularly by the author’s and Slate's usually high standards.

It makes leaps of assumptions itself that would like to lump things into nice round numbers, a point off growth here, another there, to size up the effects of climate change neatly.

And that's the problem.

Eminent pro-market Nobel economists like Kenneth Arrow say (Economist Explains Forests' Costs and Benefits") that today we don't cost pollution correctly by many order of magnitude.

And as Arrow explains:

It’s very typical all over the world for fisherman to limit their catch, because they know that if they catch too much there won’t be any next year. Or the nets have big meshes so that the young will escape. It has been very well documented that, for fishing, people tend to create a market, not like we ordinarily have, but a market that understands what costs that you’re imposing.
It’s the idea that, at least for the resources you use, you should at least pay the cost to society. What you do today may not be so serious today, but it affects tomorrow. Of course, the typical situation is using up fossil resources, for example oil and coal. Or the degradation of farmland.
Those things are profitable today, but don’t take the future into account. Or consider dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which for many years, didn’t create any significant problems. Now the dumping, which has been going on since the 1800s, since the Industrial Revolution began, is beginning to show up. The point being, once stuff goes in, you can’t take it out.
So, the result is that there is a permanent effect, and – from the perspective of an economist – you don’t pay for it. You don’t pay a tax, a price for putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is what you call a dynamic effect, an effect over time.

So just because we don't doesn't mean we shouldn't. Without an eye-blink people seek insurance for cars, earthquakes, dismemberment, and floods, some of which are fairly unlikely to ever take place for most people, but just in case....

Most people, bubbly (pun intended) as folks seem to be these days, naively assume we can treat Mother Nature as a free garbage dump and don't support efforts to hedge, assess and mitigate one of the most potentially catastrophic large-scale risks and costs ever. Schizophrenic. Not what the conservative Teddy Roosevelt would have done.

It also demonstrates plenty of naive and wishful thinking. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't take time, effort, and resources to learn and mitigate. We do it for a bunch of lot less likely risks of life. Yet we apply a double-standard for the environment, which today amounts to a molecule of water in a bucket.

The environment should trump most issues for our collective attention and resources.

And to even imagine summing up the environment and assuming we can arrive at a well-informed present-value dollar cost misses a key point. Obviously, conserving and engendering green technologies is a cost. But conversely it is also an intrinsically very valuable exercise and work product in of itself (as with most things worth doing).

Society spends money to learn how to make a widget with less parts, less costs, and less resources yet with more functionality and features - standard fare for most technological advances. They typically feature upfront R&D costs with huge gains amortized well into the future.

Take CFL's for instance. Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs are the size of a regular light bulb. Costco now sell a 6-pack 120-watt equivalent compact fluorescent bulbs for $5:

- It only consumes 20 watts of energy, basically cutting out about 100 watts worth
of heat. Yet it’s whole lot brighter and has a purer white light than regular
incandescent and emits a lot less heat.
- That 6-pack also cuts out over 7,230 lbs of CO2 over its lifetime. It saves 4,700 kWh of electricity, enough to light up an avg. home for 2 yrs.
- And greenhouse gases forgone equal to planting 80 trees.
- Average 10,000 hr lifetime (1-3 yrs) is lot longer than a regular bulb.
- Now, there’s a bunch of wattage options available – all a lot greener, fantastic ROI
and better all around.
- Not to mention the $564 you save over the lifetime of use.

Less (and smarter) is (a lot) more. Now more business are taking part of green as they should. It’s a strategic investment.

Conservatives typically are comfortable with the status quo and thus seek to keep it intact.
What I dislike about this type of nit-picking is it gives [neo]conservatives ammunition and excuse to continue doing as little as possible. In uncertain times like these, we need progressives and liberals who see the world colored as it really is, not black and white lumps of numbers and choice facts that fit into nice, easy to sound-bite bullets on paper. And write-off the big chunk of reality that is altogether nuanced and inconvenient [or difficult] to grok at the moment.

At least without hard rigorous thought, effort and science applied over prolonged, sustained periods of time. Quite liberal and open-minded, a pre-requisite for the innovations necessary.

And just to be clear: we're not the ones doing Mother Nature any favors. Rather, she’s doling us a big one, putting up with our crap, so to speak, while not asking for payment upfront though the IOUs will need to be paid, no free lunches and all. Else she’ll stop picking up the trash and just let us die off. As we rightly deserve if we can't come to our common senses.

Which I'm sure Mother Nature will be fine with, as she’s been for the last 4 billion years.

Slate - everyday economics: How the dismal science applies to your life.
Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions What Al Gore doesn't understand about climate change.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 7:44 AM ET

Barring a last-minute intervention by the Supreme Court, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize will be shared by Albert Gore Jr. Admittedly, Gore has been less of a menace to world peace than some previous laureates (think Henry Kissinger). But there is nothing particularly peaceable about Gore's rhetorical approach to climate policy.
At his most pugnacious, Gore has depicted the fundamental trade-off as one between
environmental responsibility and personal greed. Of course, as everyone over the age of 12 is perfectly aware, the real trade-off is between the quality of our own lives and the quality of our descendants'.
In other words, climate policy is almost entirely about you and me making sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. To contribute usefully to the debate, you've got to think hard about the appropriate level of sacrifice. That in turn requires you to
think hard about roughly half a dozen underlying issues.
1. How much does human activity affect the climate? This is actually a whole menu of questions: What can we expect given the current level of carbon emissions? What if we cut those emissions by half? By two-thirds? And so on. These are questions for
physical scientists, not economists or politicians.
2. How much harm (or good!) is likely to come from that climate change? This is partly a matter of physical science and partly a matter of economics. If the world temperature rises 3 degrees, agronomists try to predict the wheat yield in Oklahoma; economists try to predict when Oklahomans will turn to alternate ventures—and when it will become profitable to grow wheat in Alaska. Climatologists estimate what it takes to put New York underwater; economists estimate the cost of moving New York inland.
3. How much do we—or should we—care about future generations? Edmund
Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate for economics, argued long ago that you (and I)
should care exactly as much about a stranger born 1,000 years hence as we do
about a stranger who's alive today. Phelps' view has been highly influential
among economists, who now take it as more or less the default position. But even
economists are sometimes wrong, and there are powerful arguments for
"discounting" the welfare of future generations.
First, many people (myself excluded, however) believe we should care more about our countrymen than about a bunch of foreigners—hence the sentiment for a border fence. If we are allowed to care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong country, why can't we care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong century?
And second: Few of us feel morally bound to churn out as many children as we possibly can, which means we think nothing of denying future generations the gift of life. If it's OK to deny them their very lives, shouldn't it be OK to deny them a temperate climate?
There is a ton more to be said in response and counter-response, but in the end, you've got to take a stand. Does the next generation count 100 percent as much as our own, as Edmund Phelps demands? Or 99 percent? 95 percent? 90 percent? I'll show you later how much the answer matters.
4. How likely are those future generations to be around, anyway? If you think life on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid in 200 years, it makes little sense to worry about the climate 300 years from now. (Of course, the issue is complicated by the fact that our climate policies change the survival odds.)
5. Just how rich are those future generations likely to be? If you expect economic growth to continue at the average annual rate of 2.3 percent, to which we've grown accustomed, then in 400 years, the average American will have an income of more than $1 million per day—and that's in the equivalent of today's dollars (i.e., after correcting for inflation). Does it really make sense for you and me to sacrifice for the
benefit of those future gazillionaires?
6. How risk-averse are we? This matters not just because of uncertainty about the effects of climate change but because it affects the way future generations want us to behave. Imagine yourself as a disembodied soul, waiting in line to be born—possibly next year, possibly 100 years hence. If you have little tolerance for risk, you'll want us to pursue policies that make life about equally good at all times; if you're
willing to roll the dice, you might prefer a policy that allows some generations
to live riotously at the expense of others.
Only after you've addressed each question in turn can you say something sensible about climate policy. To carry out that program in detail would indeed be a Nobel-worthy achievement. I don't propose to earn my Nobel Prize in this column space, but I can at least offer a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to show you how this stuff works.
First, I'll make the extreme assumption that our environmental recklessness
threatens to shave 1 percentage point off economic growth forever. Because of
compounding, our disposable incomes will be reduced by 9.5 percent a decade from
now and by 63 percent a century from now—perhaps because we'll spend 63 percent of our incomes relocating coastal cities. Now toss in some standard (but arguable) assumptions about risk aversion and discounting. (Note to econogeeks: I assumed a risk-aversion coefficient of 1, and I discounted future generations' welfare at an annual rate of 5 percent, partly because we might care less about them and partly because we're not sure they'll exist.) Run this through your calculator, and you'll find we should spend up to about 17 percent of our incomes on climate control—provided that our investment is effective. That's an expenditure level that I expect would satisfy Al Gore.
Change the numerical assumptions, and you'll change the numerical conclusion. Make the discount rate 1 percent instead of 5 percent, and you can justify spending up to a whopping 62 percent of our incomes on climate control; lower the discount rate to 10 percent, and you can't justify spending more than 8 percent of our
incomes.
The moral of that story is not that economists can justify anything;
it's that assumptions really matter. Therefore you need to be clear about your
assumptions, and you need to be prepared to justify them. If you're not talking
about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you're blathering.
The most thoughtful assessment of climate change is the Stern Review, prepared in October 2006 at the behest of the British government. The Stern Review reaches
conclusions generally compatible with Al Gore's worldview, but only after laying
out the underlying assumptions so clearly that skeptics like me can tinker
around with them and see how the conclusions change. In other words, they've
taken a hot-button issue and reduced it to its constituent pieces so that
opposing parties can stop yelling at each other and say, "Let us calculate."
That's what I call a contribution to world peace. I wish the Nobel Committee had
agreed.

What the falling dollar means for you

2007-10-10T01:55:00.000-07:00

There’s a number of really big macroeconomic issues with such a lop-sided exchange rate.

It’s not coincident that the forex curve fell precipitously just a year and half after W takes office. It continued throughout his much vaunted “tax cuts for the top 5% [trickling down] to help stimulate the economy” and by using interest heavy debt financing.

Ironically, the good advice now is to buttress your wealth/retirement, if you’re rich enough and haven’t already done so, by saving your tax cut windfalls. Then reinvest it into emerging markets like Asia and Latin America, which defeats the purpose of the cuts to begin with. Ugh. Reality bites again.

And the CNBC talking heads who chatter about how that works out for America today because today’s US companies are multinationals, and thus profit from this miss the point. Profits go to shareholders, mostly the top 5%. Labor wages go overseas.

Few Americans benefit. The top 5% want the best returns, so they reinvest their shareholder profits overseas. And since it’s the 95% of US households running now on credit fumes fueling 2/3 of US economic activity, it’s ultimately corrosive to the US economy.

That’s why supply side tax cuts don’t work. They target the wrong people, are debt financed from overseas, and seep the life blood (steadily rising wages) from the economy. That’s why GOP supply-siders are Wild West Doctors trying to heal the American economy.

And the oft-cited exports go up because of a weaker dollar plays to our weakness. Our exports aren’t in more demand because of its rising intrinsic worth. It’s because there’s a yard sale going on and things are cheap. Not to mention that exports play a small part of our economy - a quarter of our GNP.

And end of day, the debt we borrow still need to be paid back, ultimately, in foreign currency.

Sometimes I wish we taught economics in school by starting with personal finance, not orthodox theories that are hard to relate and apply. At the core, economics really isn’t rocket science. It’s just laden with jargon.

Ultimately, it’s about learning to diligently follow where you dollar goes after you spend it and go from there, developing a simple economic model that you fill in with more meat over time.

Having solid savings strategy now is key. To really have your money work harder for you, invest overseas for superior returns. Great vehicles are emerging market index funds, like VWO. Not the best feeling when doing this but necessary for financial well-being.

The mighty U.S. dollar has tumbled over the past five years and is likely to keep falling. Here's how it could change your life.

By Charley Blaine

Thinking about a trip to Europe? Start saving. Because of the weakening U.S. dollar, travel overseas is becoming more expensive.

Even if you don't plan a globe-trotting vacation, the falling dollar may cost you. If the slump gets out of control, it could mean inflation and much higher interest rates for Americans.

The dollar has steadily lost value compared with other major currencies since the end of 2002. Result: The euro has risen more than 70% against the dollar. The Canadian dollar, affectionately known as the loonie, is up more than 60% -- to parity for the first time in more than 30 years. The yen is up about 16%.

The dollar is falling partly because Americans import way more goods than they sell abroad -- especially oil -- and must borrow to close the gap. Another factor: Higher interest rates in Europe and elsewhere make those countries' currencies more valuable.

Consider how this affects your life:

The downsides

Pain at the gas pump will get worse. While growing global oil demand is pushing prices higher, here's the dollar angle: Crude oil is priced in dollars, and oil producers, especially members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, want to be compensated for the dollar's decline.

In most years, the price of crude oil and gasoline declines in the fall. But this year, AAA's daily price survey shows regular unleaded gasoline at about $2.79 a gallon nationally, up 21% from a year ago.

Jim Jubak: Big banks about to lower the boom

You may need to stay home. Let's say you went to Paris in early 2002 and paid 100 euros a night for a room in a moderately priced hotel. That was the equivalent of about $86 a night.

Today, that room would cost $142 a night, a 65% increase.

Ditto for neighboring Canada. Keep that in mind if you want to attend the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Your dream BMW costs more. The base price of a BMW 3 Series sport sedan has risen about 20% over the past five years, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. It's likely to go up more.

Though BMW and other automakers may accept lower profits to stay in the U.S. market, the lower dollar boosts prices for imported food, shoes, chemicals and the like. European governments worry that a dollar in free fall could be a disaster even for Germany, Europe's strongest economy.

And if price competition eases, U.S. companies could gradually charge more for products they sell at home.

Tim Middleton: How to fight back against inflation

Interest rates will rise. Somehow, the U.S. has to finance its trade and government deficits, and, at some point, the investors who provide the cash will want to get paid.

The lenders are banks, pension funds and governments in Europe, China, Japan and oil-producing nations. These investors showed their potential muscle over the summer, when many balked at the terms for purchases of mortgage securities and junk bonds that Wall Street banks wanted to sell.

But there are upsides

U.S. exports will get a boost. The weaker dollar is a boon for U.S. manufacturers because it makes their products more competitive abroad.

One company that sells bakeware made at a factory in Minnesota expects its exports will grow 50% this year because of the weaker dollar, according to The Wall Street Journal.Lay out the welcome mat for foreign tourists. Visitors to the U.S. will find their cash goes further than before, potentially helping the travel business.

The Greater Fort Lauderdale Beachmobile -- a sandbox on wheels that promotes warm beaches and suntans -- usually goes to New York in winter to drum up business for south Florida. This year, it's going to London.

''It's almost un-American, but every time the dollar drops a little lower, it looks a little better for tourism in the U.S.,'' Nicki Grossman, the president of the Fort Lauderdale tourism bureau, told The Miami Herald.

Video: Should you be in or out of the market?

Of course, foreign investors want to buy what they see, pushing property prices higher in key markets like New York.

The falling dollar should help U.S. stocks. All of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU, news, msgs) are big multinationals. Each time one of them translates a profit from, say, Europe, the weaker dollar adds to the bottom line. For example, IBM Corp. (IBM, news, msgs) reported that quarterly revenue rose 9% from a year earlier. Without currency changes, the gain was about 6%.

The weaker dollar is one reason the Dow gained 684 points, or 5.1%, in the 10 trading sessions from Sept. 18 through Monday, when it smashed through 14,000 for the second time in 2007.

Jim Jubak: Kuwait kicks sand on the dollar

This rosy scenario is good at least until the dollar drops so low that U.S. interest rates start to rise. When that happens, things could get nasty -- which is another story.

Update on New Data Published on Benefits of DHA (Omega-3's, e.g. Fish Oil)

2007-09-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

The benefits of DHA supplementation were recently discussed in several publications:

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (August 2007) found that DHA is effective in reducing the level of triglycerides in male hypertriglyceridemic patients. In this study, DHA alone was effective without EPA, the other omega-3 commonly found in fish oil, in reducing triglycerides. Hypertriglyceridemia (high triglyceride levels) in men is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome.

An independent study published in the Society of Biological Psychiatry (July 2007) found a deficit in the total fatty acid composition of the orbitofrontal cortex and found a selective deficit in the level of DHA compared with controls in brain examinations of postmortem patients who had been diagnosed with major depression compared with controls. These findings add to the growing body of evidence showing a correlation between low tissue levels of DHA in neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression.

A study published in Nature Medicine (July 2007) reported that increasing consumption of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, including DHA, reduces destructive vascularization in the retina. In this animal study of retinopathy associated with prematurity, the authors summarize a series of experiments demonstrating that long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, and selected metabolites, are effective in reducing retinal vascular disease, a leading cause of blindness.

The Big Elephantine Squeeze

2007-08-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

The obvious is sometimes so much so that nobody [wants to] pay attention. The media finally sounds the big bugle about the elephant that's been smelling up the room all this time. None of it is rocket science, just [personal] finance 101 that the "punditry" routinely chose to glaze over on the tube and [less so] in print: flat wages + high debt + high market/GDP growth = ?

And it doesn’t help that “pundits” - chatterboxes or slick-talking snake oil salespeople are just as descriptive - play musical chairs knowing that growth can grind to a halt when credit’s overstretched to breakpoint. Yet they fear crying wolf given how vested they are in folks buying into the dogma of everlasting stock market growth - while they divest - business cycles be damned.

Newsweek's "A Widening Credit Squeeze" (August 9th, 2007) aptly frames the issue:

…A credit-card squeeze carries real risks for the U.S. economy overall. “The shift from home-equity borrowing to credit cards is quite costly,” says Smith. Not only are mortgage interest rates about half that of credit-card interest rates, but the interest paid on credit cards isn’t tax-deductible. Smith believes that already-strapped households with little or no savings to rely on will be faced with increased financial obligations that will eventually lead to slower growth in consumer spending. And with consumer spending accounting for about 72 percent of gross domestic product, any slowdown could have a big impact.

Americans are so tapped out financially that they may not be able to stop using plastic no matter how high rates get, says Christian Weller, an economist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progess. “I think credit-card usage could still go up even if rates go up,” says Weller. “The credit market right now is like a balloon that’s being squeezed on the mortgage side and expanding on the credit cards side,” he says. Weller says he’s concerned that credit-card debt has risen dramatically over the past few months, even as growth in consumer spending has slowed. This, he says, is a sign that credit-card borrowing is being used to close a widening household budget gap—that cards are being used to fund housing, transportation and medical care. “I believe what we’re seeing is that consumers are borrowing out of necessity—we’re not talking about a flat-screen TV or iPods here.”

This chart shows how consumer spending has slowed even though credit card use has risen. According to some economists, this may indicate that consumers are increasingly using cards for basic living expenses, rather than luxury items.

Source: Moody's Economy.com, Inc.

For customers who need access to credit but get knocked out of the prime credit-card market due to tightening standards, the only alternative to meet their expenses may be the subprime credit- card market, says Ellen Cannon, assistant managing editor at the financial research group Bankrate.com. And that could put them even deeper into trouble, she says. “What happens with the subprimes is that they’ll give you a $200 credit limit and then they charge you $59 initiation fee and an annual fee of $45. So by signing up, you can be $150 in the hole and your interest rate is 32 percent. It’s highway robbery.”

How long will it take Americans to dig themselves out of their credit hole? Years. “Debt will increase and consumption will weaken in the next year,” says Smith. “But there will come a point when people will either have maxed out their credit or they’ll see their credit rating starting to suffer, and that’s when many of them will decide to get their household balance sheets back in order—probably by sometime in early 2009.” Smith warns, however, that reversing a borrowing trend is “a slow process.” And that’s something anyone who’s ever tried to pay down a big credit-card bill knows firsthand.

I’ve blogged for a while about the overextended American, including a month ago, “It’s the Balance of the Paycheck, Stupid”. That was a response to a posting about the “irrelevance of trade deficit figures”, a oft-popular sentiment during peaks of a financial bubble.

In fact, our growth has run too long on the inferior grade economic fuel that is debt financing, mirroring the Japanese bubble. That bubble was followed by more than a decade of spiraling deflation and economic stagnation that the Japanese are just beginning to recover from.

Now China’s finance ministry’s bold threat recently to withdraw their $1.33 trillion dollar reserves from US treasuries and debt markets if forced to devalue their yuan is doubly potent. (UK's Telegraph - August 10, 2007 - "China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales")

As history tends repeating, a lame-duck administration is acting its part as a modern day Hoover, waiting for the economic fallout to widen before being forced to resort to a last-ditch effort to do something. Even then, it’d be mostly cosmetic laced with rosy sound-bite oratory – doubly impotent & intellectually hallow – as is the low expectations of these past 7 years.

And the non-stop touting of tax cuts as panacea for much of this country's financial maladies, big and small, is a rather sorry linchpin for American economic policy. It also sets a shoddy example and excuse for Americans to heed, akin to deciding to cash the always-plentiful "free-for-now" check-as-cash offers that credit card companies shovel out.

While attractive politically, tax cuts are botched economics when they dig an even bigger financial hole using 100% debt-financing as is the case when a country is in a deep red trillion-dollars+ deficit and chooses to starve itself of tax revenue by refusing to maintain tax rates as is or raise them as needed (like "no voodoo economics" Bush 41 did) and goes about writing a giant nationalized IOU check that in the fine print inevitably also echoes "free-for-now, ballooning-interest-later". All the while, benefits of this tax cut accrue mostly to the wealthy who often reinvest most of that unneeded upside overseas in emerging markets, in order to maximize returns.

And this sums up at root the flaw of the Laffer-inspired "supply-side" economics, in a nutshell*.

Which also means that, bottom line, some serious green and gravy is due Asia and the rest of the world, which they will cash in the not-too-distant future at a time of their choosing, not ours.

* Not-so-nutshell, from Wikipedia:

Estimates of the effectiveness of the Laffer curve

In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office released a paper called "Analyzing the Economic and Budgetary Effects of a 10 Percent Cut in Income Tax Rates" [2] that casts doubt on the idea that tax cuts ultimately improve the government's fiscal situation.
Unlike earlier research, the CBO paper estimates the budgetary impact of possible macroeconomic effects of tax policies, i.e., it attempts to account for how reductions in individual income tax rates might affect the overall future growth of the economy, and therefore influence future government tax revenues; and ultimately, impact deficits or surpluses. The paper's author forecasts the effects using various assumptions (e.g., people's foresight, the mobility of capital, and the ways in which the federal government might make up for a lower percentage revenue).
Even in the paper's most generous estimated growth scenario, only 28% of the projected lower tax revenue would be recouped over a 10-year period after a 10% across-the-board reduction in all individual income tax rates.
The paper points out that these projected shortfalls in revenue would have to be made up by federal borrowing: the paper estimates that the federal government would pay an extra $200 billion in interest over the decade covered by his analysis.
To support these calculations, the paper assumes that the 10% reduction in individual tax rates would only result in a 1% increase in gross national product, a figure some economists consider too low for current marginal tax rates in the United States. [3][4]
The paper appears to focus on Federal government revenue only and does not look at the total public sector revenue (i.e., it does not include increases in local and state government revenue).

The Government's Big Fish Story

2007-07-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

Omega-3's (fish oil) are pretty important to one's health. And luckily, there's lots of good choices - from great-quality ones, to super-quality ones. Some rules of thumb that may be helpful:

1 - molecularly distilled: both have no PCBs, mercury, heavy metals
2 - well-absorbed: enteric coated is best absorbed by intestines, latter is emulsified and goes quickly to bloodstream
> taking omega-3's with food, including fats, also significantly increase absorption
3 - high levels of active ingredients DHA+EPA: 200+240mg vs. 230mg+350mg per dose/capsule, respectively
> effective dose varies, usually 1-3 grams a day of DHA+EPA (assumes ~500mg DHA+EPA total per dose = 2-6 dose a day)
4 - naturally preserved: protected with vitamin E

Thanks to MSN.com, below is a well-written, succinct article about Omega 3's:

The Government's Big Fish Story
By Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Denny Watkins, Men's Health

When Randal McCloy was rushed to West Virginia University Ruby Memorial Hospital's intensive-care unit, he was practically dead. The 27-year-old coal miner had spent 41 hours buried 2 ½ miles underground after an explosion in the Sago, West Virginia, mine where he'd been working. His 12 oxygen-starved colleagues had all perished.

"As far as we know, he survived the longest exposure to carbon monoxide poisoning," says Julian Bailes, M.D., the neurosurgeon assigned to the case. McCloy was in a coma and in deep shock, his heart barely beating, one of his lungs collapsed, his liver and both kidneys shut down. Even if he somehow managed to pull through, doctors predicted McCloy would be severely brain damaged, since the carbon monoxide had stripped the protective myelin sheath from most of his brain's neurons. "It's very difficult to come back from a brain injury," says Dr. Bailes. "There's no drug that can help that."
While McCloy was being given oxygen infusions in a hyperbaric chamber, Dr. Bailes was struck by inspiration: He ordered a daily dose of 15,000 milligrams (mg) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) for the miner. In layman's terms?
"Fish oil," says Dr. Bailes.
Several weeks passed. Then, unexpectedly, McCloy emerged from his coma. This in itself was amazing, but he wasn't done. In the weeks that followed, he stunned even the most optimistic experts by recovering his memory and gradually regaining his ability to walk, talk, and see, a turnaround that many in the medical field called miraculous.
Although Dr. Bailes believes the hyperbaric chamber may have worked some magic on the myelin, he thinks much of the credit belongs elsewhere. "The omega-3s helped rebuild the damaged gray and white matter of his brain," says Dr. Bailes, who now takes his own medicine, swallowing a fish-oil supplement each morning. On his orders, McCloy, still recuperating at home, continues to take fish oil daily. "I would say he should be on it for a lifetime," says Dr. Bailes. "But then, I think everybody should."
70's to Now...Omega 3 fatty acids = the building blocks of your Brain and Heart: DHA + EPA
Maybe what fish oil needed all along was a better publicist. After all, this isn't the medical community's first infatuation with omega-3s. Back in 1970, a pair of Danish researchers, Hans Olaf Bang and Jørn Dyerberg, traveled to Greenland to uncover why the Eskimo population there had a low incidence of heart disease despite subsisting on a high-fat diet. Their finding: The Eskimos' blood contained high levels of omega-3s, establishing the first link to heart health. But even though this discovery spurred additional omega-3 research throughout the '70s and '80s, the public remained more interested in other nutrients—none of which had the unfortunate words "fish" or "fatty" in their names.
There are three types of omega-3s: DHA and EPA, found in fish and marine algae (which is where the fish get them), and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which is found in plants, seeds, and nuts. All three have health benefits, but those attributed to DHA and EPA have sparked renewed interest in recent years. Studies show that this tag team may not only reduce a person's risk of heart disease and stroke but also possibly help prevent ailments as diverse as arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, asthma, autoimmune disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—and those are just the A's. Researchers are now exploring if these multifunctional fats can, among other things, ward off cancer and even make prison inmates less violent.
It's enough to make omega-3 geeks downright giddy.
"Omega-3s are fantastic!" says Jing X. Kang, M.D., Ph.D., a Harvard University researcher who made the news by genetically engineering pigs to produce omega-3s in their meat. "Not just for your heart but also for brain function, immunity function, women's health, children's health — I'm amazed at how important they are."
In fact, some experts argue that omega-3s should be labeled essential nutrients as necessary to health as, say, vitamins A and D. "They're involved in the metabolism of each individual cell," says Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D., a physician and the president of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health in Washington, D.C. "They're part of your body's basic nutrition."
...
Early Man: From 1-lb brain to 3-lb supercomputers
"Not very glamorous, is he?" says Jane Crowther, senior director of Omega Protein's Health and Science Center. It's hard to disagree: I've come to the nation's largest fish-oil refinery, in Reedville, Virginia, and now that I'm face to fin with what a poster on the wall calls "MENHADEN...THE WONDERFISH!" I'm not exactly awestruck. Bony, oily, and without much meat, the menhaden isn't even considered edible by most people. And yet, hidden inside is a substance that some anthropologists claim was critical to our very evolution; without it, they say, we'd still have brains like chimps'.
Ask most scientists and they'll tell you that Stone Age man evolved on the African savannas, developing his big, complex brain as a result of all the animals he'd hunt and eat. But most scientists would be wrong, according to Michael Crawford, Ph.D., who, along with researchers from the USDA, conducted a 2002 study challenging the prevailing theory, which he calls "a load of rubbish."
Crawford, the director of London's Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, argues that many other savanna mammals also subsisted on meat, but none developed our megabrains. "And with their strong jaws and sharp teeth, they were far better equipped to eat flesh than we were," he says. Yet relative to their growing bodies, those animals' brains actually shrank, while man's brain expanded from a 1-pound processor to a 3-pound supercomputer.
What were we dining on that the rest of the Paleolithic crowd wasn't? Crawford has a three-letter answer: DHA. "The human brain is soaking in DHA," he says. "It is the only substance that supports that level of neural development and cognitive function."
And lo and behold, paleontologists have found evidence that early man lived along the coasts of southern Africa, leaving behind mounds of fossilized shells and other table scraps. Crawford points out that catching fish would have been a heck of a lot easier than snaring four-legged prey. Children and pregnant women could wade in and collect mollusks themselves, feeding young brains in the process. Studies show that DHA helps secure the connections between brain cells, especially in utero, when pregnant women can increase their babies' IQs by as many as six points.
While the savanna-versus-seashore debate will continue (Emory University researchers recently fired their own scientific salvo at Crawford's theory), no one can dispute that we're veritable meat-eating machines today. The average American ate only 16.2 pounds of fish in 2005, but consumed 195 pounds of meat. And although our livers can manufacture tiny amounts of DHA and EPA when we eat lots of ALA-rich nuts and seeds, these aren't exactly our favorite foods, either.
"6 and 3 got out of whack"
Changing agricultural techniques have worsened the situation. The natural omega-3 contents of meat, milk, and eggs have plummeted now that our livestock no longer graze on ALA-rich grass, instead consuming corn, wheat, and other grains that are loaded with another group of fatty acids, called omega-6s. In fact, the disappearance of omega-3s from our diets has coincided with an upsurge in omega-6s, mainly in the form of cereals, grains, and processed foods made with hydrogenated oils. Dr. Simopoulos estimates that in caveman days, we ate an equal amount of the two types, but that the average American now eats 16 times more omega-6s than omega-3s.
"That's what's really killing us," says Lands. "The balance of 6 and 3 got out of whack." These two types of fatty acids have a biochemical yin-and-yang relationship: While omega-3s reduce our body's inflammation response, omega-6s encourage it. Each fatty acid is crucial: For example, if your inflammatory response is too weak, you won't be able to fight infection properly. And in theory, the push and pull should create perfect balance. Instead, the excess of omega-6s in our diets may have left us in a perpetual state of inflammation.
"The reason you take ibuprofen and Celebrex and all those nonsteroidals is to prevent the manufacture of these inflammation molecules in the first place," says Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., a neuroscientist with the NIH. "The mental picture I have is of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, where the finger is expensive pharmacology, and the flood is omega-6s."
"Put us out of business with fish oil"
Andrew McGeehin had limped for the past half century. "Stupid football," mutters the 83-year-old resident of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He tore up his right knee in his 30s, and despite surgery and drugs, the pain gradually became enough to wake him at night. Finally, McGeehin's orthopedist, Thomas Meade, M.D., suggested that he take an omega-3 supplement. "I wasn't expecting much. But I figured I'd tried everything else," says McGeehin, who began swallowing fish oil along with his usual dose of the anti-inflammatory drug Voltaren. One week later, McGeehin was startled to realize that the stiffness in his knee was gone. He was able to walk with the easy, fluid stride of a younger man.
"Dr. Meade must be a genius!" McGeehin says today, though Dr. Meade himself explains it more modestly: "I read the literature. There's a plethora of evidence supporting the benefit of omega-3s for joint pain." He cites a 2006 University of Pittsburgh study of 125 people with neck and back pain, in which 60 percent of participants reported having less pain after taking omega-3s. And clinical studies on rheumatoid arthritis suggest that patients who take a daily dose may be able to cut back on their meds.
Indeed, in the 2 years in which Dr. Meade has been recommending omega-3s to his patients, he's seen a major shift in his orthopedic practice. "I almost never prescribe anti-inflammatories now," he says. "My staff kids me that I'll put us out of business with fish oil."
"Internal ice pack"
Omega-3s act as a sort of internal ice pack, in part because they spur our bodies to produce several inflammation-lowering substances. "Omega-3s work along the same biochemical pathway as a COX-2 inhibitor, such as Vioxx, but farther upstream," says Dr. Meade, meaning that omega-3s treat the underlying problem rather than the symptoms. And emerging research indicates that this powerful ability to ease inflammation is one of the ways omega-3s may help prevent a number of ailments, including...
Heart attack and stroke
Cardiologists now believe that chronic inflammation triggers the release of artery-blocking plaque. In the most definitive study to date, published in the Lancet, heart-attack survivors who took 900 mg fish oil daily were 30 percent less likely to die of a second heart attack, and 20 percent less likely to suffer a stroke, than those who skipped the supplement.
Omega-3s can guard your arteries in other ways, too, since they also lower triglycerides and make blood vessels more elastic. Add in their ability to improve electrical communication between cardiac cells, thereby preventing arrhythmia, and you can see why omega-3s are a standard part of cardiac care in Europe. If you have a heart attack in Italy, France, Britain, or Spain, the hospital will even send you home with a prescription for Omacor, a "medication" that's superpurified DHA and EPA.
Alzheimer's disease
Though not yet conclusive, research suggests that runaway brain inflammation may cause Alzheimer's disease. In a 2007 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, elderly men who consumed 350 mg DHA and EPA daily experienced less cognitive decline than those who swallowed only 15 mg a day. And researchers at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, in Chicago, found that people who ate fish at least once a week were significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than those who ate more turf than surf.
Prostate cancer
It's estimated that chronic inflammation is the culprit in 20 percent of all cancers, and that may include many cases of prostate cancer. In a 2003 Harvard study that tracked nearly 48,000 men over 12 years, researchers discovered that the men who ate fish three times a week were 25 percent less likely to develop metastatic prostate cancer than those who dined on less. However, a recent (and hotly debated) study review in the Journal of the American Medical Association says clear proof of cancer protection is still lacking.
Depression
Could fish be the ultimate mood food? Ohio State University researchers recently analyzed blood samples from 43 older adults and found that a high omega-6 to low omega-3 ratio corresponded to elevated inflammation and more symptoms of depression. This and previous research suggest that eating more fatty fish or supplementing with omega-3s could help us beat the blues.
...
Columbia's Akabas agrees, which is why her Institute of Nutrition has come out with a bold endorsement. "We think the whole U.S. population would benefit from an upward shift in omega-3 intake, and we don't see any downside," she says. "So our recommendation is to not wait until the research becomes definitive. It's time to examine the development of a DRI."
...
Pick the Perfect Fish-Oil Supplement
Purity
When Consumerlab.com tested 41 fish-oil supplements, none was found to contain unsafe levels of mercury, PCBs, or dioxins. One explanation is that many brands are now molecularly distilled to remove any possible contaminants.
Dosage
Ignore the total milligrams (mg) of fish oil, and focus instead on the combined eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). You want a supplement that contains at least 500 mg per dose or serving. If you're on blood tinners, talk to your doctor about the best dosage.
Form
Your choice is basically capsules or a liquid. They're equally effective at delivering omega-3s to your bloodstream, so go with the form you think you'll take on a daily
basis.
Fish Burp
Some people experience this as their stomachs dissolve the fish-oil capsule. Beat the burp by buying enteric-coated capsules or freezing regular capsules. Either strategy will cause the fish oil to be released in your intestine instead, says William Harris, Ph.D., a professor of medicine and biomedical sciences at the University of South
Dakota.
Ratio
The ratio of EPA to DHA used in research varies, but most supplements are made with a 3:2 split. This translates to 300 mg EPA and 200 mg DHA in a 500 mg supplement.
Source
Any fish oil will do, be it from mackerel or menhaden, salmon or sardines. Supplements made from algae oil contain only DHA, and those made from flaxseed oil have alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), only a little of which can be converted into EPA and DHA by your body.
Antioxidants
Once inside your body, omega-3s can quickly lose their power due to oxidation. Look for vitamin E, a.k.a. tocopherol, an antioxidant that can neutralize free radicals.
More on Omega-3 Fatty Acids on MSN Health & Fitness:
· Reality Check: Omega-3 Fatty Acids
· The Cholesterol Connection
· Check Your Oil
· Share Your Thoughts on Omega-3s
Provided by Men's Health
http://health.msn.com/general/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100166680>1=102 a 12

The Tale of Two Silent Economies

2007-07-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

Coincident to my last post, there is a story in today's NYT about Taiwan being the Silent Hands Behind the iPhone.

It's stunning that Americans are mostly silent, in this case satisfied with ourselves sans any competitiveness policy, other than promoting free-trade (important, but not sufficient in of itself) and outsourcing to the bottom of the value chain, neglecting the bread-and-butter policy work that is the formulation of a top-level national policy to consistently engender next-generation R&D sectors and the basis for the next round of new markets and technologies (and better jobs).

There's no good reason why we shouldn't be accruing the high-end value of this economic supply chain. Consider what happens when Apple eventually outsources the iPhone + iPod's design overseas - perhaps Cupertino can continue to be the bastion of avant garde sales and marketing.

...Taiwan’s evolution from computer-making giant to telecommunications Goliath has gone largely unnoticed in the United States because companies here make most of their money as made-to-order manufacturers, not sellers of their own brand products.
But Taiwan’s industrial makeover has helped its companies remain competitive in a world increasingly dominated by low-cost Chinese assemblers and by Japanese and South Korean companies with strong footholds in high-end components like flash memory chips. The strategy of repackaging — finding new uses for computer components — has paid dividends.
Companies on the island have captured 87 percent of the global market for wireless modems, 84 percent of the D.S.L. modem market and 70 percent of the market for personal digital assistants. In the competitive cellphone business, Taiwan companies made 12.4 percent of the world’s handsets last year, up from 9.8 percent in 2005, according to the Institute for Information Industry, a government-affiliated research center. That share is expected to grow as brand-name companies like Sony Ericsson outsource more of their production to companies here. In all, Taiwan companies produced $31.5 billion in communications equipment and services last year, more than 50 percent above the total the year before, according to the institute, which expects production to reach a value of $46 billion by 2010.
Less than a quarter of that was manufactured on Taiwan, with the bulk made on the Chinese mainland. “It’s been a fairly natural progression because handsets are really a mini-version of the PC, and Taiwanese are adept at adjusting,” said Gary Chia, president of the Yuanta Research Center.
The transformation did not happen by accident. As in much of Asia, the government played an active role in steering businesses into new markets by showering them with tax incentives, cheap property to build factories and research money. Companies on Taiwan have also been able to shift gears smoothly because the concentration of component producers on the island has made it easier to gather the technology and engineers to design and assemble new products....
...The iPhone is a great example of where Taiwan is still strong: reliable sourcing, leading technology and complex integration,” said Allen J. Delattre, chief of the electronics and high-technology practice at the consulting firm Accenture. “Does the average person who buys an iPhone know it’s from Taiwan? Maybe. Do they care? Probably not. But if you look at the companies in Taiwan, they are behind the scenes, and that’s a good place to be because that’s where the value is.”
...The key for Taiwan companies, Mr. Delattre and other analysts said, is to invest in next-generation products early. For example, companies here are fast becoming important players in the development of WiMax wireless and fiber optic broadband equipment. They are again getting a healthy push from the government, which is spending more than $200 million over five years to help create the world’s largest high-speed WiMax network. By next year, with 2,000 base stations spread across the island, companies will be able to start testing new applications, like the sending of video from ambulances on their way to hospitals. “We are trying to make the infrastructure more complete,” said Tsung-Tsong Wu, deputy minister of the National Science Council, which has a $1 billion annual budget. “If the highways are built, companies can go as fast as they like.”

It's the Balance of Paycheck, Stupid

2007-07-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

This is homage to a thought-provoking post by Charles Fitzgerald's Platformnomics titled "It's the Balance of Profits, Stupid". Commenting on renowned economists Hal Varian (information) and Gregory Mankiw's (macroeconomics) exchange that bilateral trade balances (aka balance of trade, the source of our big national bogeyman, the trade deficit), both economists suggest the such deficits matter less than you think, when you consider that we Americans are soaking up a lot of the profits.

On the other hand, I suppose what would concern a *labor* (Mincer) vs. an information-(Varian) or macro-(Mankiw) economist is that more than two-thirds of our economy is driven by consumer spending, spurred on by net job gains, concomitant with wages + credit-use growth.

And while we steadily export hourly jobs to China, the same can't be said that domestic jobs are being replaced fast enough by "new economy" markets that stimulate and provide for net new jobs (be it measured by headcount or aggregate wages), as orthodox economic theory prescribes: Think new Boeing Dreamliner as a pertinent business model, which invests in R&D locally, sources internationally for its composite inputs and garners 80,000+ net new high-wage *manufacturing* jobs, or think of Toyota's hybrid investments in Japan while sourcing lower-end car manufacturing to rest of world.

As Mankiw indicated, the economic and trade balance numbers aren't "fake"; rather international trade can be very nuanced and certain views of [bilateral] trade have very little concrete economic meaning. What is troubling for me is that for a while now, many think of new information-based markets as the economic panacea, asserting that as long as corporate profits grow, little else matter.

This faction also imply that a significant portion of corporate profits accrue to workers' [wages]. Others, like myself, assert that growing profits accrue to investors and the owners of capital like Apple's Jobs, but collectively, American workers haven't benefited much, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute (below chart), seems to be disproportionately so.

Source: Economic Policy Institute, “When do workers get their share?” Economic Snapshot, May 27, 2004.
Data from the National Income and Product Accounts, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Dept. of Commerce.

And thus, unsurprisingly, most Americans have resorted to "house-of-credit-cards" financing that continues to encourage end-to-end economic exuberance, now greatly over-leveraged, to the point that currently the U.S. has a net negative 0.5-1% *dis-savings* rate.

One fundamental indicator of "dis" trend is the stagnant wage growth of the past 6+ years, and, according to the progressive Center for American Progress, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that the biggest employment gains were:

"...largely concentrated in three industries: government employment, with 40,000 new jobs—all of them occurring at the state and local government level. In addition, health care and restaurants, two sectors that have shown remarkable job strength throughout the past few years, added 42,300 and 34,600 new jobs, respectively.

In comparison, the construction sector, which had provided a lot of labor market momentum before the residential housing boom came to an end in late 2005, added only 12,000 new jobs, almost all of which happened in nonresidential construction. Residential construction employment was essentially flat, reflecting the continued weakness in the housing sector..."

This comparatively weak job growth has also contributed to slowing wage growth:

"...Hourly wages for production, ...workers who make up about 80 percent of the workforce rose by 0.3 percent in June 2007. Hourly wages in June were 3.9 percent higher than a year earlier. This is down from a monthly growth rate of 0.4 percent in May and a year-over-year change of 4.0 percent in May.

This slower wage growth comes after inflation-adjusted hourly earnings already declined in March, April, and May. In fact, after accounting for inflation [~2.5-3% average], hourly and weekly earnings in May 2007, the last month for which data are available, were the lowest since September 2006. That is, because of weak job growth, workers do not have the bargaining power to keep wage growth at least in line with price changes.

Just because job growth is better than expected doesn’t mean that it is strong. It is certainly welcome news that the economy is seeing some unexpected employment gains, but these are happening in a labor market that has been struggling for years to find a foothold. Workers who are burdened by high prices and near-record amounts of household debt need faster job and wage growth, not lowered expectations."

Deficits in the end will matter when the ratio of wages-to-credit reach a critical mass and profit growth collapse as credit-driven expansion slow drastically, unless wages rise and we pay down our debt by saving a larger portion of our income.

Which ironically means that, meanwhile, the Chinese with their 1.33 trillion dollar reserves and other Asian net savers who have chosen to buy fewer iPods and such, at least to-date, have been fulfilling our money needs via global credit markets, yet are just financing their own demand and having Americans ultimately own the IOUs in the end.

That is, unless wage growth re-align to be more proportional to our consumer spending rate, and that is doubtful at this point. We may now be at the cusp of such a slowdown, with housing and mortgage markets steadily deflating; only time will tell.

And like nobody definitively knows many decades later what exactly the tipping point was for the Great Depression, nobody can say now what that "breaking point" wage-to-credit ratio is. But smart folks like Warren Buffet to the economic arbiters @ NBER assert that at some point, net (not bilateral) trade balances indeed have to balance, e.g. be paid back within a bounded future time horizon.

And for more then a decade, the vaunted consumer economic workhorse has largely been using inferior-grade credit-subsidized monies to drive this spectacular market boom (and help to top DJIA's 14,000+ in a record time).

Many seasoned economists and market pros see few economic fundamentals to justify this torrid rise, other than US companies vested in rapidly-growing, savings-rich developing markets whose populations and incomes are booming thus demanding basic infrastructure and commodities, which do benefit US trade and engender spectacular returns for emerging market ETF-holders.

Still, it's important to understand that trade only account for a quarter of US economic activity/GDP, and as such, there's a real need here-and-now to reform American economic policy to be more balanced and to hone in on improving the economic health of its citizenry and government.

A concrete start would be something along lines of bread-and-butter Consumer Economics 101 kicking it off at elementary education onward, significantly more savings incentives and education, greatly expanding R&D credits and loans, to pay-as-you-go gov't spending.

But it seems Americans tend to thrive under duress, and until one exerts itself, many will probably continue to assume that Tulips=Profits.

FDR - Another Smith Tour De Force

2007-07-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

Until Jean Edward Smith's biography of FDR came along (his other being the immaculate work on Chief Justice John Marshall), there was nothing interesting that I wanted to post about or read in a long time (last good presidential work I read was Doris Goodwin's Lincoln bio, A Team of Rivals). Then a week ago, I picked up a copy at my trusty Costco book section, after which there was nary a waking moment when I didn't find myself turning each page to see how the story would "unfold"; I just finished it. Another brilliant, insightful work, balanced introspective about the man, and the same time deftly crafts a story of the times that makes FDR so larger than life, not of decades ago, but someone who is immediate, intimate, and continues to impact contemporary events and times.

Quantasic

2006-11-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

I’m reading what most would consider dry, but to me pretty interesting, book on the history of modern physics. It really gets my juices going not to mention that it has a very human narrative, which goes a long way to convey the sense of excitement and awe that scientists get at comprehending the most fundamental, mysterious parts of nature and the universe.

Plus it has a great title too: Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century

Fishing for a good mood

2006-08-11T14:38:00.002-07:00

Some new research from Israel show that good mood and brain health is not just about having enough Omega-3’s (e.g. fish and its oils), it’s also about its proportion with Omega-6's (e.g. corn and soy oils, etc.).

Today most of us need to eat a lot more 3's and a lot less 6's.

Not that hard and it ain’t rocket science to do. Your local Costco carries Kirkland Signature™ Enteric Coated Extra Strength Fish Oil Concentrate for a whole 6 cents each. And it's molecularly distilled so there's no mercury, PCBs or dioxins.

A bit of rocketry if you're so inclined:

Omega-6's bring on increased cellular inflammation, the breakdown of cells through oxidation, which as loosened oxygen-based molecules, aka oxides, react and break apart cellular membranes (e.g. heart, brain, skin, basically everything between your head and toe).

Omega-3's, in addition to being the premier brain food cited below, is also a potent antioxidant, a molecular agent that absorbs those oxidative molecules and helps maintain cellular integrity. They also constitute roughly half of the essential fatty acids (aka Omega-3's) that is your brain.

A diet high in omega-3 and low in omega-6 beats the blues

By PsychologyToday.com

The evidence has been mounting for several years that the best way to ensure a bright mood—and a strong heart and working joints—is to consume plenty of cold-water fish, because they are rich in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. These fats, basic components of nerve cell membranes, facilitate all kinds of transactions in the brain, and one net effect is to keep depression at bay. It is through the fat-rich cell membrane that all nerve signals must pass—think of it as a kind of gatekeeper of the mind.

Now, from Israel, comes another piece of evidence linking omega-3s to mood states. And it confirms what many scientists have suspected all along. It isn't just that you need to consume omega-3 fats; at the same time you need to cut back on foods and fats that are loaded with omega-6 fatty acids, which are found in soy and corn oil.

The Israelis found that animals exhibiting the signs of depression have increased levels of an omega-6 fatty acid in their brains. Not only may depression result from a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids, it may also result from an excess of omega-6s.

This so-called "phospholipids hypothesis" of depression has been supported by research showing that omega-3 fatty acid concentrations in the blood of depressed patients is lower than that in nondepressed people. The assumption is that low fatty-acid levels in the blood reflect low fatty acid levels in the brain. But most of the evidence is indirect, because it's not possible to examine the brain tissue of people directly.

The Israeli researchers, using an animal model of depression, found that the depressed animals and nondepressed animals had about the same levels of omega-3 fats in the brain. But they dramatically differed in levels of omega-6s, particularly arachidonic acid.

"The finding that in the depressive rats the omega-3 fatty acid levels were not decreased, but arachidonic acid was substantially increased as compared to controls, is somewhat unexpected," the researchers reported. "But the finding lends itself nicely to the theory that increased omega-3 fatty acid intake may shift the balance between the two fatty acid families in the brain. It has been demonstrated in animal studies that increased omega-3 fatty acid intake may result in decreased brain arachidonic acid."

Omega-6 fatty acids compete in the body with omega-3s. Consume an excess of omega-6s and they displace the omega-3s. The catch is, you need a proper balance of omega-6 and omega-3 intake for cells to function optimally.

Here is one of the central ironies of the American diet: While consuming too much fat overall and too much saturated fat, many North Americans fail to consume enough polyunsaturated omega-3s.

And they consume too many omega-6s. These are also polyunsaturated oils, and they're widely recommended as healthful for the heart. They're also widely used in cooking, frying and in prepared foods—corn, safflower and sunflower oils—have almost no omega-3s. Instead they are loaded with omega-6s.

Canola oil and walnut oil are highly recommended because of their fat make-up. Omega-3 fats also appear to have been integral parts of the diets of our prehistoric ancestors. Although the amount of omega-3s in the food supply has radically dropped in the past hundred years, eons of evolution have custom-crafted our brains and bodies to depend on them for basic biochemical maneuvers.

So adding seafood to your diet is only half the story. It's essential to cut out sources of corn oil and soy oil—almost ubiquitous in margarine, fried foods and commercial salad dressings. They contain a predominance of omega-6s.

By cutting out soy oil and corn oil, and using olive oil instead, you can, virtually double the effect of any fish that you eat, scientists believe. Plus, that brings you closer to a Mediterranean diet—more like the diet on which mankind evolved, and which our bodies are basically suited for.

Gates charity gives $500M for AIDS care

2006-08-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

This is just terrific.

But much more is needed; G-8 governments need to step up.
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14269506/:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took its support of AIDS-related research and care to a new level Wednesday, announcing a $500 million grant to an international fund that provides AIDS assistance in poor countries.

Some musings...redux

2006-08-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

I realized a while back that sometimes one can take their background and life experiences for granted. And once in a while, you get some time to really think and, in some cases, realize all over again that everyone's history and life experiences are truly unique.

I wrote something a couple nights back to someone that I thought would also be of value in shedding light on my background and core beliefs. In other words, get to what motivates my thoughts on religion, science, and history more deeply, delving into who I am as the political/economic creature you read and see here today.

Altogether, it's sort of a redux of my other blog musing. So here goes:

My grandfather was a general in the Taiwanese army who marshalled the front lines, later emigrating from Communist China to Taiwan as Mao slaughtered millions. I know many stories of what our family experienced; many in our extended family were left behind and suffered Mao's reformation labor camps and torture. (Eerily, my grandfather went to the same high school as Mao). We were fortunate enough to escape. Thus, we were all instilled with a strong sense of duty, honor, self, and the recognition of the importance of knowledge, history and one's critical thinking. However uncomfortable, many Chinese know Mao's red book mesmerized countless to kill millions (estimates range between 40-80 million dead during his reign).

Growing up, I experienced poverty first-hand and saw those without, regardless of merit, who just didn't have a shot at opportunity. And as a Christian for 10 years, then full of hope for true salvation baptized and seeking redemption as a confessed sinner who believed, I witnessed how people who in Christ's name acted less than what Christ would've liked. It all only increased my resolve to find things out for myself, with science as guide - open and self-critical, and providing a consistent model to compare and contrast things as they were, not how they should or claim to be.
Throughout my life, I've always respected people of faith. There are many of faith I've come to known whose deeds follow principled actions that I've always had the most sincere and utmost respect for. Charlie Rose recently interviewed notable scientist Francis Collins (38 minutes on), Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, whose book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief", speaks to the meaningful coexistence of science and faith. It is an open assessment and would be a good counter to my musing; his assertion that science has no domain or relevance in things religious and vice versa is central to faith and one's religious beliefs.
In recent years, I've just grown increasingly concerned about the religious extremism in this country that has fomented as an ex-ante response to Muslim fundamentalism. When we happen to be the superpower, every step we take wields enourmous influence to literally uplift or destroy millions of lives in our lifetime. The musing was essentially a reactionary piece arising from today's proponderance to treat science and critical reasoning as throw-away commodities.
...Science is about bearing repeatable, testable experiments to expand and apply our body of knowlege for the betterment of mankind, and making predictions that verifiably withstands serious, repeated and transparent peer review and scrutiny.
I strongly stand by the scientific method and its processes, which however seemingly mundane, has afforded humanity in a relatively short time of less then a hundred years to control the wanderings of the smallest electrons and photons. Or comprehending the nuances for preventing the spread of malaria which kills thousands of African children nightly. Or allowing mothers of sick newborns to bear hope that one day we'll bear witness to humanity stopping AIDS and its various mutations in its tracks, and in such a way that everyone will be able to afford a vaccine treatment.
Bill and Melinda Gates deserve superlative kudos for their efforts, both in deeds and in principles. Not many people (Warren Buffet excepted) in their position have stepped up like they. Perhaps as a economics afficiendo, like Jeffrey Sachs and Bono, those numbers are more real to me than most - many are lives that could be saved for a quarter a day. And if someone gave up a quarter of their food a day, they could save more than 50 souls. It troubles me that that isn't the case, despite our best stated intentions and promises as a nation and people.
I've come to believe that society suffers a lot more than is obvious when religion and science mix, especially when one claims to be the other and vice versa, using each as pawns in a larger political battle to undermine each other.
...Very particularly when a growing number of extremists absolve or ignore suffering and violence as part of a necessary God-given, Calvinistic, order, e.g. the numerous end-times prophesies that see a holy war between Christendom and Islamists as an inevitability versus heeding Christ's words of "loving one's neighbors" or "let those without sin judge..." or that "noone will know the hour or the day" of Christ's return.
...This includes not seriously moving the mideast peace efforts forward today in a real attempt to stop the bloodletting of innocents, thus implicitly acknowledging such war as a natural order of things to come, etc.
At the end of the day (no pun intended), this slippery slope mutes if not deadens a society's will and aspirations, as JFK put it, "to lift all boats" irrespective of religious creed, race, color, sex or geography (or as Warrent Buffet deadpans "womb-based economics"), and subverts the positive forces and developments accrued thus far this past hundred years, parlaying it instead into increasing cynicism and despair.
Since when I was a deeply religious Christian to present-day, I've always passionately believed in a liberal democracy and deliberation between its body politic and sciences, e.g. stem cell research is not the next a-bomb but should be carefully regulated to avoid human cloning. And liberal in the political science sense of minorities having an equal of a voice as the majority.
I believe that we disregard extremism's slippery slope at our own peril; accepting such cases as [inevitable] reality is catostrophic for humanity. Just in the last ten years: in Yugloslavia where a democracy let its majority vote for and carry out genocide on its religious minority slaughtering hundreds of thousands or over a million and a half people dead in Rhwanda or the 5,600 civillians who were killed in Iraq for May/June alone or 9/11's 3,000 dead.
...They're all based on distorted belief systems and stories that do little else but perpetuate hate that infects subsequent generations, where the horridly wrong acts of killing and slaughtering become a righteous one with rewards to be had in the afterlife - an unbeatable promise and operational war doctrine.
We dare not stand by and do nothing. And here at home, secular science and critical reasoning and all the benefit that it affords is losing ground to all our detriment because society's grown complacent and come to take its fruits for granted as the British, French, Spanish and many before have, with similar belief that God was on all their side(s) as well.

In conclusion, society's at its best when religious expression thrives in coexistence with a secular society that firmly respects it, and vice versa. An imbalance is in no one's interest. Christianity as it stands today is very different then where it stood when I attended a Billy Graham crusade in Anaheim, California more then a decade ago and was deeply touched by his message. I still prefer Billy Graham but his is a waning voice seldomly heard today.

Some history lesson

2006-07-24T22:24:00.000-07:00

While the following just wasn't one of the smartest pieces of mail I've received; nonetheless this was in my Hotmail today (followed by my response):

Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 2:11 PM
Subject: FW: History Lesson...

Evolve not involve.

In the early years, humans existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer & would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundations of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups: L&C Liberals and Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early human ancestors were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as "the Conservative movement."

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as 'girliemen.'

Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy and group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years conservative came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass. Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare.

Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't "fair" to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to "govern" the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America.

They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get MORE for nothing. Here ends today's lesson in world history:

It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it. A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other "true believers".

My raw two cents follow. If you don’t like raw, delete the mail. If you dig raw (sashimi variety), read on. Thought it only fair I should respond in kind. I wanted to title mine drunk v. sober but then that’s not as fresh as evolve not involve, whatever that’s suppose to mean.

Anyways.

The schoolyard tales that get passed around so proudly as super deep conservative thought these days. It’s overdone, too self-stroking and ample congratulations for all its brethrens to revel in. Get a room already.

If conservatives can swivel away from Fox News for a few and consider by their lonesome selves that the British too had their share of proud surefooted apologists who thumped their chests, full of bravado, of apparent might and righteousness right before their empire crashed and burned around them.

Romans, French, Spanish empires…the list goes on. To imagine that conservative dogma today is in any way original v. just rehash of dogma spewed and regurgitated many a times over in history is typical kool-aid overdose and delusional egomania, of the ideological and groupthink variety.

The below tries to denigrate a whole class of people, roughly half of Americans who happen to live in richer, more colored “blue” states, who also happen to account for the majority of this country’s GDP.

Which is plain odd since the wealthiest men in the world are hardy Democrats (Gates, Buffet et al). Hmm, let’s crack that wider. Name the 100 wealthiest Americans. Tell me how many actual Republicans there are. Go by % of 100 or just total wealth of top 100.

My god, I mean talk about something measurable and comparable already, just this once - so we can at least try to keep score. Go ahead, amuse me. Amuse yourself.

And yah, liberals are nuanced creatures. Guess physicists are liberals. But then what would we do without the electron, eh?

And liberals like to govern. Someone’s got to do it. By George if W is and he seems to like it.

Others like abstracted long-term thinking. That no doubt includes nerdy do-goody-Gates to those damn physicists working on the nonsense that is string theory, just ruining our country.

Other libs like to invent. And damn those liberal Japanese inventing hybrids beating down our lame big-2 ½ (again), perpetuating the liberal meltdown of environment propaganda, nm Greenland ice caps melting or record worldwide temps or first-time ever 102 degrees in Seattle.

With liberals, it just takes a rainbow. Omg, end of days are surely upon us.

Conservatives have to wait until it hits them in the face (Katrina pun intended), otherwise who cares….if $’s can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist – as if economics is a perfect science, and coming from me that’s saying a lot.

Conservatives abhor nuance and prefer simpler worldviews, e.g. we hard working, liberals lazy bums (thump, thump). To believe that one’s superior based on a mockery tale mimicking a history lesson is what’s that word besides liberal-wannabe’ - oh right, ludicrous, a big nice juicy liberal word that’s just so right on.

It also belies a major weakness of the conservative movement today – the obsession with simple tales & short stories that’s made into “horse-sense”, which scary enough takes a life of its own becoming hard rules of thumb and conservatives’ worldview of reality.

Sadly, actual reality show that horse-sense to be all wrong and brimful of excuses, a la why invade Iraq with its two-dozen before and after versions of excuses, budget-deficit BS that’s just repressed shame for all conservatives, to whatever top issues are choice news this week.

If you can’t find any, email & I’ll happily oblige.

More damning is W and Co’s inability to address measurable evidence and facts, particularly contrary ones without resorting to continued blaming of that not in charge party (lame), rehashing Fox News’ sound-bites, conspiracy theories, immeasurable and incomparable “facts…of faith”, take 3 for giggles:
fight them over there so we can help arouse a whole new Arab extremist army all so we don’t fight them over here,
tax cuts through debt-spending somehow equal more money for government coffers and increase net growth,
spending a trillion dollars without being a hair-closer to bin Laden is cheap and on the money in return for a hoped for middle east freedom that a big multi-generational war will surely bring – nm Halliburton to (fill in the blank).
Mash those and a few more up and you get bastardized neocon “horse-sense”, which today then gets bantered about as core conservative “principles.”

It’s not what Buckley had in mind. But then, like Goldwater and Nixon, he’s probably considered a lame liberal by now, so who cares.

Sure, liberals by nature were born to consider both or more sides to an issue, and spend too much time squandering and bickering among themselves and over think…. “Over” in the sense that it has not helped us win or kick-ass in the school-yard bully fights and one-line frat-boy bagging now aka the elections.

So congrats, reality-TV politics finally comes to age in the states.

But when one considers the current Republican fracas over just 3 things - stem cell research, gay marriage and fiscal imprudence, it’s obvious deep thinking is not their forte. Still, brilliant crafting of one-liners like “flip-flop” and "girliemen" – bravo, well-done, genius.

I’m sure that’s what the founding fathers had in mind.

And true believers, boy haven’t they caused enough trouble (and wars and genocides). Right-wing conservatives are proudly “true believers” of one certain absolute truth, perceived or otherwise – an honor that happens to be proudly shared by fascists.

Liberals do this critical thinking deal that can actually lead to flip-flopping (gasp) based on what peer-reviewed evidence suggests. Liberals actually deal with, dare I say, different and multiple points of view and, gasp again, science (the stem-cell, not creationist, kind).

After all, someone’s got to cure a disease if prayer, however steadfast, fails.

Sure they’re also the ones that go on to lose 'em well-argued and debated American elections yet win those snobby, liberal-drenched, self-absorbed Nobel Prizes in the sciences and those really snobby ones in literature. Go figure.

Yah, ignorance may be bliss, and if things weren’t so fucked up, I’d be laughing my head off right now too, like hilariously and loud even.

But as the world has become fucked up beyond recognition in way too many cases, I just feel sorry for the writer (and readers who feel such pride, if not outright titillation) of this misguided, caricatured homily - evangelical self-righteousness intact - that is today’s bastardized, intellectually-starved neoconservative.

Of fish and evolution

2006-04-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Just for kicks, I was following up on a statement I heard on Discovery Channel - and considering the recent news of the missing land-sea species link makes this even more pertinent perhaps - so was doing some well-rounded reading and came upon these gems.

To preface, I’m pretty passionate about this because it has really changed my life for the better. Something simple that when consistently and sufficiently done greatly influences one’s well-being, mental acuity, and physiological health.

An angle that probably doesn’t get a lot of airplay and thus not a lot of people know about is that Omega 3 fatty acids (e.g. fish oils) were/are crucial to human evolution, particularly for the significant growth of the frontal lobe of the hominid brain.

Regardless of how fish has been bastardized these days by modern marketing thus so negatively perceived as something for health nuts, over fished, or tainted by our man-caused mercury contamination - though smaller, cold-water fish like salmon is still clean so far - good ol’ common sense should apply today, however unsexy it may be (or you can get ultra-pure molecularly distilled fish oil capsules at Costco, which at 6 cents a softgel is a bargain insurance policy of sorts).

So I present to you, the reader, an academic paper outlining DHA’s role in evolving the hominid brain (DHA is a primary form of Omega 3’s) as well as the importance of Homo Sapien's close proximity to land-water masses. A pretty nice, readable bedtime piece or you can just skim the abstract :) ...

Evidence for the Unique Function of Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA) During the Evolution of the Modern Hominid Brain

ABSTRACT
The African savanna ecosystem of the large mammals and primates was associated with a dramatic decline in relative brain capacity. This reduction happened to be associated with a decline in docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) from the food chain. DHA is required for brain structures and growth. The biochemistry implies that the expansion of the human brain required a plentiful source of preformed DHA.

The richest source of DHA is the marine food chain while the savannah environment offers very little of it. Consequently H.sapiens could not have evolved on the savannahs. Recent fossil evidence indicates that the lacustrine and marine food chain was being extensively exploited at the time cerebral expansion took place and suggests the alternative that the transition from the archaic to modern humans took place at the land/water interface. Contemporary data on tropical lake shore dwellers reaffirms the above view.

Lacustrine habitats provide nutritional support for the vascular system, the development of which would have been a prerequisite for cerebral expansion. Both arachidonic acid (AA) and DHA would have been freely available from such habitats providing the double stimulus of preformed acyl components for the developing blood vessels and brain.
...
We suggest that the evolution of the large human brain depended on a rich source of DHA from the land/water interface. We review a number of proposals for the possible influence of DHA on physical properties of the brain that are essential for its function.

Money in the bank

2006-03-31T04:05:00.000-08:00

By exporting & lending to the US cheaply (and the American consumer willingly), China has amassed nearly 1 trillion in dollar reserves.

From The Economist (March 2006):

China surpassed Japan as the world's biggest holder of foreign reserves. The news came amid more politicking over China's currency policy, which American politicians regard as a cause of their trade deficit. Charles Schumer, a senator who has been shrill in his attacks on Beijing, dropped plans, for the moment at least, to slap a 27.5% tariff on Chinese goods, partly in response to signals from China that it would allow its currency to float more freely.

Tides Turning

2006-03-27T01:40:00.000-08:00

A new book, Tides Turning, predicts that climate change is likely to be abrupt and cataclysmic—and that these sudden shifts could cripple national economies.

Newsweek has an interesting interview with the book's author here.

Implicit in this article, and mainstream economists are the first to admit, is the idea that there’s tremendous uncertainty and an unknown territory when it comes to modeling and estimating the costs of pollution, climate change, and natural disasters.

Yet sometimes in the assumed belief that free markets address most issues big and small, we fail to realize that in reality there are significant limitations and staleness with the economics discipline and free markets, particularly when dealing with uncertainty in complex, open systems with unknown transaction costs.

This is despite Nobel economist Ronald Coase’s work decades ago on transaction and social costs, that is, when property rights are fixed and defined, it was possible to “internalize externalities” like pollution. While it was a good starting point it was only for closed systems (two parties) with known transaction costs.

Unfortunately, meanwhile many have come to assume that mother nature is a trash collector that works for free, when it’s that we just don’t know how to accurately measure such externalities so it’s as if such costs don’t exist, even when it does and is often quite visible for show like Katrina.

To get a good sense of the limitations with Coase’s theorem as it applies to externalities like pollution, see A Critique of the Chicago School of Economics: Ronald Coase and the Coase Theorem

V for Wow

2006-03-26T02:24:00.000-08:00

My wife and I saw V For Vendetta last night and it was absolutely magnificient. Highly recommended.

Finally a podcast I like

2006-01-14T04:33:00.000-08:00

Podcast interviews of the world’s leading economists. Awesome.

Some musings & book recommendations: Religion, science, and history

2006-01-10T01:54:00.000-08:00

Happy New Years! It's been a while again since my last entry and thought I should squeeze one in as I end my extended holiday vacation. And well, perhaps right now you’re looking for some new books to put on your reading list. If so, some out of box suggestions / musings:

As far as religions go, I’m an agnostic. Given my utmost respect for what I understand of [the history of] the scientific method and physics, I find Buddhism to be the most open-minded, interesting and compatible of the bunch. Speaking as an ex-practitioner, Christianity is to me at best a set of haphazard myths and inconsistent tales that have long outlived its usefulness as humankind’s shining light on the future, unless one now considers the end of days to be the future to look forward to shortly. Surely then, the vast majority of the world will be damned to hell except a small fraction of [mostly American] people who qualify to be saved. And the absolute clash of logic irreconcilable between that of an unquestioned being’s omnipotence that wills glorification & worship by mere mortals, who in return goes on to afford countless children and other subjects a dismal right to live and suffer in abject poverty, squalor, destitution. Any logical person should at the very least seriously ask [a Christian apologist], “Is that the best an omnipotent being can do?”

With that said wrt Buddhism, I was compelled to pick up and read the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. It is one of most elegantly written religious perspectives that succinctly delineates spirituality and science with all its fine lines and wrinkles intact. It clearly puts together a rich and engaging storyboard distilling complex ideas and concepts that cleanly synthesizes both concrete-physics and meta-physics, using everyday language. Something similar I read some time ago in high school was an early edition of The Tao of Physics. That felt forced and was a bit confusing as it tried to force a 1:1 mapping between the parallels of physicists’ attempts at a “grand unified theory” to the foundations of eastern mysticism. It is more comprehensive, though somewhat repetitive.

So it is hard for me to pick up a religious tome unless it’s grounded on a scientific foundation with its knack for consistency and rigor. I recently read The End of Faith, somewhat an exception to the rule since it also relies quite a bit on a set of tougher to follow metaphysical arguments. It presents a strong case against today's rather fervent religious movements (radical veins of Islam and Christianity in particular) that since time immemorial have resulted in some of mankind's most awful atrocities, acted out by followers of its various factions, always bearing a similar set of exclusionary and unwavering beliefs from which comes the notion, "it's my way to heaven or hell’s on your way", thus arising the Inquisition, the Crusades, Islamic jihad, religious genocides like Rwanda and Bosnia, and so forth. They seem to eventually trap its “true” believers in an un-repudiatable straitjacket of [blind, unprovable tautology that is] religious faith, when mixed with growing extremism, death merely becomes a doorstop to heaven provided enough earthly blood is shed to get someone a one-way ticket there.

I also got to spend some treasured vacation time reading a bit of early American history. A particularly compelling narrative - a bit stylized but provides for a unique portrait of a great man - was put together by a Pulitzer Prize writer whose earlier LBJ biography accorded the award. Now, her Team of Rivals tells a rich and layered story of Lincoln’s life, perseverance, and leadership during the Civil War as he guides a very fractured yet indispensable cabinet that's constantly in turmoil throughout the entire war. Also began David McCullough’s 1776.

Managed to revisit string theory a bit as well, prompted by an excellent primer by one of the top physicists of our time. Ed Whitten of Princeton obtained a PhD @ 25 after a brief stint with history and happens to hold a professorship founded by former Microsoftie Charles Simonyi. And if you’re interested in the very latest that advanced physics and vibrating strings have in store, physicist-extraordinaire Greene’s magnificent and fun to read best-seller, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory would be highly recommended. It is accessible to anyone who knows some introductory-level college physics sans the math. String theory is even more fantastic and mysterious than standard [atomic] theory and quantum mechanics, particularly for those who are instinctively curious about the worlds around them.

Theocracy, here we come

2005-11-08T15:36:00.000-08:00

Kansas educators voted to downplay evolution
Kansas state education board approves science standards for public schools that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

Why clean air isn't free

2005-09-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.earthsky.org/shows/showsmore.php?t=20050909

Economist explains forest 'costs and benefits'
Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University has been heralded as one of the most prominent economic theorists of the 20th century. Among many other accomplishments, he was a 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics. When Earth & Sky's Jorge Salazar spoke to him in December of 2004, Arrow told us some of the issues "hot on the agenda" of 21st century economists.

There's a lot of discussion. For example, one of the discussions is how, overall, do you measure the impact of the anthropogenic causes of Earth change? How do you balance the impact?
There are lots of things going on in the world. We're using up fossil fuels. We're putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. On the other hand, we are making technological progress. We're inventing methods of cleaning up things as well as methods of destroying them. These are very disparate activities, so one problem is how do you measure the balance between these activities in some overall way? How do you measure the overall impact of these things? That was the focus of our paper (Are We Consuming Too Much? Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004).
....

Of course, the typical situation is using up fossil resources, for example oil and coal. Or the degradation of farmland. Those things are profitable today, but don't take the future into account. Or consider dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which for many years, didn't create any significant problems. Now the dumping, which has been going on since the 1800s, since the Industrial Revolution began, is beginning to show up.
The point being, once stuff goes in, you can't take it out. So, the result is that there is a permanent effect, and -- from the perspective of an economist -- you don't pay for it. You don't pay a tax, a price for putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is what you call a dynamic effect, an effect over time.

Or think about what they call ecosystem services. If you have a forest, not only do you have wood, but the forest also tends to control the flow of water. When you start deforesting, you start to get erosion, you start to get floods, because the forest acts like a big sponge.

These things are very indirect. You think of forests, you think of the wood. And of course there are a lot of subtle things. Of course, the forest is a habitat for many pecies, and so forth.

And those are just a few topics that are rather hot on the agenda of economists.

Disgrace

2005-09-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

…There is substance, laid out in stunning detail by Sidney Blumenthal on Salon on August 29. “In 2004,” Blumenthal wrote, “the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent.” That was one of about eight amazing pieces of information. It will be fascinating to monitor how aggressively the major media follow this story over the coming days.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10191
&
The Lost City: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179587/
&
The Rebellion of the Talking Heads: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125581/

Thought I’d take the liberty, particularly when it has been so hard fought for and rarely exercised in everyday discourse these days, to say bluntly: I am very pissed and ashamed by this fiasco. We have become a hallow country for long enough now, sans serious thinkers and policymakers. In lieu of which we are led by unbridled fear-mongers and hawks that have lowered our collective expectations and sense of optimism, distracting us from what’s important (e.g. stemming nuclear weapons proliferation, disease prevention, addressing poverty, education, and infrastructure, to name a few).

Results altogether have been too meager yet excuses bountiful. While neocons shout of reaping the fruits of [an intended] Iraqi freedom a dozen years later (as was the intention in Vietnam or Korea, each with a different story of such intentions gone awry), it does little to ameliorate deteriorating economic and political conditions today, e.g. if the ME stabilizes a decade later but we are greatly weakened in the process and lose our relative economic thus military hegemony to the India/China/EU trifecta – then following the shadows of a former British Empire we win ourselves a hallow victory at best, especially acute now if we don’t have a leader capable of manning and fighting on these equally important fronts.

Also, I’m sick to death of the constant, circuitous PR campaigns always distracting attention away from the unwise and meaningless policies time-and-again. For example, why do we as the world’s #1 superpower tolerate a 13% poverty rate, and we publicly care more about are how people use their sex organs based on narrow interpretations of the Bible – you’d think listening to the extreme right these days that it’s as if Jesus never mentioned love thy neighbor, do considerable charitable acts to help the poor, forgiveness for none of us are without sin….

We have clearly become a country numbed by fear and swayed by meaningless sound bites coupled with senseless policies, sans fact-based deliberation or thought-out strategy – all long-standing products of this president for which no American should be satisfied.

If I hear another right-wing Republican apologist try to find excuses gleaned off a sound-bite blaring from a right-wing cable channel or radio circuit to try to explain away W’s incompetence now - and to think people use to believe that the buck stopped at the top; those were the days - or start blaming this on the “liberal media” I’d write you off a troll and fanatical ideologue who is radicalizing the country, blind to dollars & common sense, unwilling to find common ground to address the numerous very real bread-and-butter and life-or-death challenges of everyday Americans, ignorant of broken promises made by a politician who happens to be on the same team. Not to mention particularly susceptible to fear-mongering rhetoric, and too lax to thoroughly weigh the costs seeing only a lofty gold-rush vision of benefits that apparently only a war’s blood and treasure could bring along.

Or treating the environment as one big free garbage disposal - as if Mother Nature won’t foot us or our children a bill with interest, as it always does, for absorbing today’s poisons and contaminants. As Newton parlayed, every action has an equal reaction, or what goes around….

We use to expect more from a president (at least I did with Clinton and Bush I). And I expected a lot more from Republicans who have so far been sorely disappointing, not speaking up with their own voice, yet were so quick to drag Clinton to the crap-house of 2 independent counsel investigations for such (minor) perceived wrongs like Whitewater and an oral fixation that were so frivolous in retrospect. Moreover, Friends of W can be so blind, it’s almost like FOW’s are fearful of being publicly wronged, and thus like W, never-ever dare admitting when W is wrong (using a bit of W-speak so to speak), for fear of straying from the party line.

No president is infallible, much less this one. A few prominent Republicans need to get some balls and stand firm with Democrats to try to make sure this kind of crap doesn’t happen again, considering that almost 4 years after 9/11 we are still obviously and inexcusably short and inadequate to the deliberative task of planning ahead in order to save our own people when it’s needed most, never mind a terrorist attack which usually don’t come with a 5-day advance warning.

And tough talk, or holding a lot of press conferences everywhere, or coining memorable phrases like “axis of evil”, “dead-or-alive”, or ‘flip-flop’ or having a record longest vacation in presidential history just don’t cut it anymore (particularly when we’re at war with soldiers in harm’s way and need an active, vigilant leader … and one who can cut their road trips short when a Category 5 storm is bearing down on the homeland). Americans expect and deserve better, especially when innocent people die when they do not have to, if only there was more forethought and less talk.

Latest read

2005-08-21T04:28:00.000-07:00

Went to the bookstore recently with my wife and managed to pick up two books that I don't know if I'll have the time to finish but got it anyways. Go figure - Borders had a sale :)

So ended up picking up a biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernov. So far so good, though I still find John Marshall, Definer of a Nation by Jean Edward Smith to be crisper and better written.

Also began reading economist and UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs' book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Times; as one who has a keen interest in development economics, this book was a must read, though the first couple chapters has been a rehash for me so far. The foreword by Bono was a bit odd but I suppose it does help the book appeal to a broader audience.

I've also been soaking up a number of interesting white papers on .NET Development. For those of you who do web application development, are intersted in the forthcoming ASP.NET v2 and related security best practices, may want to check out Security Guidelines: ASP.NET 2.0 published by folks from Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group. They did a fantastic job.

The world is flat

2005-06-02T17:37:00.000-07:00

In his new book, "The World is Flat", Thomas Friedman claims, "When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate". But, how did the world `become flat'? Friedman suggest the trigger events were the collapse of communism, the dot-com bubble resulting in overinvestment in fiber-optic telecommunications, and the subsequent out-sourcing of engineers enlisted to fix the perceived Y2K problem.
Those events created an environment where products, services, and labor are cheaper. However, the West is now losing its strong-hold on economic dominance. Depending on if viewed from the eyes of a consumer or a producer - that's either good or bad, or a combination of both.
What is more sobering is Friedman's elaboration on Bill Gates' statement, "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations.
. . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind."
Similarly, a while back CNN's Lou Dobbs' released a book skewering HP's Fiorina on Offshoring - Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas.
His book continues a long-time theme of his CNN-TV show, that American workers are being sold out by greedy, shortsighted CEOs who are damaging America.

Dobbs says corporate eagerness to send jobs offshore is undermining the American middle class, costing Americans jobs, forcing Americans to work harder and longer for less pay, devastating some communities, and depriving governments at all levels of the tax revenue for upgrading public education and providing other essential goods and services.
"India can provide our software; China can provide our toys; Sri Lanka can make our clothes; Japan make our cars. But at some point we have to ask, what will we export? At what will Americans work? And for what kind of wages? No one I've asked in government, business or academia has been able to answer those questions," Dobbs writes.

Dobbs singles out Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who said, "No American has a God-given right to a job."

Dobbs' reaction to that statement was the urge to tell Fiorina where she could go.

"That first reaction has held up as a lasting impression. As much as I hate what she said, I at least have to give Fiorina credit for straight talk. She didn't sugarcoat her sentiments for public consumption, because she didn't have to. Forty or 50 years ago, Fiorina's bald statement, and its clear implications, would have fueled a firestorm of labor protest and political controversy. Not now. Working men and women in this country aren't part of the political equation. Business and capital rule. It's that simple," Dobbs writes. Among the others spotlighted by Dobbs for outsourcing jobs to India, the Philippines, Romania, Ireland, Poland and other countries are IBM, SAS Institute, Intel, Microsoft, Perot Systems, Apple, Computer Associates, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.

I wrote a version of the below August 2004 here but think it's woth restating:

Focusing on purely the economic balance of costs and returns misses a larger, more important piece to the puzzle: Innovation and the leadership required to foster new types of markets, technologies, and jobs. I am a deep believer of free trade. As a professional economist would no doubt state, it's important to understand the benefits we Americans receive through international trade that is based on each country's comparative advantage. That in of itself receives no argument from me.

However, it's also important to note that comparative advantage is not static for a fixed number of areas - it is a constantly changing variable that each country and its political and business leaders must think over the long term, formulating strategies that maintain, if not expand, the scope of things a nation is good or better at vis-a-vis other nations.

We were once leaders in the markets for cars, planes, and consumer microelectronics. Now, we are not (the Big 2 car makers are re-learning the harsh lessons again from the Japanese, as if the 1980s never happened). As a sampler, presently, we are leaders in entertainment, software and PCs, as well as big pharma (albeit in turn is distorting the cost structure of health care system for the worse). In this sample list, the Japanese and Chinese are encroaching entertainment (Japanese anime, Chinese movie imports, as American plots become rehashed and predictable, much like our music), Airbus is giving us a run for our money, while we maintain a lead in the software and PC space (with the ASEAN countries not far behind).

The root concern I have is while that is true, there is a decreasing fraction of our economy and its leadership that are innovating and executing in the long term, while our basic pillars (education, healthcare, and technology infrastructure) deteriorate, which we have and continue to take for granted, watching passively as they deteriorate buttressed by a variety of excuses: fear of big government, or assuming private industry can effectively provide such public goods for society's greater good.

Meanwhile, foreign govt's are incenting and working with their businesses and political bodies to grow and nurture new IP and markets, we stand aside and hope our Fortune 1000 executives lead the charge of cost cutting, repackaging existing goods and services, and driving growth through cost-cutting (vs. innovating). It's easy to blame executives alone. But let's not forget the Internet and how it affords a voice for all who choose to participate and political leverage to grass roots efforts, and how more of us are getting involved and more need to hop on board.

It's time to stop being passive citizens, take some individual responsibility, and start getting involved in a real conversation at the local, state, and federal level about what's going on all around and where Americans want to take this country, and stop being so PC to the point of essentially having no voice, not speaking out, and being numbed ultimately to economic defeat as we let our many (not all) short-sighted politicians and CxOs get away with degrading, myopic policies and business practices.

Announcing the SQL Server/Visual Studio/BizTalk Connected Systems Developer Competition

2005-05-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

Show Microsoft what a great developer you are! Show how innovative you can be! And win $50,000 USD!

On April 25th 2005 the SQL Server, Visual Studio and BizTalk teams launched the Connected Systems 2005 Developer Competition.

The Connected Systems 2005 Developer Competition, sponsored by Microsoft Corporation and MSDN Magazine is a skill based competition for professional developers intended to highlight and reward creativity and programming excellence using SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2004/2006.

The competition is open to anyone who practices in the field of technology development, either individuals or organizations. Some eligibility restrictions apply; see Official Competition Rules for details.

Entries will be judged on creativity, innovation, design and technical excellence, usefulness, usability and value by a panel of industry experts selected from the Microsoft Regional Director program.

All competition entrants must be registered and have submitted a description of the application they are entering into the competition by August 30, 2005. The official closing date for final competition entries is September 15, 2005.

All finalists will be invited to join the SQL Server, Visual Studio and BizTalk teams at the Joint SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio 2005/BizTalk 2006 launch event where the Winners will be announced at a dinner the evening before the launch.

For more information or to enter the competition please visit the competition website located at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/devcompetition

What Can You Win?

First Prize of $50,000 USD Copies of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006 MSDN Universal subscription
Paid Trip to the joint SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio 2005/BizTalk 2006 Launch Event and competition finalists dinner
Winning entries will be highlighted on various Microsoft and CMP websites and in a special magazine inserts in MSDN Magazine, Software Development magazine and Dr Dobbs magazine.
1 Community Winner will receive a 1 year MSDN Universal subscription plus the chance to talk about their winning entry at Tech ED 2006 in Boston.
5 Microsoft MCP Winners will receive a Certificate of Accomplishment, a 1 Year MSDN Universal Subscription and a ticket to attend Tech ED 2006 in Boston. All 5 winners will be entered into a drawing from which one will be selected to speak at Tech ED 2006 in Boston.

Hey Atlanta, come experience Microsoft .NET for yourself!

2005-05-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

This Friday (May 20th), come to the Microsoft Alpharetta office for the .NET Experience Expo! This is a free event where you can come hear all about some of the hottest topics for developers and architects. This is a huge opportunity to learn more about what Microsoft is doing for developers (and it’s a great chance to win an Xbox!) All attendees will receive a free copy of beta 2 (yep, Team Suite... the full deal), a copy of "Introducing ASP.NET 2.0", and a swank .NET shirt. We will have a reception at the end of the day for attendees (who can beat free beer?) There will be partners attending as well in the partner pavillion (AmberPoint, Avanade, AVIcode, RDA, Internosis).

But wait... there's more! We will have a Hands-On Lab room where you can play with the bits (BizTalk, SharePoint, VS 2005, and more), Ask the Experts sessions, an Ask the MVPs session with some of the Atlanta MVPs, and lots of time to interact with the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team!

Make sure to sign up and register here!

Come for the Experience… stay for the beer.

DATE: Friday, May 20th, 2005
LOCATION: Microsoft Atlanta Office
1125 Sanctuary Parkway
3rd Floor
Alpharetta, GA 30004

Time	Line of Business Development	Patterns & Practices	Back Office Development
7:00 - 8:00	Registration, Partner Pavillion, and Hands On Labs
8:30 - 9:15	Opening Keynote - Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System
9:30 - 10:30	.NET Fx 2.0 - New Features for Windows Forms	Service Orientation in Practice	.NET Fx 2.0 - New Features for the CLR
10:45 - 11:45	Mobile Clients & Compact Framework	Enterprise Library	.NET for Operations
11:45 - 1:00	Lunch, Partner Pavillion, Hands On Labs, and Ask the Experts
1:00 - 2:00	Microsoft Office - A New Breed of Smart Clients	Workflow and Business Process using BizTalk Server 2004	SharePoint for the Developer
2:15 - 3:15	Deploying Smart Clients using ClickOnce	Writing Secure Code	Identity Management Using Active Directory, ADAM, and MIIS
3:30 - 4:30	Web Applications - Innovations in ASP.NET 2.0	Distributed Architecture on the .NET Platform	SQL Server 2005 & SQL Reporting Services - What's in it for the Developers?
4:45 - 5:30	Closing Keynote

Again, to register, simply sign up here.

Does the future belong to China?

2005-05-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Does size matter? If so, China matters. Fareed Zakaria writes another stimulating piece.

Does the Future Belong to China? A new power is emerging in the East. How America should handle unprecedented new challenges, threats—and opportunities. By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek.

...What America needs to do
What you can do is be better prepared. For Americans, this means a renewed focus on the core skills that have propelled the American economy so far: science and technology. The United States has been slipping badly in all global rankings of these fields. Its research facilities are dominated by foreign students and immigrants—but a growing number of them are staying home or going home. Without a massive new focus in these areas, America will find itself unable to produce the core of scientists, engineers and technicians who make up the base of an advanced industrial economy. China and India already produce many more engineers than does the United States. In five years, China will produce more Ph.D.s than the United States. They may not be as good as American Ph.D.s, but numbers do matter.
For the American government, the free ride may be coming to an end. It has run irresponsible fiscal policies, knowing that foreign governments and people would provide it with unlimited credit. But that credit comes at a price. When China holds huge reserves of dollars, it also holds the power to damage the American economy. To do so would certainly hurt China as much or more than it would America, but surely it would be better if U.S. policy were less vulnerable to such possibilities. Fiscal responsibility at home means greater freedom of action abroad.
In foreign policy, Washington will face two possibilities. The first is that China will push its weight around, anger its neighbors and frighten the world. In this case, there will be a natural balancing process by which Russia, Japan, India and the United States will come together to limit China's emerging power. But what if China is able to adhere to its asymmetrical strategy? What if it gradually expands its economic ties, acts calmly and moderately, and slowly enlarges its sphere of influence, hoping to wear out America's patience and endurance?
The United States will then have to respond in kind, also working quietly and carefully, also adopting a calibrated and nuanced policy for the long run. This is hardly beyond its capacity. America has been far more patient than most recognize. It pursued the containment of the Soviet Union for almost 50 years. American troops are still on the banks of the Rhine, along the DMZ in Korea and in Okinawa.
A world war is highly unlikely. Nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence, globalization all mitigate against it. But beneath this calm, there is probably going to be a soft war, a quiet competition for power and influence across the globe. America and China will be friends one day, rivals another, cooperate in one area, compete in another. Welcome to the 21st century.

Crash

2005-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Reminded by a friend, Chani and I saw Crash last night. From what I’d previously seen in reviews, I fully expected it to be a great movie and it lived up to that billing (it's the directorial debut from the writer of 'Million Dollar Baby'). Though presently #2 at the box office, it’s not your typical slick Hollywood screenplay, but rather a raw yet rich, layered story about real life that makes you think and better appreciate life’s complexities from a wide-angled perspective of many disparate and distinct characters.

It also had a deep nostalgic effect, reminding us of our former home, the City of Angels, and its rich melting pots bound to its many concrete jungles with people of all stripes and economic strata. Persuasively drives home the fundamental premise that, regardless of culture, skin color, and other markers that mainstream society chooses to tag on, at the end people are just people.

MSN's Movie summary says:

A Brentwood housewife and her DA husband… a Persian store owner… two police detectives, who are also lovers… an African-American television director and his wife… a Mexican locksmith… two car-jackers… a rookie cop… a middle-aged Korean couple…they all live in Los Angeles. And, during the next 36 hours, they will all collide… 'Crash' takes a provocative, unflinching look at the complexities racial tolerance in contemporary America. Diving headlong into the melting pot of post-9/11 Los Angeles, this urban drama tracks the volatile intersections of multi-ethnic characters as they struggle to overcome their fears while careening in and out of one another's lives. In the gray area between black and white, victim and aggressor, there are no easy answers.

You can also find an MSBNC movie review, "Ambitious Crash is a Stimulating Drama", here.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

2005-04-03T04:01:00.000-07:00

Mitchell decries nuclear option threat (CNN)
Saturday, April 2, 2005 Posted: 2:13 PM EST (1913 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell called on senators Saturday to reject a Republican plan to ban filibusters of judicial nominees, calling it "unprecedented, unfair and unwise."

"Neither I nor any other senator, Republican or Democrat, ever dreamed of taking the kind of drastic action now being proposed," said Mitchell, a former federal judge himself who was majority leader from 1988-95 as a senator from Maine.

"We had the power to do so, but we refrained from exercising that power because it was as wrong then as it is now. The end does not justify the means," he said in the Democrats' weekly radio address.

Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, the majority leader, has threatened to try to push through a rule change to eliminate the ability to filibuster judicial nominees.

Democrats have been using filibuster threats -- to stall the nomination through extended debate -- on 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees, which requires 60 votes to overcome. The Senate has confirmed 204 of the president's 214 trial and appellate judicial nominees.

Observers expect Frist to attempt the rules change before Memorial Day in case of a possible Supreme Court nomination during Bush's second term. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, is fighting thyroid cancer.

Mitchell said the ability to block judges is an important part of Congress's power to check the presidency. "The Senate's power to confirm or reject judicial nominations balances the president's authority to nominate them," he said Frist's plan is called "the nuclear option" because "it will destroy any hope of bipartisanship and permanently change the Senate for the worse," Mitchell said.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has threatened to shut down the Republican legislative agenda, which would cripple the Senate, if Frist succeeds in stopping the filibusters.

Republicans want to "silence the minority," Mitchell said. "What they are proposing is unprecedented, unfair and unwise. Our democracy works best when the parties work together in the interest of all Americans."

Mitchell served as a U.S. District Court judge from 1979-80 before filling the Senate seat vacated by Edmund Muskie.

A rather bleak indictment of the pope's legacy

2005-04-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

A papacy and church transformed
John Paul II ushered in 'new springtime of Christianity'
ANALYSIS
By Hanna Rosin
The Washington Post
April 3, 2005

The title is misleading given that the conclusion of the piece was diametrically opposite it and rather unfair, akin to criticizing a Fortune 500 CEO for failing to win a popularity contest. Obviously, comparing apples to pork loins; he wasn’t a rock-star CEO, but rather an apostle to Christ, and as such held an altogether different, more pressing set of obligations. John Paul’s moral authority was derived from his broad consistency evangelizing the substantive values he firmly concluded from Christendom’s core doctrines & beliefs as well as an unspoiled laser-focus on the original spirit of Christ’s teachings.

I didn’t see fault in his voice being irrespective of the whims & malleable moral-vane of fickle, huddled masses that are oftentimes swayed to stand behind actions contrary to Christ’s original message. In the midst of it all, he stood a true apostle: From apologizing for earlier this century when Catholics & Christians did little as Jews endured the concentration camps, to castigating today’s moral tolerance for the pro-war, pro-life yet pro-death penalty, idolizing wealth & power while abandoning the weak, slide of Western culture onto a long slippery slope of moral bankruptcy.

And if one was a religious cynic, all an early prelude to Armageddon.

This piece was more thorough:
The Church Loses Its Light
In John Paul II, World Found a Direct, Dynamic Leader
By J.Y. Smith
Special to The Washington Post
April 3, 2005

"...In "Witness to Hope," a noted biography of the pope, author George Weigel said John Paul believed that culture, rather than politics or economics, was the engine that drove history. It was clear from the beginning of his papacy that he had a particular interest in bringing Eastern Europe back to its Christian traditions..."

...Practicality vs. Principle
John Paul was fascinated by science. In contrast to the church's traditional wary approach to the subject, he established a Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body made up of eminent scholars, Catholics and non-Catholics, to advise him on developments in the field. He also commemorated the 100th birthday of Albert Einstein and directed that Galileo, imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting the truth of Copernicus's theory that the Earth circles the sun, be fully rehabilitated...

In October 1996, he declared that physical evolution is "more than just a theory," advancing the church's view, held for a half-century, that the process was worthy of discussion but still open to question.

...At the same time, he deplored the Enlightenment, the 18th-century movement that gave the Western world many of its scientific, economic and humanitarian glories. Its triumphs included the Industrial Revolution and the propositions embodied in the Constitution of the United States. But its central idea was that the human being, not God, is the center of the universe. This struck at the heart of Catholic dogma.

In "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," a book of reflections that became a bestseller in 1994, John Paul traced these developments to Rene Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. His dictum, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), countered the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the landmark theologian who said being was a gift from God that preceded every human activity, including thought.

John Paul spoke repeatedly and movingly against the modern tendency to make profit and efficiency the measures of success. He blamed this trend for the alienation of individuals, the disintegration of the family and the abandonment of objective standards of behavior in modern society. In 1993, he used the occasion of a World Youth Day gathering in Cherry Creek State Park near Denver, one of a series of biennial events he began in 1986, to summarize his thoughts on the "culture of death":

"In a technological culture in which people are used to dominating matter, discovering its laws and mechanisms in order to transform it according to their wishes, the danger arises of also wanting to manipulate conscience and its demands. In a culture which holds that no universally valid truths are possible, nothing is absolute. . . . Good comes to mean what is pleasing or useful at a particular moment. Evil means what contradicts our subjective wishes. Each person can build a private system of values."

At a Mass the next day, he cut short a homily that said, in its widely quoted prepared text: "In our own century, as at no other time in history, the 'culture of death' has assumed a social and institutional form of legality to justify the most horrible crimes against humanity: genocide, 'final solutions,' 'ethnic cleansings' and the massive 'taking of lives of human beings even before they are born or before they reach the natural point of death.'"

Sin City rocks

2005-04-03T03:55:00.000-07:00

Haven't seen it, trying to make up your mind, and need that extra push after having read the critics' jibber-jabber reviews? Go. It really hits the spot for an action movie. The rich plot development, the various arcs & storylines, super acting, and slick cinematography made it an all around 5-star flick.

Million Dollar Baby

2005-03-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my last post. Work has been swamping me, and while I have lots of thoughts to share, I just haven't had the chance. Well, except now - a quick blurb on the already lavishly-praised movie of the year.

After all the hoopla and media fanfare, recently, Chani and I finally went to see Million Dollar Baby.

Given all that's been said, I'll just say it was a nice story albeit one I didn't expect to be portrayed and delivered in such an understated way. It was telling a story w/o trying to tell you one - as if you just happened to be along for the ride.

Is that one of the marks of a great movie? For some it is, including me. I know years from now, I'll still remember its many memorable storylines and scenes, long after the media hoopla subsides, which is a lot more then I can say for the majority of flicks Hollywood pumps out these days.

World can end poverty by 2025

2005-01-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Times fronts and the Washington Post stuffs the U.N. report concluding that rich countries can meet their promise to halve extreme global poverty if they increase their international aid to about half of one percent of GDP, up from the current average of .25 percent. The difference would be about $50 billion annually and could save millions of lives. Currently, 500 million people live on less than a dollar a day. Nations have not met their pledges to world's poor; the U.S. currently clocks in at about .15 percent, last among rich nations.

Report: World can end poverty by 2025
Experts say richest nations would need to double

When fear follows fabric along the assembly line

2005-01-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times front page reports on the disturbing news that hundreds of thousands of women in poor countries could lose their jobs because an international system of import quotas is expiring--meaning that wealthy countries will not be compelled to buy manufactured products from any specific poor country.

In many of these nations, the article says, "women's paychecks have been a driving force behind significant gains in living standards, health indicators and educational levels," and, especially in Africa, they've helped slow the spread of HIV-AIDS.

It goes to show concretely how these [now-threatened] low-paying jobs are invaluable to women in developing nations, promoting stronger families as well as economic security and greater personal freedom.

…“Across the globe, women who work, and control their paychecks, are more likely than men to be the drivers of change for their families and communities.
Study after study has found that as the economic status of women improves, so do literacy levels, caloric consumption and other health indicators.
In Ivory Coast, expanding women's share of cash income significantly enlarged the share of the household budget going to food and decreased the amount spent on alcohol and cigarettes, according to a study published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics.
In South Africa, cash received by women through an old-age pension program increased the funds spent on schooling and food for their grandchildren, a World Bank study showed.
Extra income in the hands of women in Brazil resulted in more of the household budget going to education, health and nutrition, according to a study by Duncan Thomas, an economics professor at UCLA.
And when mothers' incomes were increased, their children ended up growing taller and weighing more.
In Cambodia, where the garment industry is responsible for more than one-third of gross national product and 93% of exports, the effect of the 220,000 apparel jobs is visible even far from the factories in the cities.
Money sent home by apparel workers — in Cambodia, as everywhere else, the vast majority of them women — has trickled out into the countryside. There it has been spent on school fees and healthful food, aluminum roofs and cement-lined water wells.The effect is immeasurable.
Hun Srean, a 22-year-old who earns $3 to $4 a day stitching men's shirts in Phnom Penh, supports two brothers and four sisters who live in the tiny southeastern village of Chreykrahim. "It feels good that I can contribute," Hun said.
But she added that the influential role she plays goes far beyond money."When I tell them to study because my work in the factory is hard, they listen to me."…

Bleed-curing the economy in 2006, old Western style

2005-01-12T18:17:00.000-08:00

Bush's Budget Expected to Be Aggressive Program Cuts and Spending Freezes for 2006 Are Intended to Trim Record Deficit

Program Cuts and Spending Freezes for 2006 Are Intended to Trim Record Deficit - The Bush administration is preparing a budget request that would freeze most spending on agriculture, veterans and science, slash or eliminate dozens of federal programs, and force more costs, from Medicaid to housing, onto state and local governments, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

2006 will be when the United States of America will be all about increased homeland security and defense spending. Hooray. That’s W’s Harvard MBA hard at work. In 2006, everything except homeland security and defense will be held constant or cut.

Almost half-trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy (80% of all tax cut refunds) to invest in their global portfolios, er, to spend for stimulating the economy has already evaporated, e.g. the lack of consumer spending and economic growth to show for it. The still lackluster economic results 1½ years later means that a significant portion was invested and/or saved than spent. The tax cuts just didn’t work as originally advertised.

I know - the wealthy “deserve” it. Presumably, it was their money to begin with.

However, consider that most of us aren’t wealthy. And that it is the not-so-wealthy consumers among us that spend and drive the economic engine, which taken together grows the wealth of this country. And the average consumer can't continue on spending too much, since they’ve overloaded their credit and home equity lines already.

Right now, circa 2003-2005, we actually have an investment glut in this country – lots of capital with no productive use since there’s insufficient, unsustainable consumer demand – as evidenced by flattening retail sales and a large slack in hiring, which has failed to replace all the jobs lost over the last four years much less to create all-new jobs to sustain the population's growth.

Meanwhile, the wealthy did their duty at tax time, investing most of their tax cut monies, and finding low returns domestically, resorted instead to foreign capital markets of China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere to get the double digit returns they’ve become so use to 90s-style.

Under such circumstance, Bush’s tax cut for the wealthy during wartime was and is the very wrong choice and simply unprecedented. No other president has ever reduced the tax income the Fed receives while the country has to spend massive sums of money driving war efforts – for sound, obvious arithmetic reasons, until W.

In any event, education, veterans benefits, Medicare, Social Security, R&D, roads and infrastructure, housing programs are all on the block. One wonders how long we we afford such enormous expenditures for tax cuts and Iraq, even after these cuts. In comparsion, these programs are a pittance, yet ones so many Joe “W” Sixpacks rely on and even more so will over time, given:

More non-degreed (75% of population) Americans can’t find low-end [manufacturing and assembly] jobs many of which moved offshore, have given up looking for a job altogether, thus not counted as part of employment or unemployment rates, and thereby not contributing as taxpayers,
We have poorly educated kids who score in the last quartile of standardized exams, versus well-educated foreign students who are better equipped for the jobs of tomorrow, which immigration tightening cannot mitigate, especially given virtual outsourcing trends,
Americans save 2% of income while borrowing the rest at double-digit interest rates payable to foreign creditors as the dollar devalues,
Average weighted salaries are stagnant across the board particularly for Americans with no bachelor or advanced degrees, and as oil, medical and housing costs are rising significantly along with increasing offshore and outsourcing pressures,
Almost 25% of Americans have little or no health care coverage, and with low or nil savings, meaning significantly increasing catastrophic healthcare costs to come

Where does that leave Joe “W” Sixpack a decade from now - gainful employment in the military or homeland security? If Joe only knew or cared…as they charge up & overload their credit cards, how dependent we are on foreign “crack” credit.

Trade Deficit Leaps Again - $60.3 Billion Gap in November Is 7th Monthly Record Set in 2004

The monthly U.S. trade deficit soared to an all-time high of $60.3 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported yesterday, sending the dollar tumbling and raising new worries about whether the U.S. economy has become too dependent on borrowing from foreigners.

And as China’s domestic consumption increases over the next 5-10 years - consider how their surged hunger for commodities had led to a drastic rise in steel, rubber, and oil prices this past year - foreign creditors will eventually shift their funds elsewhere in search of higher returns. Interest rates will rise. And many average Americans will finally feel what’s it’s like to have to live within their means.

From where I stand, the gathering macroeconomic trends for the next 2-5 years look pretty ugly for the average Joe. For W, it’s all cost-cutting now to salvage what he can out of this shoddy economy, lacking proactive planning that reflect any long-term vision except military and security spending, the former of which is being cut back since we can’t afford it already.

Mark these fonts, such simpleton policies will leech us bone dry – and we’re already beginning to see worrying symptoms today - large cuts in the military budget, unbelievable deficits, jitters in the bond and currency markets.

Through lens of Cold War-era history, one could almost find it ironic; al Qaeda did to us what we did to the Soviets, albeit with a whole lot better ROI.

Killer waves were sometimes only inches high

2005-01-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

A color-coded map, based on data from four Earth-observing satellites, shows how the wave generated by the Sumatra quake spread out to varying heights three and a half hours after the seismic event.

While a tsunami can rise to great heights when it arrives at the shore, such waves are often barely noticeable in the ocean.

In this case, scientists found that two hours after the undersea quake that launched the tsunami, the wave was about 2 feet (60 centimeters).

An hour and 15 minutes later it was down to about 16 inches (40 centimeters).

After eight hours the main wave was down to about 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters), though a portion in the Bay of Bengal was still at about 10 inches (25 centimeters), the N0AA scientists said Monday.

An earthquake deep beneath the ocean off Indonesia caused the tsunami by shifting the sea floor, resulting in displacement of the water overhead and causing a wave to spread out from that location.

Unlike surface waves that affect only a shallow amount of water, a tsunami stretches all the way to the sea floor and, as that rises to the land, so does the wave. Arriving at shore, such waves can grow suddenly by dozens of feet.

The satellite imaging did not provide a depth for the waves that came ashore.

The new measurements were based on data from four Earth-orbiting satellites. Researchers hope the work will help them develop models to improve tsunami forecasts.

The data, which took several days to analyze, came from the TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason satellites operated NASA and the French space agency, CNES; the European Space Agency’s Envisat; and the U.S. Navy’s Geosat Follow-On.

Moving off the docks

2005-01-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

A nice piece that explains how much the fishery business has changed drastically over the past few decades: The harsh economics with razor-thin margins, fast-growing and oft-changing demand, where the fishes come from today vs. a decade ago, how business has moved off the dock and open marketplace to the e-office and keyboard, as well as the fierce cut-throat global competition.
Moving Off the Docks

Technology Transforms Once-Parochial Seafood Business Into Global Enterprise

The shrinking dollar

2005-01-09T22:49:00.000-08:00

A handy primer on how a foreign exchange imbalance affects you.
Everyday Economics - The 97-cent weakling

Day by day, your dollar buys fewer and fewer euros or yen. If you think you don't care, just wait. You will.

A few things that I worry about (politically-speaking)

2005-01-09T08:26:00.000-08:00

Politically Speaking
Right-of-center oratory (as I see it on cable news in particular) is quite effective for inflaming the passions and promugating a sense of self-rightousness but does little to help reach common ground and get working political solutions for everyone, not just the most impassioned and vocal lot.

Putting such passions in perspective, simply put, is that for the past 4 years the numbers just haven't added up under W. While cable news' fiery almost-sermons are worthy that of a Christian Coalition convention yet, in the end, can't negate several trends: We as a nation are weakening economically and militarily, our foreign policy is mostly a one-dimensional military push with no diplomatic or geopolitical prongs or depth, we increasingly can't compete in the global marketplace and we aren't planning or investing for the long-term.

On this blog, I try to focus on numbers, not name-calling, and more often than not, the numbers bleed red and show that we are weaker, not stronger, irregardless of the tough rhetoric W projects in sound bites or his admittedly memorable catch-phrases.

What I Worry About
I worry about competing against the likes of Indians and mainland Chinese that enthusiastically pump out 3-4x more highly-educated scientists and programmers from their schools than we do, to outsourced jobs and their aim at usurping our economic might patiently and methodically.

I worry that American job growth has been stagnant for the past 3 years, new jobs' wages that are almost $2/hr lower then before while we're working harder, longer (then even the Japanese now) for less then before, and with an increasing number of unemployed ill-equipped or insufficiently trained to compete for the technology jobs of the 21st century.

I worry about the budget deficit and our inability to finance the military that is leading to drastic cutbacks and basic education that puts us almost last among the G8 and the world.

I worry about our lack of an energy policy, relying on Saudis and the Middle East (home to the 9/11 terrorists and Wahabiist-Muslim extremism) as our main energy suppliers, doing little to promote alternatives.

I worry about tax cuts as being the primary economic policy of the US government to drive growth that mostly benefit the wealthy, who invest the bulk of their refunds back into their portfolios that are tied to global capital markets for higher returns, not spent domestically where it's needed to drive US economic growth and jobs.

I worry about the jittery bond markets and our undervalued dollar that is slowly losing its credibility as the world's de-facto currency arising from our enormous record budget and trade deficits.

I worry that this in turn may prompt Euro and Asian creditors to forgo our bond and debt instruments in the future, driving up prices for everyday consumer items (the majority of which we import) and our interest rates for credit cards, mortgages, and loans, thereby making already poor Americans (and businesses) poorer and richer Americans (and businesses) invest their money overseas for better rates of return.

I worry that we're not doing anything to alleviate poverty and promoting economic growth at political hotspots that engender terror and global unrest, and particularly, not engaging as leaders with full presidential involvement in a full-court press in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (especially now w/o Arafat).

I worry about ineffective homeland security (that is also cyber- and tech-smart) to protect ourselves and our children from even-smarter, more-patient and stealthier terrorists looking for cheaper, more effective ways to harm us en masse.

I worry about eliminating our complacency with national competitiveness that is inextricably linked to reforming education for the 21st century, in order for us to remain [at least one of] the world's economic superpower[s] creating new markets and new types of jobs.

I worry about paying down our debt and saving a surplus so our children won't have to deal with an unstable national economy and have to pay the burdens we incurred.

I worry about single-/two-issue Americans dominating our political discourse taking our security, as embodied today by Iraq, and moral values to be the end all, be all.

I worry that there is much more at stake for the United States to take the leadership role in but we're stuck with Iraq front-and-center, pumped daily by 24/7 cable news-cycle economics, leaving room for little else on the policy agenda.

Postscript
Great statesmen in time of war would be the likes of Roosevelt who during WWII rallied the nation and the world (with Churchill) to wholeheartedly sacrifice in order to win the war against the evil that was Naziism. They had also laid out and executed a plan that kept the peace as well as led the largest successful rebuilding of the major nation-states of Western Europe and Japan. Or Lincoln who instituted land-grants to establish the nation's leading universities in midst of a mighty bloody Civil War.

In light of such historical greats, unfortunately, W is but a simpleton - whether in terms of long-term vision, pragmatism, or depth and breadth of leadership. The world is mighty complicated, and it requires more than one man's guts to run the greatest nation on earth, a man who based on his gutsy eye-to-eye meets trusted Musharraf (sp) and Putin, not realizing that both men have cataracts and stand for many things we Americans abhor.

Apparently, a lot of these things don't seem to be of much concern for those worried about our moral compass and setting the right direction for this great nation - and the world's singular role model for democracy. And it often seems like many Americans just don't care anymore.

Coders unite! It's Interoperability Month

2005-01-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

Do you write code using C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, COBOL, or CICS PL/I? And does that code need to interact with a disparate set of systems, from J2EE, Windows, mainframe, and more? Are you curious about Web Services and using it to write interoperable, versus portable, code? If so, then you're in for a treat because Interoperability Month begins January 18, just in time to start off right on the job for the new year.

You're probably wondering: What is it and why tune in? It's when Microsoft launches a month-long webcast series focusing on interoperability – why it matters to the business, common strategies and methods, and guidance on specific implementation scenarios between the major platform players. This series will feature over 40 webcasts, cool giveaways, and brand-new technical guidance from Microsoft.

Click the Interop Month button to register today!

Underwear goes inside your pants

2005-01-05T14:13:00.000-08:00

It's January already (and with it a belated happy New Years) and I thought I should start the Commentary up slow with a nice, thoughtful video that creatively frames our American life and times, circa 2004/2005, putting it in some perspective:

Among the gazillion pop, rap, crap videos, you get to watch one or two good ones. Lazyboy’s ‘Underwear goes inside your pants’ would definitely have to be one of the good ones. The video is not visually appealing nor does it have hot women running around (that being said half of you might not watch it) but it’s still worth a watch. Lyrics to the song are worth pondering over.

You can watch the video here: Lazyboy - Underwear goes inside your pants (might require launch.com/yahoo id).

Blog neglect, political shellshock

2004-12-20T01:59:00.000-08:00

As is apparent, over the last several months, I have been negligent with my blog. That should soon change, as my shellshock of Bush's seeping infection of the country's psyche with fear and moral righteousness, and ultimately garnering a slight majority 51% of red votes has finally begun to wear off. And with January 2005 almost upon us, there will be a lot to talk about. At least that's the plan right now.

What goes for [cable] news these days...

2004-10-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart lays it good on "CrossFire".

And by popular request, here is the media link (may be slow).

January 8th: CrossFire has been cancelled. A service for all Americans and the world.

Do we save or spend our way out of a stagnant economy?

2004-08-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Why Bush's Tax Cuts Don't Work as Intended
If you apply a Keynesian view to this question, it is spending that you want to drive up aggregate demand. Savings are funds that are channeled through the banking system and equity markets for businesses to invest in capital goods and equipment as well as labor in anticipation of demand. With insufficient demand, inventories build up and there is ultimately a slack in the labor and factory utilization rates.

The logic of the tax cuts was to afford people monies so they will spend to stimulate domestic demand. However, historically low interest rates and inflation, increasing productivity rates, coupled with high GDP growth and output means we have plenty (even a glut) of investment capital that is churning out goods and services against a shrinking labor force. In addition, a large number of workers have left the job market or have given up searching for jobs, poor and middle-class households (HH's) are heavily in debt over leveraged with their home equity lines, who collectively cannot afford to continue bearing the brunt of sustaining aggregate demand.

In other words, a supply glut of goods and capital coupled with insufficient new jobs created to even keep pace with population growth ultimately leads to stagnant demand (plus existing HH’s are clearly overextended more than they’ve ever been). To stimulate job growth via tax cuts, a majority percentage of each tax cut dollar should be spent versus saved, which if saved in this day and age of free capital flows, is essentially a domestic sieve that in part redirects those dollars to global, especially emerging, markets (particularly China) in seek of higher returns with little immediate benefit to the U.S. – with my Far East ETFs blazing hot in the last 7 months to prove it.

Why It Disproportioanately Benefits Those Who Need It Least
Providing the rich who make more than 200K a year with tax cuts - which probably includes a few reading this (whether one feels rich or not), and if one can put aside pure self interest and few thousand dollars refund checks for a minute - is not a wise policy criteria since folks in the top 2/5 income quintiles have a much greater tendency to save a higher percentage of each tax cut dollar received.

Since more consumption driving up aggregate demand is what’s desired, not savings, the poor and middle-class would do more with each tax cut dollar they receive since a significantly greater percentage of it would be spent. Take the Japanese as a case and point – huge savings and capital pool, low interest rate coupled to gluttonous and undisciplined lending, and extremely weak consumer demand, all have led to a deflationary economy for more than a decade of stagnant growth. Like it or not, we are all Keynesians now; supply-side economics doesn’t work in theory or in practice.

The Numbers Behind It All
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey, or CEX, and Federal Reserve data, the top 2/5 quintile, folks who make more than an average of $85K/yr, to the top 1/5 who on average make $203K/yr, have an average 30-40% savings rate. The top 1% make on average $1.5 million/yr and save more than half their income. This is in contrast to the bottom 3/5 quintile of income-holders who make on average $56K/yr and less who have a dissavings rate between -5% to -120% (dissavings rate is the degree by which a HH consumes more than they earn and/or save).

And these tax cuts aren’t free. Foreign investors finance it via our treasuries and bond issues that have significant interest costs. In addition, a noticeable portion of it flows to equities markets for domestic and increasingly overseas investment, which is doubly negative for the economy. The trend is readily apparent: In 2001 we had a surplus of $100,000,000,000 whereas now in 2004 we’re have a $400,000,000,000 deficit, with tax cuts making up a 1/3 of the red, and Iraq is at $200,000,000,000 with no end in sight.

And fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million/yr. Since they will also receive an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, with a saving rate on average of 45% and more, it means unfortunately, at least half of that almost $80K refund will not be spent, and so will fail to stimulate sufficient aggregate demand and not contribute directly to economic growth.

All this and more is why Bush’s massive tax cuts haven’t worked to stimulate significant demand and employment (last month’s anemic 32K new jobs vs. the expected 300K new jobs being a case and point), yet has done a great job for business growth and GDP.

Postscript
Instead of the 1/3 of tax cuts going to the top 1% income earners who need it the least, it can be shifted to a middle class one and/or become transfer payments to the 40 million poor and lower middle-class Americans who need and do not have access to health care (totalling almost 20% of all Americans; I can't think of another G-7 nation with 20% of its population that have no health care rights).

This would not be investing dollars subsidizing big pharma and HMOs to do as they wish to fatten their income statement or increase margins. Rather, it provides a direct economic mechanism to pool and increase the levarage afforded to disenfranchised citizens who can then vote with their feet for those providers that deliver the best health care competitively in the marketplace.

This will take tax cut monies away from those top 1% of HH's making over $1 million who forfeit an 80K refund to those who do need it (though, according to the Daily Press, consider what President Bush said on August 9th: "The really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway", on why high taxes on the rich don't work). It will also reduce the health care cost burdens for the majority of Americans who now have to pay for those that cannot.

Clarification: The most recent CEX data shows the bottom 1/5 to bottom 2/5 have a dissavings rate of -30 and -120%, respectively. The middle 20 have a -5% dissavings rate. The top 2/5 saves 35% and the top 1/5 saves 45%.

Do the rich save more?

2004-08-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

From Buffett: Bush Tax Cuts Favor Corporations, Wealthy:

..."If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning," Buffett said in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual report.
Except for 1983, the percentage of federal tax receipts from corporate income taxes last year was the lowest since data was first published in 1934, Buffett said.
"Tax breaks for corporations (and their investors, particularly large ones) were a major part of the administration's 2002 and 2003 initiatives," Buffett said....
to Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy:
...The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

...Mr. Kerry has argued that the cuts were tilted so much in favor of the wealthy that they provided relatively little stimulus to the economy and set the stage for record budget deficits. Since 2001, the federal budget has deteriorated from a surplus of more than $100 billion to a deficit expected to exceed $400 billion in 2004.
Mr. Bush's top economic priority has been to make his tax cuts permanent, rather than letting them expire at the end of this decade as they would under current law. Mr. Kerry would seek to roll back the tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 a year, a move his campaign estimates would save $860 billion over 10 years, and use that money in large part to pay for a vast new national health care plan...
...According to the new report from the Congressional Budget Office, about two-thirds of the benefits from the tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, went to households in the top fifth of earnings, with an average income of $203,740....

All this begs the larger question: Do the rich mostly spend or save?

If they save more, as a policy criteria, should the rich get the bulk of the tax cuts - especially in an anemic economy that presently requires direct stimulation of domestic demand (vs. a now oversupply of investment) to produce concommittant growth?

A detailed technical paper with extensive economic analysis and discussion on the topic by economists at the Federal Reserve, Dartmouth, and Columbia provides some answers on how much the rich save. As it turns out, a whole lot.

"Do the Rich Save More" provides a stylized analysis of data from the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX).

A salient set of results are diagrammed on pp 34-35 showing a clear trend slope measuring the much greater degree (2-3 times or more) by which the rich save over those of lower- and middle-income.

Their conclusion, in part, states:

...For households aged 30-59, we consistently find that higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income than lower income households. Also, there is no evidence that high lifetime income households dissave more at post-retirement ages...

Whereas for the middle-class, the savings (including retirement) picture is the reverse and bleak - a University College of London and University of Chicago professor state in "Do IRAs Increase National Saving?":

...households financed their IRA contributions not from a reduction in consumption, but rather from existing saving or from planned saving. Their findings indicate that only a small fraction of IRA contributions actually represented net additions to national saving. These results should lead policymakers and researchers to reexamine tax-favored saving accounts and to determine whether the additions to household saving that are induced by tax incentives are substantial enough to justify the loss in tax revenue from the program.
...While participation in the IRA program may have increased household saving (through reduced tax liabilities), results indicate that there was little or no increase in national saving between 1982-1986. Attanasio and DeLeire also examine changes in the non-IRA financial assets of IRA contributors. They find that on average, new contributors reduced their non-IRA assets by over $1,400 compared with old contributors.
...Researchers estimate that at most 9% to 20% of the IRA contributions of new contributors represent new national saving. These figures are lower than the results found by studies that compared IRA contributors with non-IRA contributors, only using data on assets. The key policy question remaining is whether a 9% or 20% increase is a large enough percentage to justify the IRA program....

Living beyond means

2004-08-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

Numbers speak for themselves, over & over again...
U.S. Trade Deficit Increased 19% in June: Analysts Worry That Burgeoning Gap Will Lead to Higher Interest Rates, Lower Dollar
...By the end of June, imports exceeded exports by $55.8 billion, another record U.S. trade deficit, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. The size of the gap forced many economists to trash their forecasts and pencil in lower estimates of the economy's strength in coming months.
..."The U.S. as a nation is just living way beyond its means," said Nigel Gault, U.S. economist for Global Insight, an conomic research firm, noting that household debt has soared in recent years and that the federal budget deficit is ballooning to a record size. "There is a worry that at some point, U.S. spending growth will have to slow sharply to get this under control."The size of the trade gap surprised many analysts because it showed the U.S. economy had slowed more significantly than thought in the spring.
...Several analysts said they also expect weaker U.S. economic growth in coming months as trade provides an additional drag on a recovery that may be faltering under the weight of high energy prices, stalling job creation and tepid consumer spending. "Unless there is significant improvement in coming months, the deficit's trajectory poses serious questions about the growth outlook in the second half," Joseph Abate, of Lehman Brothers Global Economics, wrote in a note to clients, calling the trade figures "shockingly dismal."...

Why Bush's top-heavy tax cuts don't work

2004-08-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

This entry is in response to a blog posting, where a comment was made a while back objecting to my assertion stating that the rich save more than the poor, and as a result the Bush tax cuts is not an effective stimulus for a slow-growing economy.

The Economic Irrationality of Supply Side-driven Tax Cuts
Setting aside the fact that jobs growth has been slowing down tremendously (as evidenced by the latest monthly jobs report of an anemic 32,000 new jobs) despite *record* monies spent on tax cuts, I think tax cuts are perceived in fundamentally different ways, one of which does not jive well with the economic data. I believe too many go through a certain thought process or experiment where one analyzes things at the margin and make assumptions leading to the belief that the rich are actually more likely to spend than the poor, thereby justifying the top-heavy tax cut approach.

Here is an alternative view. For a point of reference most of us can agree to, here is a set of time-series data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Consumer Expenditure Survey:

[Column #'s]
[1] Income quintiles (fifth)
[2] Share of total income
[3] Fraction of income saved
[4] Contributions to overall savings rate

1981 TO 1983 AVERAGE
lowest 3.9% -108.2% -4.2%
second 10.1% -15.4% -1.6%
third 16.7% 6.3% 1.1%
fourth 24.8% 18.4% 4.6%
highest 44.4% 31.3% 13.9%
Overall savings rate (1981-83) 13.7%

1987 TO 1991 AVERAGE
lowest 3.8% -122.6% -4.7%
second 9.3% -28.1% -2.6%
third 15.8% -0.9% -0.1%
fourth 24.3% 12.2% 3.0%
highest 46.9% 30.6% 14.4%
Overall savings rate (1987-91) 9.9%

Source. Consumer Expenditure Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics,U.S. Department of Labor.

Besides the obvious fact that the rich do save significantly more then the poor, here's some context behind this trend that should leave little room for doubt.

A Little Economic History
Beginning in the mid-1970s the share of their incomes which U.S. households save steadily declined, and this drop accelerated in the 1980s. According to household surveys, the savings rate averaged 13.8% of income during 1981 to 1983, but fell sharply to 10% during 1987 to 1991.

Most economists, and many policymakers, believe this decline is a critical economic problem. Why? First, since they view saving as the source of capital for business investment, lower savings will mean higher interest rates, resulting in less investment and slower economic growth. Second, higher interest rates will harm consumers by making it more difficult to finance home mortgages, car loans and other purchases. Third, the current generation, by not saving enough, will face greater hardships in retirement.

While economists and policymakers of many political stripes agree that we should be deeply troubled about this situation, they don't agree on why the rate fell, or what to do about it. One political viewpoint, that of "supply side" economics, became prominent in part due to concerns during the 1980s about the falling savings rate. Among other things, supply-siders argue for redistributing income toward corporations and the wealthy, on the theory that these sectors save at higher rates. But while such a redistribution has taken place during the past 15 years, overall savings have continued to fall.

Evidence from recent decades shows that while the rich are saving more, this increase has been outweighed by dramatically lower savings from all other income groups. And the reason is that widening inequality has so harmed the incomes of moderate- and low-income households that they are unable to save, and in fact are living on borrowed money (dissaving).

Flaws in Standard Economic Assumptions
One problem with standard models (and every day folks as matter of fact) is that they assume all households, regardless of their income or wealth, make consumption decisions in similar ways. All families, the models assume, balance their current consumption needs versus the need to save for retirement, and all have reliable estimates of their future income.

These assumptions are suspect for several reasons. First, only households that have relatively stable sources of income can make long-term decisions concerning future consumption in retirement. But a large and growing number of households face great uncertainty concerning their jobs and income. Second, many households, even if they would like to save for retirement, cannot do so, because they don't have enough income to cover their current consumption needs.

Standard models also fail by assuming that households adjust their behavior similarly whether incomes rise or fall - when they rise, households consume more, and when they fall, households consume proportionally less. But the "Relative Income Hypothesis" (RIH), suggested in 1949 by economist James Duesenberry - reminiscent of eclectic economist Thorstein Veblen's earlier work dissecting the [ir]rationalities of the leisurely class (in his best known book, the Theory of the Leisurely Class, chapter 4 is on Conspicuous Consumption - a term he originated) - argues that when incomes decline (such as in a recession) households resist giving up the consumption patterns they have become accustomed to.

To maintain their previous living standards, households will either reduce their savings rates, consume out of previous savings, increase their use of debt, or raise household income by having another household member enter the labor market. This all can be summed up by what someone said to me recently: "It's amazing to see how customer care representatives at my company are driving BMWs and Lexus on a 30K a year salary." I make a bit more yet I bought a Nissan Altima in 2002, albeit souped up a bit with a V6 and spoiler but at least 10K cheaper than the former two.

In other words, the more wealthy you are on the economic continuum, the more likely you are in making more rational economic decisions that involve heightened consideration of future and present values of costs and returns of goods and assets (many with help of fine accountants everywhere), which lead in the end to a much higher rate of savings to play a large part. This trend persists through times of growth and recession over the long-run (note how static the results held over the decade-long time series). If one had time to dig the more recent '01, '02, and '03 survey data, it would show the same trend.

It would be instructive to understand given the shift in income toward the wealthy during the 1980s, what caused the decline in savings rates from 1981-83 to 1987-91? It was not a lack of savings by the richest Americans, but rather by everyone else.

The dissavings rates of the lowest two fifths rose, while the savings rates for the third and fourth fifths (perhaps approximating the middle class) fell greatly. In 1981-83 the lowest two fifths dissaved at rates of-108% and - 15% respectively, while in 1987-91 their negative saving rates grew to -122% and -28%. In addition, the third fifth went from net savers to dissavers, while the savings of the fourth fifth fell from 18% to 12% of their incomes. The savings rate of the wealthiest fifth of households also worsened slightly. But this was more than offset by their increased share of national income. As a result, this was the only income group that increased its total savings (from a 13.9 to a 14.4 percentage point contribution toward the overall savings rate, as shown in column three of the table).

...And Why Bush's Tax Cuts Don't Add Up
As such, the Bush tax cuts are not very effective given such economic realities. The problem is only worsened considering that the tax cuts are funded on borrowed money that is costly, debt-financed by our very willing co-optitors of the Far East and Europe.

Many analysts expected the overall U.S. savings rate to rise as wealthier households, with higher savings propensities, gained a greater share of the total income. And supply-side theorists continue to recommend shifting income toward the wealthy as a means of raising total savings in the United States. But the evidence demonstrates the opposite - higher savings by the rich did not make up for the severely reduced savings of the remaining 80% of households.

As some economists have argued, the bottom three fifths found it necessary to increase their dissaving in order to maintain living standards in the face of stagnating real incomes and rising costs of living, especially for housing, since the early 1970s, and now rising commodities, oil, and food prices.

In the end, the tax cuts are needed much more by the middle- and lower-income class (by middle, I mean most of you and I making less than $200,000 a year), more to buttress up the savings rate *and* to increase the consumption rate since the rich (BillG and his closest 1,000 friends) are not consuming but investing for the rest of us to consume thus completing, ideally speaking, a virtuous cycle of economic growth.

However, Bush's belief in discredited "trickle-down" supply-side economics of the 80's (whereby people making >$200K a year receive bulk of the billions in aggregate benefits of the tax cuts and save much of it, vs. just marginally speaking viewed by impact as % of their income, which fails to provide a weighted measure of the economic impact of tax cut dollars spent that stimulate aggregate demand) is a disaster for this day and age of free capital flows, debt-driven foreign-funded demand, coupled with oil and basic materials volality and price increases, political instability, and a wholesale lack of investment in education, technology and research vis-a-vis the G-8 and *China*.

The real behind-the-scenes Mideast story

2004-08-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

An impressive piece of journalism that I read a few weeks back. A gripping blow-by-blow of the Iraqi situation, how Iran poses the real threat in the region capitalizing on the current tie-down and distraction of the US, and how the Israeli’s are doing all they can to stop them a la real politick.

Kumar and Harold go to Whitecastle

2004-08-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

Chani and I went to see the flick last night - what a hilarious blast! It's the funniest movie I've seen this year. A tinge of Better Luck Tomorrow. It's doubled up with an Asian and Indian mixed together who play off each other really well. Great writing and acting; it exceeded my expectations by far.

The political economist

2004-08-08T01:47:00.000-07:00

BillMon dispels the myths and confusion behind the employment rate and the influence of the household v. payroll surveys. It is very disappointing to see someone of Mankiw’s qualifications turn into a political hack. He is one of the nation’s leading macroeconomists, and like Larry Summers (treasury secretary under Rubin/Clinton), both are bright stars and were one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard.

Brad DeLong is also a noted economic historian at UC Berkeley who specializes in macroeconomic growth, also a leader in the field. And since we’re on topic, Paul Krugman, before he became a vocal NY Times columnist, was a professor of international trade at Stanford, then MIT, now Princeton, and won the Bates medal, an honor bestowed to the best economist under 40.

Note that while Bush has a legion of supply-side think tanks full of mediocre economists backing him, you have over 50 Nobel prize scientists and economists (not counting the 4 exceptional ones above), a dozen 3- and 4-star generals and admirals (including the 2 most recent retired chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), as well as over 200 business leaders of the Fortune 1000 that have signed on to the Kerry bandwagon.

The reasons behind this support is not ideology - it simply lies in the fact that the numbers just haven’t added up using Bush’s arithmetic – whether one is speaking about the president’s war or peace policies. And when numbers don’t add up, it doesn’t matter what you say as president or if people think he’s a great, straight-shooter from Texas. However, it does matter whether a president deliver on what he says most (or for 3rd rate presidents, half?) of the time.

If you do the political math yourself, you’ll see that Bush has a big deficit in this area – big on rhetoric, small on tangible, measurable results. So it’s no surprise that he has an increasing credibility gap with the American people, which I doubt will change regardless of how Bush spins, smears, and pontificates in November….

We're on autopilot

2004-08-07T15:43:00.000-07:00

After reading this article, it occurred to me…is our national and foreign policy running on auto-pilot? Do we hear of phone calls from Bush to Putin demanding that he address the Yukos issue to ensure oil price stability? No. Yeah sure, behind the scenes via back channels etc., but how about public posturing/political pressure and the face-to-face style that all modern US presidents have embraced, thereby utilzing every tool in the political toobox?

The president has visited the mid-East twice in the entire time he’s been in office, both times to make speeches, spending no more than 3 days each. His engagement with NATO is nil. Powell is not the president yet he’s acting like one in front of foreign leaders on Bush’s behalf, not to mention Bush’s record days in office on vacation, in this day and age.

I remember a time once when presidents traveled around the world to assert US leadership that the world respected and was, indeed, guided by. Now, we only know how to flex our military muscle (a blunt instrument of power, recognized since Sun Tzu to modern guerilla war strategist Ho Chi Minh) and apparently have lost the ability to practice the lost arts of diplomacy and international politics.

Results of this presidency and Republican-controlled Congress are irrefutable. What’s more damning, as history will show, the Democrats had nothing to do with it as Republicans have full sway (as possible in a representative demcracy short of a single-party system) to do whatever they want to for 4 years now. And what’s tangible to show for? Something to really think over in the next few months.

The nature of the job deficit

2004-08-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

Supply-side, debt driven economics does not work. After the latest US jobs reports states that only 32,000 jobs (vs. the 250,000-300,000 expected) were created last month, The Economist states it head on:

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the gains from America’s productivity-led recovery have been unevenly distributed. Corporate profits are strong, and business investment leapt by almost 9% in the spring. But pay has lagged behind, and the wages of production workers have stagnated. Of course, through its tax cuts, the White House has done its best to provide what employers will not—a substantial boost to take-home pay. But the effects of those tax cuts are beginning to fade, just as prices at American petrol pumps rise.
What consumers do not earn, or receive back from their government, they must borrow. Household debts grew by more than 10% in the first quarter, and now add up to more than 115% of disposable income. HSBC, a bank, says that the recovery is built on “marshlands of debt”. With interest rates now rising, this ready source of spending power may be about to dry up. Indeed, the beige book reports that borrowing by homebuyers declined in San Francisco and New York, two of the hottest property markets in the country.

Food for thought

2004-08-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

Contrary to perception, the single-most important reason developing African countries are underdeveloped is a gross lack of nutritious, affordable foods. The why's vary: Geography, political turmoil, meddling by the British empire...the list goes on.

Lest we forget the basics of economic development, satiating hunger should also be a priority alongside the massive US' AIDS/HIV initiative (which now prescribes use of expensive Western cocktail drugs vs. generics w/ vitamin supplements). More investment and attention is required in smart nutrition as well as developing and planting more productive crop strains, which doesn't require big programs to administer or much money to start-up.

There is an overwhelming amount of data available (outlined below) that draws a clear picture of the best ways to tackle this problem. For next tax season, you might consider a donation to a relief organization today.

There are 800,000,000 people at stake.

Quoted from The Economist - Food for thought:

....Western experts tend to tiptoe around the issue of how malnourishment makes people less intelligent, but local experts sometimes do not. "If your brain is stunted when you are young, that affects the decisions you make in later life. If you can't do simple arithmetic, you won't invest wisely. The cost of that will be very high," says Tomaida Msisika, a consultant on food security in Malawi. Sam Chimwaza, an analyst for Malawi's Famine Early Warning Systems Network, says that the reasoning ability of people in rural areas has been affected by malnutrition and it is hard for them to execute simple instructions. "They can work as servants in the city for two or three years and still not figure out how to adjust the temperature on an iron," he says.
Several pieces of research have shown the broader economic effects of these problems. A study on Zimbabwe found that children exposed to a drought completed on average nearly five months less schooling (and were 2.3cm shorter than expected). It estimated that this resulted in a loss of 7-12% of lifetime earnings. At a somewhat larger scale, the World Bank estimates that in low-income countries, the net present value of causing children to be born of normal rather than low weight would be about $580 per child. That is more than a year's average income in a typical sub-Saharan African country...

Going up

2004-07-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

A reason to be happy. MSFT will announce earnings this Thursday, hopefully there's strong growth for nearly all 7 businesses.

Commentary back in a week

2004-07-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

I will be sporadically blogging since I will be out of the office attending Microsoft's Global Briefing in Hotlanta until July 21st. I'll try gathering some interesting non-confidential tidbits to share on some cool MS technologies when I get back.

Spotlight on Spotlight

2004-07-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Mighty interesting read on Apple's new search engine and its management of metadata, a traditionally difficult but interesting computer science problem.
------------------------
Daring Fireball says Apple's Spotlight will be a real and a well-thought-out product:
Daring Fireball: Spotlight on Spotlight: ...two years ago... Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo, renowned file system design expert and creator of the highly-regarded, metadata-rich Be File System.... [W]hat then has Giampaolo been working on?... Spotlight — which is, in the words of one WWDC attendee, Giampaolo’s “baby”.... [T]he aforementioned source who attended the Spotlight session at WWDC sent me the following report:

Spotlight is completely, relentlessly focused on files and files’ metadata. Files are the only object returned to Spotlight queries. Two aspects of Jobs’ keynote were thus misleading: The “spotlight” effect on System Preferences was wholly unrelated to Spotlight. Spotlight’s ability to show results from Apple Mail archives on Jobs’ machine was tantamount to a sham. Believe it or not, Tiger Mail has switched to an “exploded” Maildir-like storage format with a single message per file.

One implication of Spotlight’s file-centricity is that its ability to search “email” might not apply to clients other than Apple Mail — it’s the fact that the new Tiger version of Mail stores each message as a separate file that allows Spotlight to effectively return individual mail messages as search results. No other major mail client uses a one-message-per-file storage format.

Spotlight’s full-text search is outsourced to SearchKit, which will be considerably faster in Tiger (“3x indexing, 20x incremental search” over Panther). So, Spotlight has three places to look for information about files: its own hand-tuned substring-matching metadata store (built by Giampaolo, not part of Core Data or anything else), Carbon’s HFS+ catalog calls (so Spotlight will respond to searches for type and creator), and SearchKit’s full-text index.

Both metadata collection and full-text indexing depend on cooperating per-file-format Importers, either written by Apple or by third parties. Like Google, no matter how much text an Importer provides, Spotlight only cares about the first 100K of raw text. Importers are fired on every file the moment it is created, saved, changed, or moved, including when files are made available through a newly mounted drive. Performance is said to be excellent in every case except network-mounted home directories, which are bedeviling on several levels and on which they’re still working.

It’s through the default set of Importers that Spotlight is able to index and search format-specific metadata, such as the ID3 tags in MP3 files. What’s cool about this architecture is that Spotlight’s indexes will thus stay up-to-date automatically. All you need to do is save, move, or copy a file, and Spotlight’s metadata and content indexes will note the changes on-the-fly. Compare and contrast to the full-content file searching previously provided via Sherlock, which required periodic monolithic re-indexing of the content of your drives.

Reading code is hard

2004-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Eric Lippert doles out good advice sharing some of his coding and debugging best practices.

Something cool from Microsoft

2004-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

...about Potential and Passion.

Something funny from Sun

2004-07-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

...found Inside Jack.

Slowly encircling

2004-07-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

Israel’s illegal but unstoppable barrier

Economics of two Americas

2004-07-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

Class warfare is being waged in the current elections, again.

Wal-Mart vs. Neiman Marcus illuminates with more analysis showing how economic growth is benefiting the wealthy and fast disappearing for the poor.

...the University of Michigan and the Conference Board both publish monthly gauges of consumer confidence...Both measures—produced by nonpartisan economists—find that Americans, on the whole, are confident—more optimistic, in fact, than they have been in two years. But they also found that while those with incomes above $50,000 have become more confident and optimistic, those with incomes below $50,000 have become less so.

The Conference Board shows the same split. In its most recent month, May, the index for over-$50,000 demographic was 112.1, the highest it's been since June 2002. But for those making under $50,000, confidence not only remains below its levels of July 2002, it has been falling in 2004. (Since January 2004, the confidence for the under $15,000 subset has fallen from 69.1 to 65.6; for the $15,000-$24,999 subset, from 85.2 to 69.3; for the $25,000-$34,999 subset, from 92.9 to 82.9; and for the $35,000 to $49,999 subset, from 95.2 to 93.6.)

...If the economy were undergoing a broad-based expansion, if a rising tide were lifting all boats equally, you might expect that trend to continue. But the views of the rich and poor are moving in opposite directions. The split results—the growing pessimism of the poor and the growing optimism of the rich—suggest the economy's improvement isn't helping everyone. That is bad news for a lot of Americans, but it may be good news for the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

Take CMU courses online

2004-07-12T01:28:00.000-07:00

Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available but is fully interactive. Learn microeconomics here.

On political accountablity

2004-07-11T03:53:00.000-07:00

...where I also add my 2 cents.

The closing of the American book

2004-07-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

Read a forceful piece, apparently the #1 most emailed article for the New York Times right now, speaking to the consequnces of Americans choosing not to read. Cable networks are no doubt happy about this trend as long as more eyeballs stay glued to the tube. I wouldn't be surprised if this impacts our productivity, innovativeness, and work ethic over the long-run, in turn engendering not so attractive demographics that is less educated and well-off. What goes will come around.

If it wasn't for lawyers

2004-07-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

Daniel Gross argues that lawyers—derided by the business-friendly and secrecy-obsessed White House “as enemies of free enterprise and the state”—are emerging as the true heroes of the Enron debacle. “Bush's MBA administration proved itself singularly unequipped to deal with the cascade of bankruptcies, accounting scandals, and Wall Street conflicts that exploded in 2001,” Gross writes. In this responsibility vacuum, lawyers “have proved to be the most effective tools—perhaps the only effective tool—for making the Bush government work.”

Bush, and many of his surrogates, can't make political hay out of this great coup. Every development in the Enron saga becomes an occasion to rehash the many links between Bush, the Bush administration, and Enron—and inconveniently close to the elections. (Salon conveniently dusts them off here.) And it's difficult to criticize trial lawyers for destroying Americans' businesses when Enron stands as an example of how a bunch of greedy MBAs from Texas sunk a giant American corporation all by themselves—or to bash lawyers when, as the Enron Task Force shows, they're the only potent weapon the government has against corporate corruption.

Also, an excellent piece at BillMon (solid piece of writing, as usual) laying out the history between Enron, Lay, the GOP, and the Bushes (I & II). The Whitewater "scandal" is quaint by comparison.

Nice, quiet evening

2004-07-10T04:15:00.001-07:00

Started off Friday night working out for an hour at the gym down the street from the office. Soon after, I picked up Chani from her work, where we had a nice Thai dinner nearby, and managed to catch a showing of Spiderman 2.

Spidey the hype does indeed match the performance. I thought the acting was superb, with a very well-written script, nicely assembled scenes (threaded with romance) and story line. And did I mention the killer (very realistic) special effects?

Afterwards, we got home and even caught up on a couple shows we Tivo'd.

SG-1: New season arrives

2004-07-10T03:47:00.006-07:00

I'm a big fan of a Sci-Fi channel cable show, SG-1, because: 1) it's not a Star Trek rehash, 2) has quite a few great and original story lines, 3) with rich subplots and more (e.g. Richard Dean Anderson of MacGyver fame does a great job as one of the main characters). It has garnered a loyal fan base, and is now on its 8th, and last, season.

My fiance and I saw the 1st episode of the new season last night - it totally rocked, that is, if you're a fan of [good] sci-fi. :)

The price of empire

2004-07-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this interesting piece found in May's Atlantic Monthly on the price of America's empire building; a lot of informative comparisons are made to the British experience. Seems the Brits master the craft a little better than we do.

Putting money in perspective

2004-07-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

Think you have money problems?

Look at the celebrities -- child stars to Donald Trump -- who've burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and then filed bankruptcy.

To comment or not to comment

2004-07-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

Laura's Apt 11D makes an interesting case for both turning on and off blog commenting. To keep the Commentary somewhat rational if not a controlled chaos, mine's off for now.

Microsoft's upcoming goodies for Web services

2004-07-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

Microsoftie's Yasser, Elliot, and Matt have posted New Features for Web Service Developers in Beta 1 of the .NET Framework 2.0. Interesting read if you're interested in where Microsoft is going next with Web services.

Starr defends, Moore begins, and then some

2004-07-09T01:55:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Starr offers his rebuttal to Clinton's memoirs, Michael Moore starts blogging on Independence Day, as well as Bloggers Suffer Burnout (no surprise there) and the open question, Where Are the Real Republicans?.

Anti-string

2004-07-09T00:53:00.000-07:00

String theory. You may have heard of it - many a times on Star Trek no doubt. In physics, quite a few consider it The Theory of Everything. String theory has been hot for a while, almost a decade now. PBS has a popular multi-episode special on it, quite a few best sellers are shilling it.

Yet, what if it turns out to be unprovable New Age-tinged psuedo science, which has no predictative value and fails to explain new phenomenon any better than existing theories?

That's the critical view proffered by anti-string theorists.

Report Shows Big Drop in Reading in U.S.

2004-07-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

Astounding - seems like some things we just can't take for granted anymore.

Only 47 percent of American adults read "literature" (poems, plays, narrative fiction) in 2002, a drop of 7 points from a decade earlier. Those reading any book at all in 2002 fell to 57 percent, down from 61 percent.

NEA chairman Dana Gioia, himself a poet, called the findings shocking and a reason for grave concern.

"We have a lot of functionally literate people who are no longer engaged readers," Gioia said in an interview with The Associated Press. "This isn't a case of `Johnny Can't Read,' but `Johnny Won't Read.'"

The likely culprits, according to the report: television, movies and the Internet.

Success and Motivation P4

2004-07-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

More insights by Mark Cuban. He has it nailed down, nothing fancy or MBA-esque. Focus on the basics: knowledge is power (e.g. spending 3 hours a day reading), learn from the best, understand how your biggest competitors might respond before they do. Good stuff.

The great Chinese century - are they ready?...Part 2

2004-07-08T02:32:00.000-07:00

Does freedom and liberal democracy really have nothing to do with the Chinese phenom? I take another stab at it here.

Man-made yellow diamonds - absolutely fascinating

2004-07-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

My fiance clued me to this intriguing tale that leads down some dark corridors shedding light on a battle between old diamond interests (De Beers) and a few gutsy, bleeding-edge scientists and entrepeneurs. May very well change the face of technology as we know it today.

And De Beers Agrees to Guilty Plea to Re-enter the U.S. Market.

The great Chinese century - are they ready?

2004-07-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

New York Times Magazine has a thought-provoking piece on China.

When we're not the biggest dog on the block anymore, it has to be innovate or die (like Great Britain of last century).

Regardless of the current hype, China will lack freedom and a liberal democracy that we take for granted for a long time to come, which is fundamental to forming a marketplace of ideas and innovation that lead to sustained, non-export led growth. Plus, even bigger question for them will be the 1 billion inland population that don't and won't benefit from this economic growth spurt for the forseeable future.

Sarah McLachlan

2004-07-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

My fiance and I blazed our way over Vancouver July 4th, managed to grab some delicious - and just as important authentic - Chinese eatings complete with a boatload of take-outs, and also did some shopping on Robson. Then last night, we went to Vancouver-native Sarah McLachlan's first North American concert at the Key Arena in Seattle, and it was aweseome. Her voice was amazing to behold live (almost goes w/o saying), the instrumentals, stage work, and the rest topped off an already nice holiday weekend. Though she's been out of the scene for 6 years, her performance Monday night shows that she indeed remains an extremely talented artist.

The capitalism of soccer + Mark Cuban

2004-07-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

Learned a lot about sports as a serious business concern from two articles I picked up this week.

Interesting comparison of the soccer vs. baseball business.

And Mark Cuban of Maverick's fame writes a nice well-thought out piece on a key decision affecting his franchise Steve Nash, Part 1

He also does a nice job with Rules of Success. #1: Sweat Equity is the best equity!

It was great reading, even for someone who's neither into soccer or baseball, nor a Maverick's fan.

Try out Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition for FREE

2004-06-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

Are you already a .NET developer? Would like to be one? Why not try out the latest from Microsoft; after all, it's FREE.

At TechEd Europe keynote the new Express products were officially announced that are available for download right now:
Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition – Note, SQL Express is included as an optional component in the installers of the other Express products.

Takes 15-20 minutes to download (the install is only 54MB vs. the normal 3GB VS install). It’s a great way to get your hands on some bits and start coding some .NET apps in no time. After installation, I bet you'd be surprised how much you can accomplish in 15-30 minutes.

SG-1 rocks

2004-06-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

I've noticed over the years my tastes in entertainment (among other things) has changed quite a bit. Less "must see TV", more storied shows on cable like The Shield, SG-1, The Wire, Sopranos, etc. Reality TV prompts me to have heaving spells (though the Apprentice was an exception).

That's just me. It always seems my tastes are always opposite what's popular. I'm someone who proudly picks out fine clothing from Costco when possible, and rarely frequents malls, so one can suppose my tastes can't be all that.

My tangential view on game theory and Google's IPO

2004-06-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

http://weblogs.asp.net/johnmont/archive/2004/05/28/143871.aspx
The original blog entry is here.

Sign of the times

2004-05-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

A piece in the NYT Magazine (Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall) and one in NYT online (What Adolescents Miss When We Let Them Grow Up in Cyberspace) hint at signs of the times - I was quite surprised reading this, and what media/cultural slippery slope has led to.

Time to get serious?

2004-05-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Frankly, I've always thought of blogging as a semi-waste of time. Especially after reading a NYT article about people pretty obsessed with it. Don't want it to be me. Still, I'll give it another shot and try to post regularly (once a week or two?) and see where it takes me.

My more serious interests are pretty much around politics, economics, technology/computing and the sciences. Wrt not so serious interests, I like to spend quality time with my fiance, basketball, biking (especially on a sunny day, which in Seattle can be asking for a lot), reading, long trips on the road, and working out. Looking to expand that list since there's so much outdoor stuff here in the country that can be had though I'm originally from LA so a city boy at heart. But I'm trying, really...

Political sppppewwings

2004-01-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3905142/
"It's mind-boggling that in the midst of economic recovery with 9 million people jobless, President Bush would propose this…It's going to have a dire effect on wages for American families. It will cause huge displacement of American workers. We will witness how American jobs are given away right before our eyes."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3887721/
President Bush called for a major overhaul of America’s immigration system Wednesday to grant legal status to millions of undocumented workers in the United States, saying the current program was not working.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/07/HNcetoshire_1.html
"There is no job that is America's god given right anymore."-- Carly Fiorina the CEO of HP, part of the consortia that is supporting the Computer Systems Policy Project

Akin to legalizing drugs, the administration’s efforts legalizes illegal immigration. Not to be confused with legal immigrants who respect the law of the land, this is going against the main beliefs of this country: to abide by the law, not reward illegal behavior of colossal proportions, not to mention observing the sovereignty and borders of the United States especially post 9/11, all the while minding the well-being and interest of law-abiding Americans. And as if prolific outsourcing isn’t enough, this administration now proposes to sanction massive insourcing of American labor at the behest of the hospitality, restaurant, and farming industries.

The central overriding concern here as one of principle: rewarding illegal behavior, which seem to rely on a policy litmus test implying that America is no more than an economic bazaar – what does it mean to be American anymore? We’ve become a mercenary nation where economics trumps all, taking the place of [now withering] deliberate domestic and foreign policymaking which all comes at the expense of long-term prosperity and the traditional nurturing of middle class families – and undermining the backbone of this country.

It’s unfashionable these days of political correctness to be so outspoken. Yet to be able to do so is what makes this country great and what it use to mean to be American. We've become somewhat too engrossed in maintaining, and fearful of endangering, the economic well-being of self and our families which has rendered many rather mute, rendered mere cogs running broken machinery, leaving alone what is “not too terribly broken”.

Over the long-run, this mentality has eroded what has made America so exceptional, standing a league above the rest – unwavering respect for the rule of law, freedom, trust, and respect of fellow countrymen, coupled with open and vigorous discourse, fostering a liberal democracy that engender ideas, ideals and astounding innovations which steadily improve the well-being of not just a few, but all, Americans.

"Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules."
- Thomas Jefferson

"In all business, there is a factor which cannot be compensated for in dollars and cents or computed by any measure. It has no relation or connection with the mercenary and is represented only by the spirit of love which the true craftsman holds for his job and the things he is trying to accomplish."
- Frederick Louis Maytag