The Links:
CO2 production is going up because the world is building more power plants than the west is shutting down. We're going to burn every bit of coal, oil, and gas before we ever get serious about renewables.
The WHO warns that Ebola cases could go parabolic unless more coordinated approaches are taken.
Science Magazine notes the heavy toll Ebola has taken on front line researchers.
So, rates of Autism aren't going up. In fact, they're pretty much flat. Who knew? (Links to .pdf of the study)
Elizabeth Warren finally gets pinned down by reporters and has to answer some questions about foreign policy. Unfortunately they aren't the answers I like.In 2010 there were an estimated 52 million cases of ASDs, equating to a prevalence of 7.6 per 1000 or one in 132 persons. After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010. Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs. Globally, autistic disorders accounted for more than 58 DALYs per 100 000 population and other ASDs accounted for 53 DALYs per 100000
"I think the vote was right, and I'll tell you why I think the vote was right," she said. "America has a very special relationship with Israel. Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren't many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law. And we very much need an ally in that part of the world."Pennsylvania is going to accept the government's Medicaid expansion starting next January. Interestingly, they are going to use the funds to straight out buy insurance plans from private companies.
Rhode Island's state pension fund, as I've mentioned here several times, shifted their money into Wall St. private equity firms. They've "lost" more than $300 million though underperformance so far. Have fun covering all those retirees.
The same thing is going on in New Jersey, as I noted yesterday. Chris Christie lied about it on live TV. So that's cool. How many other states are in this same predicament?
As if you're not feeling bad enough about retirement, Bloomberg points out that the huge hit to Baby Boomer wealth caused by the housing collapse is potentially very bad for the US economy.
The increase in mortgage debt may influence labor-force dynamics as some older Americans find they’re unable to completely retire, needing extra cash to keep up monthly payments. It also diminishes home equity and wealth, making these households more susceptible to swings in the economy and curbing spending on things such as vacations and visits to grandchildren.Subterranean pent up wage deflation blues.
So does pent up wage deflation mean that US interest rates should be rising soon, after all? There are two reasons for saying no.The first reason is theoretical. We have seen that under conditions of downward wage rigidity, wage levels are higher than they should be during recessions...
The second reason is empirical. If pent up wage deflation is a significant factor, it would be expected to have the greatest effect in those parts of the economy where the recession had been most severe.Generation X, you know, the ones just above us in age, are still up to their eyeballs in debt.
Brad DeLong wants us to stop calling it the Great Recession or whatever and start calling it The Greater Depression. Based on measures of cumulative output lost, it's actually worse on a global scale than the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Baking the Data Layer. The browser cookie turned 20 this week and this article takes a short look back at that history from a big data and advertising perspective.
Story Time: How I shorted cookies and ended up long Google.
It was early March of 2000. I was in 8th grade and part of our math class was linked with part of our social studies class and we were learning about capitalism and the stock market. So, like many children throughout the country, we all played The Stock Market Game. The premise is you get an imaginary $100,000 to invest over a 6 week period. The winner gets an A. Everybody else gets, well, probably still a good grade but not a 100%! My strategy was simple: I don't know anything about stocks and my dad was Big Mr. Wall St. Guy so the other kids probably know even less than I did. Therefore, rather than make a series of uninformed decisions and risk losing money, I'd just sit on my $100,000 and see if I came out on top.
We were nearing the end of the six weeks, spring break was approaching, and my strategy looked like it was going to fail miserably. Some kids were making money hand over fist because the tech stocks like Amazon and Cisco were going crazy. Yeah, I was ahead of like 2/3 of the class but they don't count. I wanted to win by being clever and I just wasn't clever enough. Then, on the radio I heard about something terrible! Literally, the worst thing anyone in the world could imagine. Internet companies were spying on us by implanting secret files onto our computers and then tracking every website we visited.
I had one week left in the game and developed a plan to short the evil company, Doubleclick. If the stock went down I'd make money and I felt sure the stock would go down because invasion of privacy was, like, the cardinal sin of the universe, or something. I remember getting into school early on Monday so I could go to my teacher's room and get on the website to make the trade happen (we didn't have internet at our house). I then learned the worst thing in the world: I was not going to win the stock market game. Due to the peculiarities of the game, a short sale lasted 1 week. That was 1 day longer than I needed it to last because the game ended that Friday. No short sale. No pyrrhic victory. I wouldn't suddenly shoot to the top of the class and be that weird kid nobody knew who won the whole thing. Seriously, ask Justin. That's the kind of person I was.
Later that week, maybe that very night, I remember nearly coming to tears telling my dad about the whole thing. He was a big supporter of my "just hold it" strategy even though I didn't make any money; he said that the other kids probably only made money because of luck and not because they knew what they were doing. He was also pleased with my idea to short Doubleclick and thought the invasion of privacy was sure to kick their stock down a little. So, taking a page from the Oligarch-American Training manual, he opened a brokerage account and gave me some real money to buy stocks with. Like $1000, so lots for a 14 year old kid. I put on my short sale of DCLK and then we went away for spring break.
While on vacation, the stock market crashed. March 10, 200: It was the tech bubble bursting and burst it did. By the time the bubble ran its course, almost $5 trillion in value had evaporated from the economy. It was just about as big as the Great Recession 8 years later. My short sale made a lot of money. I can't find a historic price chart but the price of the stock went from about $30 to about $5. Not that I was correct in my reasoning, mind you, but the luck of the timing was such that I succeeded wildly. If the stock market game had lasted just 1 more week, I'd have won. Those kids with their fancy tech stocks would have been wiped out Cisco lost 88% of it's value in a single day. Amazon was trading above $100 at open and at close it was at $7. Dad was so impressed by the whole thing he gave me more money to use in the brokerage account and I bought a bunch more stuff while on vacation. I came back to school from break and promptly forgot most of this. I obviously still have it seared into my memory but at the time I was busy getting out of 8th grade and into high school. Plus, nobody cared that I would have won the stock market game. Hell, most of the kids didn't even know there had been a crash.
I didn't much pay attention to that brokerage account for a few years. I had like 600 shares of this Doubleclick company that I acquired at like $5 a share because of the short sale and, for some stupid reason, 100 shares of UPS (the company with those brown trucks that deliver your Amazon orders). I just kind of held onto them for several more years. In 2007, Google bought Doubleclick and all those shares I owned magically became about 100 shares of Google. And there you have yet another irony of the whole thing: I initially wanted to short this company because of their evil invasion of privacy and I ended up owning the company that has done more to erode privacy than any other. And I made money doing it. All it took was ignorance and an uncompromising commitment to compromising my principles.
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