Ben Slade

Given the massive amounts of Federal bailout dollars being put to work, the incredible expansion of the Fed's balance sheet and the soaring U.S. deficit (these are all intimately connected of course) the "Treasuries are a bubble" view makes a lot of sense: The dollar must fall, inflation must rise, foreigners will demand higher rates on Treasuries [thus causing the price of the treasuries to go down]

From Wow! America is cool by Garrison Keillor:

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor -- he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

"The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not."

This article from the New Yorker talks about how the formerly successful the Republican strategy of polarization and division is now falling flat. "After Reagan and the end of the Cold War, conservatism lost the ties that had bound together its disparate factions." After that, "“The only thing that held the Republican coalition together was hostility to government.” But “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American,”

"Bush’s fatal incompetence and Rove’s shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement’s demise, they didn’t cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems."

“Republicans have been reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well.”

"...little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces."

My own take is that people are realizing that Republican easy solutions to hard problems not only don't work, but the quack medicine makes things worse. But the fact that people are disillusioned with the Republicans' easy answers doesn't mean they will want to take the bitter tasting medicine prescribed by the Democrats.

Malicious software is a growing threat to national economies and security interests, concludes an Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report (PDF format).

The report says communities that fight malware only manage to offer a fragmented local response to what is a global threat, noting that about one in four personal computers in the United States, or 59 million PCs, is already infected with malware. Furthermore, a booming malware market is making it easier to launch cheaper and more sophisticated attacks.

Zombie computers infected by malware are used to send out roughly 80 percent of all spam, and to attack commercial Web sites and other Internet-linked systems with crippling amounts of traffic as part of extortion schemes.

Although the largest botnets have included up to 1 million computers, and the number of computers infected is increasing, OECD found that the number of computers in each botnet is actually shrinking to avoid detection. OECD says that international organizations and agreements are needed to properly measure and counteract the impact of malware attacks. (this summary was copied from the ACM TechNews newsletter)

No story behind this picture. She's just cute:

Paul Krugman talks about how to really conserve gas, we have to be use more mass transportation. But mass transportation really requires denser metropolitan areas, a change that could take a long long time given how many houses have been built in the distant suburbs.

My take away from this? Buy real estate close in.

The current Internet email architecture is slowly dying. Garbage spam email is choking the system. The current ad-hoc, heuristic based spam filtering is a messy spam eater, eating 10-20% of good email while letting an equivalent amount of bad email get through.

While the current email architecture is based on the model of a cooperative university environment (both free and security lite), the next generation of email is being defined by GoodmailSystems to help businesses make sure their email makes it to the masses.

Basically, if a business sender meets certain minimum technical and business behavior standards, and pays a 1/4 cent per email fee, an unmistakable "certified email" graphic flag is displayed to the email recipient in a non-fakeable portion of the web page (or AOL client window) displaying the email.

By Paul Krugman in the NYTimes.com (12/3/07):

...nobody knows where the [subprime mortgage] financial toxic waste is buried. Citigroup wasn’t supposed to have tens of billions of dollars in subprime exposure; it did. Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers).

How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation” — two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts.

O.K., to be fair, some kinds of financial innovation are good. I don’t want to go back to the days when checking accounts didn’t pay interest and you couldn’t withdraw cash on weekends.

But the innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses. They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime [mortgage] crisis.

Also, from a similar column by Paul Krugman (on 12/21/07):

"Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs."

This article makes the point that the consensus on the health benefits of fat reduction in the diet are not scientifically born out. Instead it's the result of the moral equivalent of the herding instinct for scientists.

Could this be true? A basic dietary assumption of the past 40 years was a whoops? And if scientists were wrong about something this fundamental, what else could they be wrong about.

Maybe Woody Allen's predictions in the movie "Sleeper" really will come true (Ie., in the future, steak and cigarettes are determined to be healthy)