[Quote:]

LeRoy Schaffer, a St. Francis city council member, dressed in a tuxedo and top hat for the occasion. Shaffer got visibly emotional asking Bachmann about the future of health care and the role of special interests in Washington.

“I’ll be danged if I am going to give up my Social Security because of socialism,” Schaffer said, before being booed by the crowd.

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University of California-Berkley economist Christopher Knittel has developed a rigorous assessment of the implied cost of carbon emissions under the clunker program. (“The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide Under the Cash for Clunkers Program” [pdf], Center for the Study of Energy Markets, Berkeley, The University of California Energy Institute.) Knittel made plausible assumptions about the average life remaining in vehicles removed from the road, the average fuel economy associated with those vehicles, and the resulting levels of carbon emission that would have survived in the absence of clunkers.  Eventually, of course, the clunkers would have died a natural but less dramatic death.  Knittel then estimated the carbon reduction gained when the large fleet of clunkers was replaced by a new fuel-efficient fleet.  When he ran the numbers, Knittel found the cost per ton of carbon reduced could reach $500 under a set of normal values for critical variables.  The cost estimate was $237 per ton under best case conditions.   And what does this tell us?  The much celebrated Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade carbon-emission control legislation estimates the cost of reducing a ton of carbon to be $28 when done across U.S. industries.  Yes, we are getting carbon-emission reductions by way of clunker reduction, but we are paying a pretty penny for it.

Of course, one of the arguments made by some people is that the whole carbon-emission reductions thing is just a side effect of the economic boost the program has given. Those people need the Broken Window fallacy explained to them. How much economic boost would have been given by an industry wide program (not limited to clunkers) spending, say, $52 per ton of carbon reduced? That would be double to Waxman-Markey guess…

[Quote:]

So far, 34 of the banks that got TARP money have paid it back, according to SNL Financial, a Charlottesville-based research firm whose statistics I’m using throughout this piece, with about half the institutions paying a total of $1.7 billion (including Amex and Goldman) to redeem their warrants. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that we’ve now seen most of the good news, because the remaining TARP borrowers — 628 that owe the government $174 billion — are considerably weaker as a group than the ones that have repaid.

It’s what economists call “adverse selection.” The strongest borrowers — the ones whose warrants are likely to produce serious profits for the Treasury — are bailing out of TARP as rapidly as possible to avoid pay restrictions and other rules that the Obama administration adopted after inheriting TARP from the Bush administration. These stronger firms would also like to capture as much of their stocks’ potential upside as possible, so they’re trying to buy back the warrants based on today’s share price rather on what they assume will be a higher price in the future.

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A Democratic push to appoint a successor to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy is sparking a political tempest in Massachusetts, infuriating Republicans and dividing Democrats who only five years ago passed a law requiring that voters decide on Senate vacancies.

On a day when members of both parties paid their respects to Mr. Kennedy, a Democratic icon who died this week of brain cancer, Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy. In 2004, the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature changed the law to prevent the governor from appointing an interim successor after a U.S. Senate seat becomes vacant. Instead, the new law requires that a special election be held between 145 and 165 days after the position becomes vacant.

At the time, Democratic Sen. John Kerry was running for president and Massachusetts had a Republican governor, Mitt Romney. Proponents of changing the law argued that a gubernatorial appointment was undemocratic and that only voters should decide on a replacement. Democrats also feared Mr. Romney would appoint a Republican.

Now, with Mr. Kennedy dying three years before his term was up, some Massachusetts Democrats are reversing course, calling for Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick to appoint an interim replacement to hold office until the special election can be held. They now argue the state shouldn’t be without full Senate representation for months, especially with pressing issues such as health care before Congress.

[..]

“If legislators go through with this, they are gigantic hypocrites,” said Jennifer Nassour, chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party. “There is no other way to label them.”

It’s not often that I agree with the Republican Party, but this time they’re absolutely right.

[Quote:]

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation’s leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

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A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

“You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense,” Glattfelder said. “From that you’re able to … unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn’t at all important.”

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. … But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

[..]

While it is true that the paper in the Physical Review E has not yet been published, I have found a draft version of their article from February which shows that the top 10 list of most powerful financial institutions (from most to least powerful) is as follows:

1. The Capital Group of Companies

2. Fidelity Management & Research

3. Barclays PLC

4. Franklin Resources

5. AXA

6. JP Morgan Chase

7. Dimensional Fund Advisors

8. Merrill Lynch

9. Wellington Management Company

10. UBS

[Quote:]

Earlier this year, Afghanistan embarked on its second presidential campaign season, with over forty candidates registering to run for president, and over 3,000 candidates for provincial offices. The election itself took place on August 20th, and the results are still being tallied – but, according to preliminary results, the two front-runners are current president Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Members of the Taliban boycotted the election process and threatened those who participated with violence. Although security was heavy, nearly 800 polling stations (out of 7,000) were not opened due to feared insecurity – insurgent attacks having spiked in frequency leading up to the 20th. The Afghan government also issued a ban on media coverage of violence during election day, fearing such news would drive down turnout. Find below photos from around Afghanistan during its recent election. (40 + 3 photos total)

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An Afghan National Policeman threatenens photographers with his weapon as they attempt to secure the site of a bank where gunmen attacked on August 19, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) #

43
(And, from another angle:) An Afghan policeman aims his weapon at photojournalists Paula Bronstein and Kevin Frayer as he prevents them from approaching the area where three gunmen stormed a bank in Kabul on August 19, 2009. (PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images) #

[Quote:]

After Microsoft was caught removing the head of a black man from a stock website photo and replacing it with the head of a white man, UK betting shop Paddy Power is offering odds on the racial makeup of the smiling faces who will turn up in Redmond’s global advertising campaign for the upcoming Office 2010.

[Quote:]

It’s not green cheese, but it might as well be.

The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.

Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.

“It’s a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered,” she said. “We can laugh about it.”

The museum acquired the rock after the death of former prime minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then-U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the first moon landing.

Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.

The U.S. Embassy in the Hague said it was investigating the matter.

Surely this must be fake…

A new supermarket has opened near me. It has an automatic water mister to keep the produce fresh. Just before it goes on, you hear the distant sound of thunder and the smell of fresh rain.

When you pass the milk cases, you hear cows mooing and you experience the scent of fresh cut hay.

In the meat department there is the aroma of charcoal grilled steaks and sausages.

In the liquor department, the fresh, clean, crisp smell of tapped Stienlarger beer.

When you approach the egg case, you hear hens cluck and cackle and the air is filled with the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs frying.

The bread department features the tantalizing smell of fresh baked bread & cakes.

I don’t buy toilet paper there anymore.

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The “Google generation” finds it hard to imagine life before the world wide web, it seems. A student of Leo Enticknap, lecturer in cinema at the University of Leeds, explained that a political group “used the internet to publicise their cause, just like the French Resistance did during the Second World War”.

On the other side of the pond, when David Null, an emeritus professor at California State Polytechnic University, asked his class to write about the person they most admired, he was impressed to receive an essay on Martin Luther.

It turned out to be a mishmash of facts about a 16th-century Protestant reformer, who miraculously also managed to head up the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, some four centuries later.

Meanwhile, a biology student spent an entire paper telling Kevin Reiling, from the Faculty of Sciences at Staffordshire University, about the science of gnomes.

“It took me a while to realise she was referring to genomes,” Dr Reiling remarked.

[Quote:]

Both the Dow and S&P hit their highest levels of 2009 intraday Tuesday, and all seems well for the bulls. But Howard Lindzon of Knight’s Bridge Capital isn’t among them and candidly admits to being “clueless” about the rally at this point.

One reason is the big volume in shares of “bankrupt” companies such as Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Sirius XM Radio and AIG, which don’t seem to be moving on any fundamental growth, says Lindzon, who is also co-founder of Stocktwits. There are “just no underpinnings of real growth,” he says. “The markets seem broken.”

How about just calling it market manipulation?

[Quote:]

A man approached and launched into a speech about how Obama is secretly working to build a socialist state, like the Nazis – “They want to take over our country.”

And then another woman asked me where slavery was started. Without waiting for a response she said “Africa! They started it themselves.”

Slavery? “They”?

The small crowd around me nodded.

I was stunned and dismayed. Who are these people? They look like my neighbors. They are people I see at the store.

What has happened to them?

[Quote:]

The St Gallen-based bank, Switzerland’s oldest, said the decision had been taken in response to stricter measures introduced in the US against tax dodgers and planned changes to estate tax, which would make some non-US citizens liable to tax if they inherited US securities.

In a letter to investors it said Swiss banks were likely to find themselves in an untenable position, as they would be expected to know which clients were liable to pay US tax – “an impossible undertaking”, given the lack of clear definitions in the matter.

The danger of inadvertently making false declarations to the US tax authorities will be too great, it explained.

It added that it believes the US overestimates its attraction as a financial centre, and is advising its clients to get out of all US securities.

[Quote:]

IKEA abandons ~50 years of Futura and Century Schoolbook for Verdana. In an interview with Swedish design magazine CAP&DESIGN the reason for the change is to be able to use the same font in all countries, including Asian countries. Also they want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the web.

I imagine an external consultant blabbering “you need to have the same visual impression both in print and the web” on some golf course, and next a committee translating that advice to this utterly wrong decision.

[Quote:]

But John Strachan, 52, an IT worker from Dundee, found the experience troubling. When it offered to serve him in English or Cockney, he suspected a hoax. He selected Cockney.

“Readin’ your bladder of lard”, read the message on the screen. It asked for his “Huckleberry Finn”. Then more bewildering questions: did he wanted to see his balance on the Charlie Sheen? Did he wish to change his Huckleberry Finn or did he simply require sausage and mash, with or without a receipt?

He “suspected a hoax” but typed his pin anyway. Fuck, I know customers can be stupid cunts, but banks pulling stupid pranks like this are not exactly going to improve the situation much, right?

[Quote:]

Katrina was a fairly terrible natural disaster. But it turned into a horrific social catastrophe because of the response of the people in power, spurred on by their willingness to believe a hysterical, rumour-mongering media. (Journalists on the ground were often fiercely empathic and right on the mark, but those at a remove were all too willing to believe the usual tsunami of cliches about disaster and human nature.)

The story that few can wrap their minds around is that ordinary people mostly behaved well – there were six bodies in the Superdome, including four natural deaths and a suicide, not the hundreds that the federal government expected when it sent massive refrigerator trucks to collect the corpses. On the other hand, people in power behaved appallingly, panicking, spreading rumours, and themselves showing an eagerness to kill and a pathological lack of empathy.

[Quote:]

Wooster Collective spotted this fun prank at Bristol Zoo where an informational placard about Homo Sapiens was installed outside the zoo’s cafe.

I just realized there aren’t that many pictures of yours truly on this site… so here’s one:

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An American organization claiming to defend the rights of mermaids is threatening to appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam, after its municipality offered a $1 million prize to whoever could provide proof for the existence of a mermaid off the northern city’s shores.

A letter received by the municipality over the weekend states that the organization, presenting itself as the Mermaid Medical Association in Brooklyn, New York, was shocked to hear about the prize offered by the city.

This offer, the organization said, “badly and outrageously damages the legendary mermaid legacy.”

[Quote:]

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

[..]

Already this year, Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

[Quote:]

At 25-45mm in length, the gobies are so small and cryptic they are often invisible to the casual visitor – but they make up almost half of all the fish life on the reef, says ichthyologist Professor David Bellwood of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

‘These fish may be tiny, but they are very important. They are telling us that the world has changed, and in ways we do not understand. That we may not be able to manage things as well as we hoped,’ he says.

‘In 1998 there was a major coral bleaching event that affected corals across a huge area of the reef. After some years, quite a lot of the coral has recovered – and looks more or less as it once did.’

‘But the gobies have not come back. Something is not right if the fastest breeders of the reef are still missing. Overall, the coral fish fauna are still in a degraded state – after 30 generations.’