American meth addicts will cause war with Mexico

CA Neighbor Mexico Spirals Into Anarchy
Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats. The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be.
What, then, accounts for the carnage, the worst Mexico has suffered since the revolution, a century ago? To be sure, many of the dead have been cartel criminals. Some were killed in firefights with the army, others in battles between the cartels for control of smuggling routes, and still others in power struggles within the cartels. The toll includes more than 1,000 police officers, some of whom, according to Mexican press reports, were executed by soldiers for suspected links to drug traffickers. Conversely, a number of the fallen soldiers may have been killed by policemen moonlighting as cartel hit men, though that cannot be proved. Meanwhile, human-rights groups have accused the military of unleashing a reign of terror—carrying out forced disappearances, illegal detentions, acts of torture, and assassinations—not only to fight organized crime but also to suppress dissidents and other political troublemakers. What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen—never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason—retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.

Americas choices are simple. 1) Educate all our youth with actual bran scans of meth addicts. 2) Register the meth addicts so they can maintain themsevles.

The Zombie threat is real:

Anything less and we will actually have a war between American soldiers and meth addicted, deranged Mexican fighters. Mexican cartel fighters live on that drug, they are conditioned to mass murder, brain damaged and aimed at the border states.

Still hammering the Big Government Texan

Instead I’d suggest that Perry is neither a libertarian nor a theocrat. He is, in the end, a traditional big-government conservative. Evidence for this can be seen in his record as Texas Governor, which includes a history of crony capitalism disguised as economic development and, of course, the Gardisil decision. He isn’t necessarily another George W. Bush, at least not domestically, but anyone in the Tea Party who thinks he’s going to lead a revolution to cut the size and scope of the Federal Government is, most likely, kidding themselves. DOUG MATACONIS

I think we misunderstand the Tea Party and their Red State socialist agenda. The Tea Party was formed in rebellion to Pork Busters, not in support of it. The Tea Party secret agenda is restarting the Senate Goodie factory with a huge chunk of debt. This is Bush all over again.

Huntsman on jobs

Utah compared to neighbor Nevada

Huntsman seems to win on the jobs front, he was the governor of Utah after all. Look how poorly Nevada functions, even with Reid head of the porkabilly Senate. Why does Nevada do so poorly? They are the tail of Californa. Jerry and the Dlils destroyed Calfornia, along wth Nevada.

Notice that Utah figured out the recession early and have stabilized. They acted early and stopped the public sector carnage, replacing the defined benefits with 401K.

Quote of the day

In other words, blue states have been subsidizing red states. The federal government is like a giant sump pump – pulling dollars out of California, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Michigan – and sending them to places like Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Old South. Business Insider

Before I reveal the author, let me repeat my pitch. The Western states, the Great Lakes and NYC fund our central government, but lose the most. They also have much less representation in the Senate. What are the progressives worried about? High unemployment and poverty in the states the fund central government. Which states are likely to gain the most from stimulus? The small red states. Get it? The stimulus is and was skewed.

What all this is leading up to is Robert Reich, the author of the quote. He is finally starting to get the problem. Perhaps other progressives will listen to his insight!


Kevin Drum, Yglesias, are you listening to your mentor?

Recording the Anti-democratic Fat Slobs of history

In a state where unemployment sits above 12 percent and the budget is in perennial distress, the guy who holds what used to be called the second most powerful position in the state is embroiled in public spats with Pasadena-area Assemblyman Anthony Portantino and Sen. Kevin de León, whose downtown Los Angeles district encompasses Pérez's.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/31/3873334/perez-is-bungling-power-of-his.html#ixzz1Wf4NubcY

LGTBTFS, Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, Trisexual and Fat Slobs

A better take on the Grim Deficit cuts

Howard Gleckman talks about the impossible task of the Congressional Bankruptcy Committee. First the truth:

Congress will find a way to avoid, evade, delay, or otherwise confound these spending limits. In other words, the stick that is supposed to force lawmakers to act is mostly sawdust.

And:

Democrats won’t agree to entitlement cuts unless Republicans accept new revenues. Btw, this is not a matter of equivalent intransigence. Ds are, in fact, much more likely to swallow cuts in Medicare and Social Security than the House GOP is to accept any net increases in taxes.

I have a better test I would like to see how much the defense budget can be cut before the defense executives go crying to Grover Norquist. Already we have seen the Tea party capitulate as their Red State Goodies were cut. Now we have a Texan who wants more defense goodies. Both parties want to pay for this with deficit spending , but the deficit will rise by 30% as the Double Dip hits.

Bruce Krasting uncovers a central bank plot

He lays it out here, it is all about the mortgage relief idea being floated.

I (Bruce)  try to get all the steps:

Edward Demarco, head ot the Federal Housing Finance will push Freddie and Fannie to refinance federal moartgage loans at 4%, giving many homeowners a lower monthly.
2I) Homeowners get a new loan at 4% and payoff 100% of the old mortgage.

II) The servicing banks get the proceeds and pay off the old loan.

III) The money is paid to F/F. This money is used to redeem existing mortgage pools of Agency MBS.

IV) Fannie/Freddie have the same asset mix at the end of the day. They still need to finance the new 4% mortgages they are writing.

V) Fannie and Freddie are taking on substantial new risk as they now have a book of 4% mortgages and are much more at risk to rising interest rates.

VI) It takes 90 days for a new mortgage to become a new Agency MBS. During this period F/F warehouse these loans. They finance the warehouse with short-term debt. They take action to reduce their risk by entering into new swap transactions or by buying derivatives to neutralize the market risk.

VII) As the process goes on huge chunks of EXISTING higher coupon MBS are prepaid. Investors [read Federal Reserve]  in those MBS securities will be forced to re-invest the proceeds.

As far as socialist plots go, this one sounds as good as any other. So why aren't homeowners refinancing? Two reasons: 1) Closing costs are still a bit too high to cover interest savings. 2) A lot of home owners are making payments but out of work, they wouldn't otherwise qualify.
3) The other problem here is that many home owners are still with the community bank, they don;t get the goodies.

But, we are talking about a select group, mortgages on file at the government offices of Freddy and Fannie. The process should be simple, a little software, don't bother informing the home owner, just cut their interest rate.

The tax payer will be earning $85 billion less, and the homeowners saving $85 billion. The $85 billion will be covered by the 12 member appointed Congressional bankruptcy committee. So someone out there should lose their Goodies in favor of the homeowner.

Another banker's panic on the way?

That would be our old friend Satyajit Das, the derivatives expert in Australia and author of the terrific new book “Extreme Money,” who has been my best guide to the global financial crisis for the past four years. (To read my first interview with Das, in September 2007, click here . His forecast was way out of the mainstream then, but incredibly prescient.

In an op-ed piece published in Australia last week, Das argued that in global financial markets the signals have changed from green to red. But rather than a simple traffic jam, he argues that a full-scale credit crash may be ahead. In financial markets, facts never matter until they do but there are worrying indications. Market Watch

Skipping the technicals, the issue is that there is not enough real economic yield to support all the big banks, same as 2008. One way to think of it, consider the Treasury curve as a proxy for the bankers yield curve. When the curve shrinks, as it has recently done, there are too many bankers to fit along the network, so merging occurs. As the merging proceeds the fewer bankers along the curve have more curve space allocated and have more gain. Go look at the curve during the 2008 panic, the curve gets all bunched up.

But the bankers like to have anxiety attacks, and likely will show up at the central bankers office, peeing in their pants.

The problem of California's renewable energy act

The act, pushed by Brown, requires 33% of energy to be from wind or solar within 9 years. LA Times

Solar and wind is still expensive. California utilities will price fossil fuels higher than other markets, in an effort to meet the standard, reaching the standard by reducing fossil use compared to available renewable. From history we know what results, government price controls, a mixed up market and blackouts.

From EIA Renewable Trends

The only way for California to come close is to use valuable farm land for biomass, and lots of it.  We are still working the solar panel technology, but  a little searching tells me that solar efficiency of 20% at usable cost is nearly here. But we only get 1% of energy from solar panels today.


If the Moonbeam wants to lead the market, a better idea would be to fund basic research.

Bipartisan panel hammers Socialist Defense network

Washington (CNN) -- A nonpartisan panel reporting to Congress says the United States is wasting $12 million a day among contracts issued in support of American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. CNN 

AT&T has a new Android tablet

Venture Beat

Speaking of Michigan

Unemployment, California and Michigan

Let's just say that Michigan dodged a real bullet during the crash, at 14% unemployment they barely survived a series of municipal bankruptcies.  This is the state with Detroit and the Rust Belt. From a Huffington Post report:

Michigan currently has 68 cities on its "fiscal watch" or "fiscal stress" lists, meaning these communities are at risk of running through their money. Many communities, Hamtramck included, have seen sharp drops in their populations as laid-off manufacturing workers have moved elsewhere in search of new jobs. Cities now struggle to provide the same services with depleted tax revenues. William Alden

I don't see how a Republican threat of dictatorship helps here. The voters in these cities either get it or they, the unions and bondholders can meet in court.

Is the Michigan municipal bankruptcy bill anti-democratic?

In a party line vote, and despite impassioned speeches of protest by the body’s Democratic minority, the Michigan Senate approved legislation that threatens to take over and even dissolve local governments that refuse to balance their budgets by breaking labor contracts.

According to the law, which has already been approved in the House, the governor will be able to declare “financial emergency” in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services.

Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.

An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education.

Critics say that Republicans are manipulating concerns about budget problems in order to consolidate power by undermining unions. The measure could be sent to the governor for final approval this week.   Michigan Messenger

We are getting pretty good using the courts. The anti-democracy movement is in both parties. I think removing the risk insurance and getting the judicial system working is the best approach.
Voting is wonderful, and voters should be allowed to screw themselves royally, if that is what they want. In California, the Dills act removed the local voter from the process and caused the states debt crisis. Passing the Gov. Rick Snyder Act in Michigan creates the same thing, right wing Republicans will bankrupt government just as fast as left wing Democrats. The solution is to put the contracts in the hands of voters and the bankruptcy judges, going in and going out.

Who's our third party candidate?

A webbot?

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson. Wiki

Or this:

How billionaires could save the country

Using the new method:

Americans Elect

Get your Goodies while you can

Economist Calls Entitlements A Massive Ponzi Scheme And Says US Is Actually $211 Trillion In Debt

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That's the fiscal gap...

Former Reagan economic adviser Laurence Kotlikoff

This guy thinks like me!

Abstract
The idea that we could build molecular communications systems can be advanced by investigating how actual molecules from living organisms function. Information theory provides tools for such an investigation. This review describes how we can compute the average information in the DNA binding sites of any genetic control protein and how this can be extended to analyze its individual sites. A formula equivalent to Claude Shannon’s channel capacity can be applied to molecular systems and used to compute the efficiency of protein binding. This efficiency is often 70% and a brief explanation for that is given. The results imply that biological systems have evolved to function at channel capacity, which means that we should be able to build molecular communications that are just as robust as our macroscopic ones.Thomas Schneider

Is Shannon the Theory of Everything? From astro physics to economics to nanotech to atomic physics to biology, we see this everywhere now.

I should read the article, but if I were looking at the problem, I would compute the variatians in the DNA binding sites, then estimate the channel bandwidth needed to cover the variations. That gives you the channel efficiency. We are asking: If the DAN binding sites result from a Huffamn encoder than what was the channel bandwidth.

Let's check in to the Baltic Dry

Well, that a big whoops!

The index tells me that global trade is down substantially. These are shipping prices, I really should be looking at actual shipping tonnage. But, given the other data, I think we can safely say Double Dip.

Why multipliers are less than one

Green Jobs' Arteries Clogged By Davis-Bacon

The reports offer a peek into the dysfunction within the White House's green jobs initiative. In 2009, Obama dedicated $7.2 billion of stimulus funds to build "clean tech" jobs. He vowed to create 5 million jobs over the next decade.

So far, that effort has "created or retained" just 7,140 jobs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That's about $1 million per job. The number is actually down from last year, when the EPA claimed 16,605 green jobs.

Audit reports by the Energy Department's Inspector General Of fice offer some clues as to why: Trying to comply with federal reg ulations such as the Davis-Bacon Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Buy American Act has stalled many projects. Investors Daily

Big hat tip to Instapundit again.

I hit this point again and again, we are bottle necked by past bail outs of unions, business and interest groups. If is not a simple matter of clearing regulatory underbrush as progressives trivialize the problem. This is a permanent problem of delusions by the likes of Joe Biden and Jerry Brown.

Nanotech

First direct measurement of force generated by an individual synthetic molecular machine
News articles by Jon Cart at Foresight

Big HT Instapundut

Also from Foresight a nice animation of a cell.

Case-Schiller metropolitan housing index is out

All if it bad news.

DC did the best, down 1.4%, but everyone else was losing 3-6% on house value. Overall, double dip and continued deflation. San Diego is down 5.32%, which bodes very bad for a city government already strapped for cash. Same problem for San Francisco, which was left in bad shape by Mayor Gavin Newsome. Las Vegas down 6%, whipsawed by California. Phoenix AZ, down a whopping 9.27%.

Some evidence confirming my theory, when Kevin Drum wants stimulus from DC, Yglesias pays slightly higher rent and Kevin's house goes way down in value. The Pacific economy is 180 degrees out of phase with the Midatlantic.

Also this puts a lie to Yglesias/Delong's theory of a housing shortage.

The Alaskan Welfare Queen may announce

Appearances in the first two states to vote in the GOP presidential race raise questions about whether Sarah Palin will announce her intentions for 2012 CNN

Now that the Tea Party has adopted Big Government policies, she might have a chance.

Oil hits $89, Stock rally halted

That is all.

Does the Black Caucus support roaming African American Thugs?

Does the Black Caucus in Congress really support the facebook organized thuggery of young, deranged Black males?

I doubt it, but since they want to play the race card, I thought I would remind them of their own race problems.

Andre Carson: Tea party wants blacks 'hanging on a tree'
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62396.html#ixzz1WcEcNVrN

A top lawmaker in the Congressional Black Caucus says tea partiers on Capitol Hill would like to see African-Americans hanging from trees and accuses the movement of wishing for a return to the Jim Crow era.

I would recommend that the Black Caucus disband.

Cantor gets busted

"The magnitude of the damage suffered by the Richmond area is beyond what the Commonwealth can handle," Cantor said in a press release at the time, "and that is why I asked the President to make federal funds available for the citizens affected by Gaston." Hill

That was in 2004 when Bush was handing out the Communist Goodies.

Marc Anderson fools Felix with the delusion

And yet the right people in the right place are worth more now than at any point in history. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, writing in the WSJ on Saturday, complains with good reason:

Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
It’s clear that there’s a shortage of good software engineers in the world. But it’s important to understand that Silicon Valley is facing an artificial shortage of good software engineers. There are lots of highly-qualified software engineers from India, Russia, and elsewhere—even Canada—who would love to work in Silicon Valley but can’t, for visa reasons.

Both of these two miss the point. People around the world do software all the time, they deploy it, they make money. The whole system today is based on web standards, the W3C standard group. Yet, perusing the W3C site I cannot even find if they have a headquarters! Facebook wasn't started in Silicon Valley, neither Microsoft. We have software experts around the world who have expertise in Google's Android. Linux still runs the web, but Linux has no home.

No long term planning for Timmy

The Treasury Department just had a straight-up terrible 30-year bond auction, following two solid debt auctions. These are the first three debt sales of the AA+ era, remember, and all eyes were on these auctions as a test of how investors would react to the downgrade.

Turns out they were OK with shorter-term debt, but 30-year debt might be tougher to swallow.

Treasury had to pay 3.75% for the debt, compared with 3.648% the market expected. That’s a record tail, according to Ian Lyngen at CRT Capital.

The bid/cover ratio was a dismal 2.08, compared with an average of 2.51.

There was some strong direct bidding, but indirect bidding — a proxy for foreign demand — came in at 12.2% of the auction, compared with a normal 40%. That’s the lowest ever, says Mr. Lyngen. Yikes.WSJ

People with money see no long term solution for Congress

Young and healthy are not paying for Obamacare

“Young people are disillusioned after 2008, when the message was change,” points out Surbhi Godsay of the youth-research organization CIRCLE. Now, she says, they’re “concerned about employment.” And for good reason. Statistics show that Millennials have been hit hard by the high jobless rates around the country. The unemployment rate for 16-24 year-olds is a staggering 18.1 percent, down from the record-breaking high of 19.1 percent a year ago, while 25-34 year-olds face a rate of 9.7 percent, higher than the national average.WA Times

Not a problem, the old and sickly can pay! But will they:

According to the latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters, Americans support the repeal of Obamacare by a margin of 20 percentage points (57 to 37 percent), with 46 percent “strongly” supporting repeal. To put that into perspective, more than twice as many Americans “strongly” support repeal (46 percent) as “strongly” support Obama (22 percent — the poll’s tally for the past week).WS

Whoops

We get efficient at this bankruptcy thing

By W. Zachary Malinowski
Journal Staff Writer

CENTRAL FALLS — The state-appointed receiver has sent a second round of letters to 141 retired police officers and firefighters informing many of them that their retirement pensions will be slashed further than he first proposed at a public meeting at Central Falls High School last month. Projo

As municipal bankruptcy gets efficient and the rules easily determined, then post default looks a lot less expensive.

Rick Perry and insider real estate deals

Perry became a millionaire while serving in office

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/08/28/3319362/perry-became-a-millionaire-while.html#ixzz1WX5lYXyN

Look at this transaction from the 2000s. A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator – the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land – back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000. Tidy. And how remarkable that Perry and his state senator friend could see a value proposition that the two professional real estate developers overlooked.

Speaking of stupid:

“32 years ago, liberals asked the same question about Ronald Reagan,” cracks Don Surber. NRO

We knew Reagan was dumb when he was an actor. We knew he had alzheimers when we was elected president. What we never figured out was why NRO thought they could hide their Big Government policies.

The other thing I have no answer for is why Billy Kristol at WS is so desperate for his Defense Goodies that he jumps aboard the first nut case Texan willing to run up the deficit again.

I am the religious bigot

As the 2012 presidential race gears up, leftist Christophobes are showing some signs of hysteria -- or political opportunism; it's sometimes difficult to tell. NRO

Yes, that is me, I have phobias against Fairy Tales. The reason, quite simply, is that the socialists at NRO manipulate poor religious psychotics into granting welfare to rich people. I have evidence that every time we elect a member of the God squad from a big western state, we end up paying trillions to cover the security costs of wealthy global traders.

Where is the Higgs Boson?

But the Higgs boson never appeared. Running continually at an unprecedented energy level of seven trillion electron volts since March 31, 2010, the LHC has been amassing petabytes of data that are being analyzed by a grid of interlinked computers worldwide in search of the missing boson. And yesterday, August 22, at the Biennial International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, the bombshell was dropped: CERN scientists declared that over the entire range of energy the Collider had explored—from 145 to 466 billion electron volts—the Higgs boson is excluded as a possibility with a 95% probability. Scientific American

I will convene the staff here at Imagisoft and see if we can rework the theory. I suspect the problem is related to the Gibbs phenomena in a quantized world which limits the sample rate.

Libyans invent human Richter scale

Trading today

Stocks even, oil nearing $90 and Gold up 2.35%. Oil near $90 is risk off, oil below $85 is risk on. Put that in your webbots.

James Kwak joining the Hayek revolution

Ben Bernanke Doesn’t Get the Message

I don’t think it makes sense to criticize the political system for being dysfunctional and then rely on the political system to rescue the economy. I understand that traditional monetary policy tools don’t work that well in this environment: short-term rates can’t go any lower, and lowering long-term rates won’t make companies invest if they don’t think there is demand for their stuff. But there’s always, you know, dropping cash out of helicopters.

Yes, Ben never gets the message in time, he collects it centrally. I think Hayek pointed that out several times. I bitch about it all the time. The problem, James Kwak is discovering, there is more to the economy than what data that Ben can collect.

OK, so I remind James, we do not need helicopters, we have regional Feds, perfectly capable of dealing in municipal debt in their regions. Decentralize the Fed and you can still have your socialist network.However I might remind James the democracy comes with decentralization. Watch the Keynesians, they are notoriously anti-democratic.

Socialist Banking network makes a play

"There are three main ways in which the Fed could be more radical: (1) an extension of the QE program into markets other than Treasuries and agency MBS, e.g., private sector securities, (2) a much bigger QE program, up to the extreme version of a promise to buy as many securities as needed to hit a specific yield target (i.e. a "rate cap" further out on the yield curve as then-Governor Bernanke suggested back in 2002), and (3) an explicit or implicit change in the Fed's policy targets." Goldman Proposal

Goldman is making sure that the Fed does not revolt and decentralize, their worst fear. This is called the Goldman put, for Goldman is as much in control of the Socialist Network as Timmy and Ben.

Ignorance at the NY Times

The innumeric BINYAMIN APPELBAUM:

How can such an important number change so drastically? The answer in this case is surprisingly simple: the Bureau of Economic Analysis, charged with crunching the numbers, concluded that it had underestimated the value of vehicles sitting at dealerships and the nation’s spending on imported oil.

More broadly, politicians and investors are placing a great deal of weight on a crude and rough estimate that has never been particularly reliable.

“People want the best information that we have right now. But people need to understand that the best information that we have right now isn’t necessarily very informative,” said Tara M. Sinclair, an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University. “It’s just the best information that we have.” Times

Economists can't figure out that central government is collecting data over the whole of nine separate economies, they will always be late. By the time economics data hits DC, here in the West it has already been collected and acted upon. Further, the private sector spend as much time and effort collecting that data, and they have always acted on it locally before they give it to central government. Look at the Ceridian, California is 180 d out of phase with DC.

This is idiot economists attempting central control in a delusion. We have a bunch of these economists at UC Berkeley. Hilariously, they wait until the BEA has the data before, even while their layoff notices are in the mail.

How will history remember CA Assembly Speaker John Perez?

Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, today presented independent research he says proves the California Assembly has manipulated budget numbers and spending patterns to mislead the public.

The battle between Democratic leadership and Portantino heated up last week over Portantino’s accusations of secretive bookkeeping practices by the Assembly. Thursday, Portantino introduced AB 1129 to force the Assembly to comply with the California Public Records Act, making access to Assembly financial and administrative records much easier.

This came after a several months of public battle between Portantino, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, and Assembly Rules Committee Chairwoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, over what Portantino says is retribution for his vote against the budget in June. Shortly after the budget passage, Portantino was ordered by Skinner to cut his own budget by $67,000 or have his office staff furloughed.

According to California's LGBT Education Law, we are supposed to remember the fat slob. OK, let it be known for the history books, the John Perez is an anti-democratic fat slob.

California's not paying for Rick Perry's defense goodies

The California job gap getting worse

JOHN SEILER at Cal Watch tracks this for us.

China's not lending for Rick Perry's defense spending. Illinois is as bad as California. New York makes a profit dealing with Rick Perry's debt expansion. That leaves Texas, the only state with enough workers to send Rick Perry all the Socialist Defense dollars he needs.

The collective stupidity in Texas voters is a direct result of their lack of Senate representation.

If the American consumer is so valuable

Then pay us to consume. Everyone is talking about how the American consumer still stands as the hope of the global economy. Time magazine, Pettis and others.

So, if Asia doesn't quite get the concept of decoupling, I guess consumption by me should be paid for by Asians.   Asian economies that want me to consume, e mail me and I will notify you on how to deposit $20,000 in my account. I promise to spend it.

Perry wants trillions in debt based defense spending

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called for a muscular foreign policy during a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Monday morning in San Antonio. 

Hill as the story on enormous expenses billed to the middle class

This a plot to start funneling middle class taxes to the rich members to the Socialist Defense Network. Americans should cease paying any taxes at all, in protest.

I have this imaginary religion

All is God, God is All and God's purpose is self discovery.

Huntsman has jined my religion:
Jon Huntsman: Evolution 'part of God's plan'

Better than the Bachman/Perry plan, to use a socialist law to declare Christians the superior race.

Singularity still believes in the classroom?

Seriously, these guys live in the dark ages. Here is a page that has an actual map for people to teleport themselves to a building and classroom! Stanford has offered an on line AI class which has enrollment beyond 10,000.

I guess the Singular idea idea is that one cannot learn about Internet unless one is in a classroom before a white board.

Rick Perry, I worked the Missile Defense project

National defense: Although the United States spends nearly as much on defense as every other country on Earth combined, Perry thinks that's not enough. He believes President Obama's attempts to limit nuclear weapons are misguided because they ignore "the realities of a world full of power-hungry despots who respect us not because of our ideals but because of our strength." He [Perry] wants to reinstate funding for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, a pet project of Bush's involving an expensive and unproved technology that generated enormous tension with Russia. LA Times op ed

SDI is a  boondoogle. Let me explain. For each $10B spent trying to shoot down warheads in space, it takes $1M for the offense to deploy hundreds of fake warheads.

The missile defense shield had only one purpose, fund the Socialist Defense Network via the Republican Communist Party. Rick Perry, we know you, you are in the end a goddamen communist in the model of that great American disaster, John C Fremont. Communist Republicans from start to finish.

IMF wants more armed police, antidemocracy and property seizures

JACKSON, Wyo. — The world economic recovery is in new peril of derailing, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Saturday as she called on leaders in the United States and Europe to take aggressive and immediate action to address new cracks appearing in the global economy.WA Post

Ben is going to massage our expectations

Bernanke May Seek Consensus on Easing

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s decision to extend next month’s policy meeting to two days stoked speculation the extra time may allow him to forge a stronger consensus on monetary easing.
Bernanke, in a speech yesterday at the Fed’s annual forum in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, said adding a second day to the September gathering would “allow a fuller discussion” of the slowing economy and the central bank’s possible response. He said the Fed still has tools to boost growth, without specifying what they were or whether they would be deployed.

I would expect higher gold prices or, if we are lucky, Ben will lead a monetary revolution.

My secret girlfriend is going soft on Federal subsidies

Bachmann’s farm subsidy walk-back

She says she might just vote to continue agricultural subsidies. So the new Tea Party rhetoric has become, Slightly Smaller Central Government.

Yglesias delusions

Can the Fed debase its currency, asks Yglesias

It sure can, but the Fed cannot debase Lockyer LaserBacks out here in California. California, because it imports oil, would be forced to adopt a stable currency, probably gold backed. Texas, a major oil exporter would follow suit. Most of the federal defense and welfare departments would collapse because long term planning in a hyperinflationary currency is impossible.

Yglesias forgets, we have had 10,000 years of experience in creating new currencies to replace old worn out currencies. In the USA alone, over our 250 year history we have dealt with this problem and adapted a few times by making new currency arrangements.

Code words for steal from the Germans

Christine Lagarde: EU banks must raise more cash

One option would be to mobilize EFSF or other European-wide funding to recapitalize banks directly, which would avoid placing even greater burdens on vulnerable sovereigns.

We know this is code for attack Germany because she wants public sovereigns to supply cash to banks so sovereigns have more cash!

Nvidia + Microsoft = Stupid

Microsoft puts viruses in my computer that loads new drivers.  nVidia writes a driver that breaks my flat panel display.  Together they cause catastrophe in the computer world..

How much does it cost to manage bits on a disk?

Banks seeking relief from regulators as deposits swell

NEW YORK — Federal regulators have asked some banks to take more deposits from large investors even if it’s unprofitable, and lenders in return are seeking relief on insurance premiums and leverage ratios, according to six people with knowledge of the talks.

Deposits are flooding into the biggest U.S. banks as customers seek shelter from Europe’s debt crisis and falling stock prices. That forces lenders to raise capital for a growing balance sheet and saddles them with the higher deposit insurance payments. With short-term interest rates so low, it’s hard for financial firms to reinvest the new money profitably.

The nation with the reserve currency will be soon taxing citizens for the socialization cost of the world's currency.

Debt increases fail

Market Ticket posts this chart as part of a rant against DC.  Essentially the large growth in debt only brought a debt crisis and low GDP growth. Kind of hard to see, but the growth in debt was a kernel of catastrophe started by Reagan and the Neo-conservatives. I can't tell if this is total debt or just government debt.

Econ 24-1 at UC Berkeley by Delong

The spread between short ad long term rates

Regarding this chart, Brad asks:

• Question: Why have a Fed at all? Why this island of central planning in the middle of the economy? Why not just let the market take care of interest rates?

Well, he asks a loaded question, let's ask instead why do we have a centralized Fed?

The answer is we don't, we can decentralize the Fed and still have socialist banking.  The crunch between the short and the long term reflects the central Fed problem of dealing with variant regional economies that react differently to Fed actions.

Vice President of Belt Bombing killed

Al Qaida number two gone. Droned out they say.

I missed the ice cream truck again

Here at Imagisoft we had worked this problem, give the ice cream truck a GPS-O-Meter so I can tack him on the web.  Where is the venture community when we need them?

Quantum numbers and information channels for atomic physics

The information channel view of the atom is a channel that encodes joint entropy between the some observer particle and the atom structure itself. If we view it so, then the three quantum classes act as independent sub channels.  The solution is the encoding of the three sub channels that maximizes mutual entropy among them.  My guess is that using this Shannon channel approach will distribute the charge, angular momentum and magnetic moments such as to fill orbits appropriately.

Note, this is different from the quantum wave view, the channel view is only valid then there is an observer particle, and says nothing about the case when no observer particle is present.  The Schrodinger solution, in this case, is created from a set of viewing of the atom, composing the 3 dimensional wave distribution from the set of views.  So, if this approach proves out, then we have a kind of finite element approximation to the schrodinger solutions.

Tea Party supporting the Big Government Texan

Tea Party Supporters Rallying Behind Rick Perry Outside the Beltway

My secret girlfriend in trouble, the pollsters say, and Tea Party folks want their government goodies after all. The appeal of Perry is his support of the Socialist Defense network. Plus, coming from Texas, citizen's there are counting on a huge space project goodie from DC.

The mere thought of Perry and the Tea party on a deficit loving, DC, spending spree will scare the crap out of business interests. The Buffet crowd will circle around Obama.

Fareed Zakaria wants too much revolution

Does America need a prime minister?

We do not need a complete revolution and rewrite of the Constitution. We simply need to use constitutional provisions for fixing the Senate's lack of democracy, break up the big states and give their citizens greater Senate representation, as per Jeff Stone of Riverside county:
California Rebellion 2012

We are still basically suffering the aftermath of the Civil War which stopped the progression of Manifest Destiny. The two big western states, Texas and California, stopped in their process of breaking up into smaller more efficient and democratic states. New York, especially the metropolitan areas were frozen out of Senate representation, Illinois is short two Senators, as is Florida.

We have simple Constitutional processes to fix the problem, what we fear is a return to Civil War conditions, and that freezes us.

Photos of actual Quantum Mechanics

Dvice has the story

Rick Perry doesn't frighten the decentralists

From Reagan to Bush, we have learned how to handle deficit loving big state westerners.
So if Krugman is worried that Bernanke will skip the revolution, have no fear, Ben ultimately will be a decentralist.

As for the Texan, if he is nominated we vote for Obama.

Hammering the deficit spending, big government Texan

Rick Perry: Know-Nothing Neoconservatism Reincarnated?
Doug Bandow pointing out that an idiot like Perry will be firing $40 billion dollar bloated, defense guns and charging the middle class for the cost.

Looking for topics

Economics have become boring, other than picking on Krugman, I don't see much to post about.

I sort of exhausted tha main points about nanotech, and have gone over much of the important published research.

Transportation automation is stalled by government right of way.

The Senate has been banished so my source of humor dwindles.

Jerry Brown is not going to become Moonbeam, just boring.

Calm before the storm?  Rubber neckers unite!

This is a meth addict trick

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Two dozen gunmen burst into a casino in northern Mexico on Thursday, doused it with gasoline and started a fire that trapped gamblers inside, killing at least 45 people and injuring a dozen more, authorities said.
The fire at the Casino Royale in Monterrey, a city that has seen a surge in drug cartel-related violence, represented one of the deadliest attacks on an entertainment center in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.
 http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/25/3862171/8-dead-in-grenade-attack-on-northern.html#ixzz1W6Wlv5fV

The gang wars are not about marijuana, they are about exporting methamphetamine to the USA. Most of the cartel members live on the drug and it causes severe brain damage, resulting in violent delusions.

Eight years of Texas in the White House will do that

(Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry on Thursday described Washington as "a seedy place" while defending what he said was his manner of speaking plainly. Reuters

Jerry Brown is senile or delusional

"The way it works is that every time an out-of-state company moves a job out of California, they get a tax break," Brown said at his first news conference at the Capitol since the state budget was resolved two months ago. "And every time they hire in California they increase the taxes they pay -- that's why it's truly perverse and outrageous and needs to be eliminated.Mercury News

Uh, that is how it works when providing government services. Jerry is a bit confused and disoriented, let me help. Employers and employees who live and work in New York do not  consume services from California and therefore do not pay for those services not received.

The problem we have in California, is the Dills Act, Jerry needs to focus on that problem. Trying to create  Keynesian style nonsense from government operations just causes confusion.  Tens of billion of tax payer dollars have been lost because Brown and Davis keep thinking they can outsmart the economy with market manipulation. 

Founding parents of the post default federal system

WASHINGTON) -- The co-chairs of the super committee formed to reduce the federal debt issued a joint statement Wednesday saying that they have been in “serious discussions” on the rules of the Joint Committee’s operation, including setting up formal meeting times and that committee members are busy reviewing the deficit reduction work that others have worked on over the past years.

The co-chairs, Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Representative Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, say that during the August recess they have been “working together” to ensure that the committee has “every opportunity to succeed.” News Talk

This is the new legislature in DC. There is no possible voting solution that can make the Senate work again.

Buffet to Obama: Thanks for the taxpayer guarantees

Buffett to Host Obama Fundraiser in New York

This is actually becoming humorous.

Warren is making a point, if Obama is going to listen to interventionists, then he will visibly stand in line while Obama and Timmy line his pockets.

Stupid things the economic world does

For one weekend every year, the economic world turns its watchful eyes away from New York and Washington and to Jackson Hole, Wyo. This weekend, the Kansas City Federal Reserve will again host the annual Federal Reserve conference in the valley just outside Yellowstone National Park. Recent economic troubles have brought intense scrutiny to the meeting, and markets will be watching Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's Friday morning speech particularly closely for the barest hint of future policy moves.Yahoo

Seriously, why do we do this thing?

Whenever central bankers do something stupid, taxpayers should withhold another portion of their taxes.

The day after a call from Obama

Bank of America Corporation announced today that it reached an agreement to sell 50,000 shares of Cumulative Perpetual Preferred Stock with a liquidation value of $100,000 per share to Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. in a private offering. The preferred stock has a dividend of 6 percent per annum, payable in equal quarterly installments, and is redeemable by the company at any time at a 5 percent premium. ZH

The Socialist Banking network distributes inside information to its favored clients. The implication here is that Timmy has promised a taxpayer guarantee, Obama is the salesperson.

Delong thinks that anti-democratic insider moves are good Keynesian stunts. A nationwide tax protest anyone?

Congressional Bankruptcy Committee at work

If the supercommittee fails to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by Thanksgiving, then automatic cuts to defense and non-defense spending, including Medicare payments, are to be triggered in 2013. Hill

The numbers don't work, we are in the middle of a recession. Next quarter growth will be near zero, as the current quarter is near 1% or less. Tax revenue falls faster than growth falls. The crisis will hit again in fourth quarter.

Don't elect a president from California or Illinois

Progressives attack Texas, so let's compare.  Lemme see, Barak Obama sucks, Jerry Brown sucks, Gray Davis sucks, so should we elect another Texas idiot? Look how well Minnesota does.

OK, I'll defend Krugman on earthquake stimulus

His starting assumption is that we are currently saving more than we should. As a result, we are not knocking down old building and rebuilding them fast enough.  Earthquakes tend to knock down older buildings, and forces us to rebuild some of them.

So, if you accept his argument that Americans are in a savings glut, then earthquakes make sense.

We have tried the stimulus thingy a few times and we always end up driving fuel import prices higher. That says to me that we do not suffer a savings glut, we suffer oil shortages.

Dick 'Deficits Don't Matter' Cheney has a book

In it he explains his economic theory.  Basically, Texans cannot count past five.  Everything else was derived from there.

Hammering Panetta

Henderson does it for us, pointing out that Panetta's statements as defense secratary implies he will spend whatever to get the very last Al Qeda operative.

Panetta is caught up in the entanglement of the office in which his statements veer off into political symbolism, protecting the military complex rather than operating from any understood threat. The Tea party and Rick 'Big Government' Perry wont't help, they are into the symbols. A forced, mandatory set of across the board cuts, especially defense, will cause everyone in DC to be more realistic and efficient with defense dollars.

Steve Jobs accused of intellectual theft

Samsung Electronics Co., facing allegations that it stole tablet computer patents from Apple Inc. (AAPL), says the design for such devices can be traced back to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The design claimed in a 2005 patent Apple holds covering parts of the appearance of the iPad is depicted in the film, in which two astronauts are using tablet computers, Samsung attorney Sara Jenkins said in a court filing yesterday in federal court in San Jose that included a clip from the film.

“The tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominantly flat front surface, a flat back surface” and a thin form, Jenkins said in the filing. Bloomberg

We should also notice that Steve Jobs stole from Xerox in the original windows/mouse design.

Big spender in first place.

Big Government Texan

Perry Zooms to Front of Pack for 2012 GOP Nomination

Google fined for advertising cheaper drugs

Google will pay $500 million to the federal government for allowing ads from Canadian pharmacies to be displayed through its AdWords program, the Department of Justice announced today. VentureBeat

I don't feel any more protected.

Blog exploring

A chart discovered as I explore new blogs. This chart from Gregor.us
The message is that California must default and restructure.

Gold Bubble

Bloomberg compares the price of oil and the price of gold and finds a gold bubble.
Since the chart, gold has dropped a few points to $1760. The correct value of a dollar is the price of oil, so Bloomberg here is correct, gold should be priced around $1650.

Kevin Drum educates us on education

Words of wisdom. It's not unions, it's not teachers, it's not the curriculum, it's not funding, it's not charter schools, it's not poverty, it's not testing, and it's not poor parenting. It's all those things. Drum

Thanks for the education, though I can see you are entirely unaware that you educate via a blog.

NY traders adopt Communist principles

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Judging by the action so far this week, Wall Street evidently believes Ben Bernanke is the man with the plan.

After all, even the odd earthquake on the East Coast couldn't derail the buying.

The contrarian view is that stocks were oversold after the bloodbath of the past four weeks, and there's some easy hay to be made running stocks up a bit ahead of the Federal Reserve chairman's speech on Friday.

Capital Economics on Tuesday was one of the many voices this week talking about the diminishing returns to be expected if the central bank embarks on more fiscal stimulus. Yahoo

We are going to need a financial tax to pay for all the bailouts.

Step one in replacing the FAA

United Airlines said Tuesday it was replacing the hefty flight manuals and chart books its pilots have long used with 11,000 iPads carrying the same data.
The 1.5 pound (0.7 kilogram) iPad will take the place of about 38 pounds (17 kilograms) of paper instructions, data and charts pilots have long used to help guide them, parent company United Continental Holdings said.

The popular tablet computer will carry the Mobile FliteDeck software app from Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary which provides navigation tools for air, sea and land.

"The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying," said Captain Fred Abbott, United's senior vice president of flight operations

"The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight.". AFP

Why does water flow so well in nanotubes

Nano Tech reports on the analysisi of water in nanot tubes by Caltech Researchers

The water molecules are disconnected from each other in the tube and their flow is ruled by the number of ordered states.

Now, using a novel method to calculate the dynamics of water molecules, Caltech researchers believe they have solved the mystery. It turns out that entropy, a measurement of disorder, has been the missing key.

"It's a pretty surprising result," says William Goddard, the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics at Caltech and director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center. "People normally focus on energy in this problem, not entropy."

Here is more from some research in Houston More:

But water molecules can be confined in other ways too. And when that happens, the electronic structure of liquid water becomes a connected network.

That raises an important question: how does the behaviour of molecules in this electronic network differ from the behaviour of molecules in bulk water interacting in an ordinary way?

Reiter and co say they have measured the properties of confined in the tiny space inside carbon nanotubes at room temperature and found some important differences. They've done this by filling nanotubes with water and bombarding them with an intense beam of neutrons at the Rutherford Appleton Lab in the UK. The way the neutrons scatter reveals the momentum of the protons inside the nanotubes.

They conclude:

Reiter and co also say that this quantum water can only exist when it is surrounded by neutral molecules such as the carbon in nanotubes and not in the presence of many commonly studied materials, such as proton exchange membranes like Nafion. This is made of molecules that conduct protons in an entirely different way and so prevents the formation of quantum water.

The implication, of course, is that the proton exchange membranes used in everything from chemical production to fuel cells could be dramatically improved by using a neutral carbon-based material.

What's the point here?
Working within stable nanotubes, molecules in the tubes are isolated from too much entanglement with the tubes, yet confined to prevent self entanglement. Hence, water and other molecules can be treated at the quantum levle, not the statistical mechanical level. Hence optimal flow in nanotube complexes can be designed to higher efficiencies, as in reliable 20% solar efficiencty when activated. This stuff is a big deal.

Republican Communist Party watch, Rick Perry edition part 243

"The Obama Administration continues to lead federal agencies and programs astray, this time forcing NASA away from its original purpose of space exploration, and ignoring its groundbreaking past and enormous future potential. It is time to restore NASA to its core purpose of manned space exploration, and to define our vision for 21st Century space exploration, not in terms of what we cannot do, but instead in terms of what we will do." Perry said. Political Ticker

This guy is from a big, under-represented state. His job is to go to DC and grab huge Senate goodies. Unfortunately the idiot fails to realize that his state, Texas, is going to be the big funding state for DC, now that California is dropping out. Have a nice tax bill, Texas.

Let the Fed lead the revolution

To all the economists who fret the Fed is useless, and conclude it can do no harm in trying, here is my Fed stimulus action:

1) Empower regional branches to buy and sell state and local bonds
2) Require that the regional branch boards must be fairly elected by citizens.

I mean, that is a lot more localization of knowledge than Central banking affords, and it gets around the Senate anti-democracy problem. Or should we prefer banking via insider knowledge:

“The President and Mr. Buffett discussed the overall outlook on the economy and the reaction to the headwinds we’ve experienced over the last couple of months," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. "They talked a little bit about some possible measures that would spur investment and increase economic growth. And they also talked about some measures that could address the long-term fiscal situation in this country.”  Hill

Nano array super batteries

Rice University

My home town is doing a BRT study

Here, along Blackstone.

My instinct is always take the center lane, then convoy the BRT using coordinated lights, bells, and cross bars. Move the BRTs through efficiently over the center lane, then return the center lane to auto traffic. Digital control of the traffic lighting, use of lightweight barriers, lane guidance; combined utilizes the speed capability of center lane access.

Algae and nano investments

s of March 31, 2011, the company reported net assets of $146.63 million, with a Net Asset Value (NAV) per share of $4.73. Due to the difficulty in replacing the company’s unique private portfolio, the stock has historically (but not always) traded at a premium to its NAV.

Investors should expect the firm’s NAV to significantly increase in the coming quarter–and that should be welcome news for TINY’s stock price. Why?

Harris & Harris Group’s single largest holding is algae biofuels developer Solazyme (SZYM), which went public on the Nasdaq in May. The firm was an early private investor in Solazyme and now owns 2,304,149 shares. Harris & Harris Group’s first quarter carrying value on its SZYM shares is conservative and far below its current trading price. At today’s $24.30 price, TINY’s Solazyme holding is valued at nearly $56 million (more than 1/3 of its most recent NAV).Forbes

Solazyne, focus on oil from algae stock production.
And:

A leading Australian research institute has developed technology for printing thin, flexible solar cells based on inks made from semiconducting nanocrystals.
Printable, flexible solar cells that could decrease the cost of renewable energy have been developed by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Melbourne.
The cells are created with inks that contain semiconducting nanocrystals, known as quantum dots, which have the potential to be printed in a continuous process, suggesting the technology can be scaled up for high-volume production.
The ink to make the cells can be printed on flexible plastics or metal foils and is then dried to form a thin film. Though this process can lead to defects, depositing multiple layers of the ink means these can be filled in, to produce a densely packed, uniform solar cell film.Plastic Electronics

Large, active, thin film, solar activated, nano-lattices designed for mass processing of water, waste and fuels.

A Southern California town on the brink

To pay off its debt over the next three decades, Brea would have to fork over $10 million a year – that's more than double the $4.5 million in annual sales tax revenue the city gets from the Brea Mall.Orange County Register

They are a transit district, the population swells during the day, and much of their security costs are imported.
But, their major impediment are contracts promised many years ago, sticky wages if there ever was such a thing. The main legal issue in California is when is the cheapest way to break the promises.

The California Dream Act

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Monday a bill allowing illegal immigrants to receive privately funded scholarships to attend the state's public colleges and universities. Reuters

If they have scholarships, they are not illegal, they are on student visa.

As a citizen of the Pacific States of America, I propose the following: If you can get any student in the world to sign up for an on-line college class then PSA will gladly accept a check from you for no apparent reason.

Marc Anderson is nutty

Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software. WSJ 

Not really. There has been no great breakthrough in counting boxes on the shelves. The data base procedures have been in use since pre-history, simply speeded up a bit by microprocessors.

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. More nuttyness

The world has plenty of talent for the task, they just do not have stupid idiots who want to move to Silicon Valley. They can do their job where they are, with the education they have.

Google+ starts up and immediately captures a large share of social networking.  What heppened?  Simple, the database format used by Facebook has no value added, anyone can duplicate it.   Marc does not get this and think he can somehow control a simple database format from Silicon Valley.  Software is simple, easy to do, believe me we have no shortage of software engineers.

Yes to nanostructure chem factories

Sounds simple enough, so why is it taking us so long? It’s all about designing and making the right photocatalyst in the correct form that exhibits sufficient reactant activity and product selectivity to do the task. This is not a simple problem to solve because management of the energetics and control of the dynamics of sunlight-generated electron–hole pairs have to be finely tuned through material composition and structural engineering to optimize multi-electron oxidation and reduction reactions of H₂O and CO₂ that underpin the formation of a specific organic product. 

This is where the strengths of a nanochemistry approach to nanoscale materials are likely to come into play, with all the advantages of synthetic control over their size and shape, bulk and surface composition, porosity and surface area, and their ability to self-assemble into constructions with structure, property and function relations designed to mimic the photosynthetic solar fuel machinery of plants as imagined in the graphical illustration of an artificial leaf made and powered by nanochemistry (see article’s main image, courtesy of Dr. Wendong Wang).

If this could be accomplished at a globally significant rate at a globally meaningful scale and at a globally competitive cost, there would be nothing artificial about the magnitude of this scientific and technological achievement and humankind would be able to turn over a new leaf and enjoy the benefits of having learned from nature’s solar fuel factories a much better way to power the planet and keep it safe and clean! Geoffrey Ozin published: 2011-08-19

Congressional Bankruptcy Committee raking in the dough

Yet many groups with the most at stake didn’t have to change their plans. Some members of the supercommittee received more campaign contributions in July from political action committees controlled by corporations, unions and other lawmakers than anyone else in Congress, disclosures filed this weekend show.
WA Times

States are bad sample sets

The variation of the mean of a sample (here the number of bankruptcies each month) is inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size (here the number of people in each state). In English, that means the larger a state's population, the less likely its bankruptcy filing rate will gyrate from month to month. Smaller states--like Vermont and Utah--are more likely to end up on the extremes than larger states.Bob Lawless at Credit Slips

When I look at states, I specifically look at them as bad samples, showing the distortionary effect.

Ms Bachmann, get a better energy advisor

Bachmann Stands by Pledge: Gas Under $2 a Gallon

No more quoting of future prices.

What would Hoover do?

He would have dumped passenger rail and gone full digital transportation control, pushed it, he was interventionist. He would be pushing this nano structure industry with big bucks, personally harassing scientists. Hoover would likely be clamping tight on pentagon mis management. Hoover's kid was an old Ham radio guy and started radio companies in his garage in the 30s.  That guy would get the information revolution issue. The whole family was technology oriented. What would Hoover say about entitlements? We have too many, the set size is too big.