My Easy like Sunday morning reads:
• Shitcoin: a Modest Proposal. (Loper OS)
• I Was an Amazon Chew Toy: “The dog-friendly offices always had their doors closed, lest the dogs escape.” (The Awl)
• Shiller: What Good Are Economists? (Project Syndicate)
• What’s So Bad About Cheap Oil? (NYT)
• Attorney General Holder limits civil seizure process that split billions of dollars with local and state police (Washington Post)
• “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven” Recants Story, Rebukes Christian Retailers (Pulpit and Pen)
• Eaten up with guilt: Roll on February and an end to New Year’s nutritional self-flagellation (FT)
• Supreme Court to Decide Marriage Rights for Gay Couples Nationwide (NY Times)
• Jolly New Jersey Governor Doesn’t Give a Shit About New Jersey (Rude Pundit) see also State Contends in Court That Christie’s 2011 Pension Reform Is Unconstitutional (NJ Spotlight)
• 5 charts that explain 2014’s record-smashing heat (Mother Jones)
What are you reading?
Annual Temporary Help Services Jobs
Source: Bruce Steinberg
Edits:
Twinkies, not twinkles
14 healthy meals a week, not day
If you over eat consistently (are always over your own self-defined optimal weight) you have a food addiction. Period.
Think nutrient dense, avoid processed. Use an inverted food pyramid (upside down triangle) from most to least:
Unprocessed raw veggies
Unprocessed cooked veggies
Fruits
Legumes
Fish
Nuts
Unprocessed grains (I.e., not bread of any kind)
(Now, in ever smaller amounts):
Fowl/meat
Processed grains
Milk, almond milk, etc
Sugar
Hydrogenated oils, other shitty processed additives
Twinkies
Start with manageable change, say 7 healthy meals a week, with a goal of making 14 in a year. I chose three or four breakfasts of stir fried veggies (no rice) and a few manly sized salads with red peppers, celery, etc., and only 4oz of turkey and a tiny sprinkling of Parmesan and 2 tbls of olive oil based dressing.
I still eat all kinds of sweets, but with 14 super healthy meals a week, exercise, and limiting snacks, pow!, I’m 5’10 and 170lbs
If you put on 4 pounds you’ll have a BMI of 25 and be officially over weight.
If processing is so bad, why not eat raw meat? Why not chew around the fur as God/evolution (take your pick) intended?
10 REASONS WHY OUR UNIVERSE IS A VIRTUAL REALITY
Dec 10 2014
Physical realism is the view that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone. Most people think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of physics for some time now. The paradoxes that baffled physics last century still baffle it today, and its great hopes of string theory and supersymmetry aren’t leading anywhere.
In contrast, quantum theory works, but quantum waves that entangle, superpose, then collapse to a point are physically impossible—they must be “imaginary.” So for the first time in history, a theory of what doesn’t exist is successfully predicting what does—but how can the unreal predict the real?
Quantum realism is the opposite view—that the quantum world is real and is creating the physical world as a virtual reality. Quantum mechanics thus predicts physical mechanics because it causes them. Physics saying that quantum states don’t exist is like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
…
http://brainmysteries.com/10-reasons-universe-virtual-reality/
Kickstarter’s 2014 Score Card: $529M Pledged By 3.3M Backers, 22K Funded Projects
6 Jan 2015
Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter released its 2014 breakdown yesterday, trumpeting a total of $529 million pledged by 3.3 million backers. (NB: Pledged dollars do not equal spent dollars, given that crowdfunding pledges are not necessarily concrete unless a project is successfully funded.)
Update: Kickstarter has confirmed the “successful dollars” in 2014 summed to $444 million (out of the pledged $529M total). Its total cumulative successful dollars figure since the platform launched is $1.27 billion. “It took about five years to get to a billion and in 2014 alone we did nearly half of that,” said a spokesman.
The technology category attracted the largest single chunk of backing ($125 million pledged), putting a partial value on people’s hankering for sci-fi gadgetry. However tech was far from being the most successfully funded category, with just 1,124 tech projects funded in 2014. The most successful categories for being funded on Kickstarter were music (4,009), film & video (3,846), and publishing (2,064).
…
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/06/kickstarter-2014-numbers/
BPA and ‘BPA-free’ alternative linked to fetal brain changes
January 12, 2015
Fetal exposure to Bisphenol A, as well as to the widely marketed alternative Bisphenol S, may cause “real and measurable” changes in the development of a brain region that plays a key role in fear, impulse-control, obesity and early puberty.
Canadian researchers have found in animal studies that low-level exposure to either Bisphenol A (BPA) or Bisphenol S (BPS) during the equivalent to a human fetus’ second trimester altered the timetable and rate at which neurons inside the brain’s hypothalamus developed. Such perturbations, they warned, can lead the developing brain to wire itself incorrectly, with potentially subtle but wide-ranging downstream behavioral results.
The findings could shed light on the physiological mechanisms that link the growing use of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as BPA, in consumer products to increases in such childhood disorders as clinical anxiety and hyperactivity.
…
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fetal-exposure-bpa-brain-20150112-story.html
Yelp there are a lot of nasty things feed to infants. But have you seen analysis of breast milk. There are a lot of nasty man made things in breast milk also.
Agreed. Pregnant mother’s have to remember that everything they put into their bodies is shared with the fetus until it is born (and potentially through breast milk after it is born).
For example, when pregnant woman smoke cigarettes, they are unfortunately on the road to producing a baby that is addicted to nicotine right from birth! Also, the baby’s genes will be more attuned to tobacco.
I wonder if children who cry more than usual in their early months are possibly suffering from withdrawal from whatever their mother might have been addicted to? I also wonder if children of smokers are more likely to become smokers in the future. Their could be a genetic tie-in introduced from conception.
“”Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.” -Benjamin Graham”
I believe this is the President’s supposed tax proposal. Let them run amok for 6 yrs and then say pay up when you have a Congress that absolutely will not go along w/ you on either side of the aisle
An Amusingly Embarrassing Fact About Each State. OK, Maybe They’re Not ALL Amusing (22 Words)
Got to this late but it’s a good one.
Trust Me, I’m a Swiss Central Banker (ht DdL)
One trade structure I have always liked is the peg break trade. I first deployed it in 1997 with the Thai Baht. It is fairly simple and involves the option market pricing smooth curves of probability, thanks to nice models, over realities that are far from such. If I had had the confidence to put it on in EURCHF, or rather a lack in confidence in the Swiss national bank, then It would have looked a bit like this. Sell 1.2000 Eur puts Chf calls and buy twice as many 1.1750 or there about Euro puts choosing the period to make this 2×1 put spread at zero premium. The payoff being zero if no break but if there is to be a break I lose between 1.15 and 1.20 but make on everything below. The theory being that when pegs break they don’t mess around with 500pt moves instead jumping right over the loss zone into profit. This isn’t a bleat about missed trades, but an idea for future application and, more importantly, a lesson in faith.
Hands up. I had complete faith in what I was told by the SNB with respect to their attitude towards the everlasting floor. Wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that the peg was held up as a cornerstone of policy? Why did I have faith in what the SNB said? Because removing the prop of central bank credence in the midst of a market that is completely controlled by central banks and the expectations of what they will do to save the world leaves a financial world orphaned. …
I feel betrayed and I feel confused. …There are times when you have to package up risk assessment into a bundle and put it in the drawer. You can’t live life unless you have trust in some of the building blocks. Time would be wasted in a dither and decisions never reached in time to act.
What was so important for them to deceive us and to threaten the very integrity of the cornerstone of Central Bank policy?
Let’s look at why the floor was put in place in the first place ….
http://twoicefloes.com/waking-up-is-hard-to-do/#more-11007
by Cognitive Dissonance
I have wondered for a while if Grover Norquist views asset forfeiture as a tax.
Holder’s actions limiting asset forfeiture may be one of the more significant tax cuts of the past decade. It is interesting that the police organizations are getting upset about not being able to legally steal money to make their budgets work. They probably envy the freedoms that the KGB, GRU, and Stasi had back in the day to keep law and order.
In 1950, C.M. Kornbluth wrote “The Little Black Bag” which is a similar concept to the Shitcoin concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Black_Bag