Pour some coffee, settle in for some Sunday morning reads:
• Fed Up: How Will Rising Interest Rates Affect Stocks? (WSJ)
• Lies Investors Tell Themselves (A Wealth of Common Sense) see also Bad Assumptions (stratechery)
• Go For the Value (Irrelevant Investor)
• The History Of The American Economy, Told Through Super Bowl Ads (Buzzfeed)
• Bloomberg Business’ new look has made a splash — but don’t just call it a redesign (Nieman Lab) see also Bloomberg Business’ new site design is beautifully bizarre — and it’s begging for haters (Venture Beat)
• The Street’s Due-Process Joke: Investors who sue their brokers must accept an arbitration process run by officials appointed in an inscrutable manner. Why help is needed. (Barron’s)
• It Looks Like An Armed Chinese-Made Drone Crashed In Nigeria (Business Insider)
• Getting Ready for the Super Bowl: A Cameraman Preps for Chasing the Quarterback (WSJ)
• Most Republicans Say They Back Climate Action, Poll Finds (NY Times) see also 10 Facts That Will Blow Right-Wingers’ Minds (Alternet)
• Grandma’s Experiences Leave Epigenetic Mark on Your Genes (Discover Magazine)
What are you reading?
Credibility Continuum
Source: OC Housing News
And from NOAA we have this little piece of information.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-temperatures-are-so-high-noaa-had-to-make-new-charts-2015-1
RE: The Bloomberg redesign. I’m finding the site really irritating but what really bothers me is that they are decontenting their site with less and less data. This combined with the increasing reliance on video (which is a poor way to convey information) has made the site pretty useless. As a rule, the more white space and HTML5 animations the less usable it is (“vibrant, responsive design” WTF!). The site may be good if you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a 15″ macbook pro and headphones but if you have 3 monitors, 6 phone lines, and are multitasking multiple tasks the site just doesn’t work…..
Wow. It’s not just the Bloomberg website. It appears that the Businessweek website has become Bloomberg.com now. Ugh! What an awful design. Looks like they hired the Microsoft Metro design team after Microsoft fired them. I don’t watch many web videos and doubt that I will be visiting Bloomberg site at all now.
Speaking of redesigns, Wired recently redesigned their mag and it is also awful. Weird colors and light gray, point 7 text. You need a magnifying glass to read the magazine.
Agree with both of you, especially the use of video for interviews, already too many talking heads on TV. I want to read and re-read words, study them, analyze them. Video is for fast buck artists trying to flim-flam you.
Different for animations.
Johnny Rotten still getting it done. Great “guitar” work too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Rw4-gFtCQ
New Bloomberg site is strange. It might be me but it is useless. Screen after screen of useless confusing graphics. Seems they did their best to hide and confuse the reason I always used their site to keep up on financial news. The mobil site is still useful, but for now I no longer use the bloomberg.com site.
Progress, you got to love it.
11. If Reagan Won the Cold War why didn’t anybody tell the Russians?
Are you telling me GOP Media Machine BS doesn’t work on anybody but their soft-headed genuflectors?
The answer in a new study will not please Democrats….
“…There is still plenty of evidence that making unemployment benefits too stingy is a bad idea, especially when an economy hits the skids. If people feel forced to take the first job that comes their way, they are unlikely to pick the one in which they are most productive. But when the labour market is improving, cutting them may give it an extra spurt…”
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21641263-stingier-benefits-may-be-behind-americas-blistering-job-growth-incentives-matter
So giving unemployment extensions during a downturn is something Democrats like. How about Republicans?
Having people work in a productive job is something Democrats like. How about Republicans?
Curtailing a program that has done it’s job when there are five million job openings in the best Western Economy is something everyone should like. REPEATING: Five million job openings
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
This data sounds like something Republicans won’t like and Democrats will like. I do.
The Economist comes up with these lines as if they were a GOP caricature writer on the Koch payroll.
Credibility Chart
Looks like Wall Street and Washington should be well to the left on that chart.
I stopped reading the bloomberg.com redesigned site. Loved it last week…too bizarro this week. Must I now go to WSJ for business news and info!
Bloomberg’s new site is typical, tons of white, wasted space. Pictures that ad no value. And clicks to videos whose information could be distilled into two sentences.
We’ll all look back at this and laugh.
The PR power of the financial sector must be collapsing if a negative opinion piece on the FINRA arbitration process finally gets into Barron’s. The process has been rigged against the investor for decades. For most of the time it was simply an “efficient” way to address grievances.
An interesting piece here on how Americans tend to focus on the leadership personalities in other countries to the detriment of actually understanding those countries and policies. The focus on Saddam Hussein which led to the Iraq War would be poster child number one for this as it led to one of the great geo-political blunders. Vietnam was another example where the focus on Ho Chi Minh and Communism meant that everybody missed the fact that the Vietnamese were really fighting a 50-year anti-colonial war and the real North Vietnamese decision-making was made by people the West were not focused on. It is ramping up again with Putin, Russia, and Ukraine. The Russia – Ukraine dynamic is unbelievably complex with centuries of history behind it. However, it is always easier getting policies in place if it is simplified to one grand focus on a single individual.
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/30/group-thinking-the-world-into-a-new-war/
Letters to Richard Dawkins.
http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/richard-dawkins-reads-hate-mail-fans
In Focus
Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015
Alan Taylor
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1964, is an annual international showcase of the very best in nature photography. The competition, co-owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide, opened for entries on January 5, 2015, and will stay open until February 26. This year, the contest includes 21 individual categories, ranging from birds and mammals to “In the Skies” and “TIMElapse Special Award”. The owners and sponsors have been kind enough to share the following 10 finalists from last year’s competition. Be sure to visit their website [ http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/wpy/index.html ] to see all of last year’s winners and find out more about the current competition.
http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/02/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2015/385064/
Obama targets foreign profits with tax proposal, Republicans skeptical
On proposed tax increases for the wealthy and large companies that are part of that package, Paul Ryan, the top Republican tax writer in the House of Representatives, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “What I think the president is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/01/us-usa-budget-tax-idUSKBN0L51IX20150201
As a shareholder in every single on of these public companies I can tell you NO ONE is envious of me.
Please raise my taxes. And Paul Ryan, you are a tweet.
Mike Huckabee makes it clear that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” doesn’t prohibit making laws imposing conservative Christian interpretations of the Bible on everybody else. He also believes that the Supreme Court should follow majority public opinion, so presumably their civil rights rulings in the 1950s and 60s were inappropriate. It is possible that the Dred Scott decision should be the law of the land.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/mike-huckabee-gay-marriage-offends-christians-the-same-way-muslims-think-dogs-are-unclean/
http://www.americanbanker.com/news/consumer-finance/bank-ceo-retires-dies-but-youd-never-know-it-from-sec-filings-1072486-1.html
What’s the fuss? Those are called ‘synergies’. ;)