Ahh, a sunny Spring Sunday morning. Its still too cold for the birds to be singing, but thats only a few weeks away. On to our morning chillaxing at home reads:
• Wages Haven’t Been This Crucial to U.S. Economy in Half Century (Bloomberg)
• Swedroe: Ignore Interest-Rate Noise (ETF.com)
• Investing: The Fed and unintended consequences (USA Today)
• The Steve Jobs You Didn’t Know: Kind, Patient, And Human (Fast Company)
• What happens when US rates rise? Three Scenarios (Medium)
• Utilities experience competition, don’t like it, run crying to regulators (Grist)
• Roadies: Unlikely Survivors in the Music Business (WSJ) see also “The First Roadie—Ever” (Texas Monthly)
• Fewer, Richer, Greener: The end of the population explosion and the future for investors (Larry Siegel)
• An Orgasm App? UC Berkeley-Nurtured Tech Team Launches its “Smart” Vibrator (UC Berkeley)
• This has been the warmest winter on record, except in the most politically important part of the world (Washington Post)
What are you reading?
Investors Celebrate Gentler Tone From Officials on Rates 
Source: WSJ
“…the most politically immobilized part of the world”
Re: Warmest winter
Its only a drought if it impacts Washington DC. Everywhere else it is just “normal climate variation”
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/the-economics-of-californias-drought/388375/
We had snow this morning. Non sequitur’s cartoon earlier this week applies to us
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2015/03/20
Ted Cruz is planning on coming out as a presidential candidate on Monday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/report-cruz-will-launch-white-house-bid-monday/2015/03/22/5e81fa00-d064-11e4-8a46-b1dc9be5a8ff_story.html?tid=trending_strip_3
I expect to see vehement protests against his run from a significant portion of the GOP party and “base” since he was actually born in Calgary, Canada and has a birth certificate to prove it (they don’t even have to claim it is forged), and neither of his parents were in the military (eliminating the John McCain analogy).
So if the “birther” movement was ever anything but a bunch of racist bigots, this is their chance to prove it. Yes, that includes Donald Trump.
Why art is not an asset class
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/03/20/lifehunters_pranks_dutch_museumgoers_into_thinking_an_ikea_painting_is_worth.html
Wired
* Juan Enriquez and Steven Gullans Science
* 03.03.15
Fat? Sick? Blame Your Grandparents’ Bad Habits
Toward the end of World War II, the Nazis blocked all food and fuel supplies to the Netherlands, leading to famine. Many babies born during this famine suffered long-term effects, including a higher incidence of a variety of conditions such as heart disease, obesity, glucose intolerance, and obstructed airways. Severe trauma altered the victims’ gene code for life, even if the victim had yet to be born.
But here’s the weird part: The effects didn’t stop with a child or with a generation. Postwar and post-famine, later-born siblings were also affected. Even in periods when food was available and the war over, a genetic memory lingered.
And it appears to linger a long time. In follow-up studies, the daughters of Dutch mothers who had suffered through WWII’s famine while pregnant in turn had daughters with twice the average rate of schizophrenia. In other words, mothers’ wartime duress was passed on to their daughters, in the form of mental illness, and then on to the granddaughters: a genetic scar, inherited collectively by many individuals across at least two generations. Somehow, genes had been altered even for those who had no direct contact with the famine itself.
If our gene code can change in real time because of our surrounding environment, and if these changes can be passed on, then a long-discredited biologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, may not have been 100 percent wrong. In the early 19th century, Lamarck was run out of bio-town for daring to suggest that evolution can take place in one generation; he argued that if giraffes stretch their necks to reach the upper branches of trees, their necks will lengthen and this beneficial trait will be passed to their progeny.
…
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/fat-sick-blame-grandparents-bad-habits
More cash-strapped Americans turn to tax refund advances
http://poststar.com/news/state-and-regional/more-cash-strapped-americans-turn-to-tax-refund-advances/article_940115f4-f225-5b7f-8145-b51793452f90.html
While corporations stash $2.1T offshore
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/u-s-companies-are-stashing-2-1-trillion-overseas-to-avoid-taxes
You hard-working American’s know the GOP is on your side. ROFL!
That is what is amazing – the vote for these guys totals nearly 50%.
Larry Siegels article is different in that it actually presents hope for the future. Its title catches a good bit of the theme fewer richer greener. (It points out that richer does imply greener as a clean environment is a good that is purchased after you have met the basics of life (Somewhere between level 2 and level 3 in Maslows hierarchy of needs i.e. between Safety and Security and Belongingness and Love Needs. )
For example on population is plot of population on a log scale does show a fairly drastic reduction in the slope of the population curve, Table 2 in the piece listing GDP per capita estimates for 2050 and 2010 show interesting variations between countries with China being twice India in 2050. He then shows a Kuznets curve for pollution showing that it tends to peak around a gdp per person of $5000 which is where China was until recently. So you see as folks have food and housing they choose to spend on a better environment.
Lamarck was still wrong. It is the overreaction by scientists followed by triumphalism during their careers’ twilight that led Mach to say science proceeds one funeral at a time. This is embodied in the phrase of Sagan that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”. Fallacy of conception. Claims require proof. Extraordinary is an unquestioned prior bias.
Ideally there will be some refinement in understanding the epigenetic effects of life experience, chemical exposures, microwave radiation and so on.
Thankful to live in Alabama? Paris pollution so bad city banning half of all cars on roads Monday
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/paris_pollution_so_bad_city_wi.html
All those Alabama-led catalytic converters, energy saving, and soot scrubbers are to thank. That pro-solar, EPA-focused electorate. Thank you Alabama for all your cutting edge work in keeping our air and water clean.
I think Zero Hedge unfairly puts the blame on the Fed. Prosecution of financial crimes is decided by the Administration, particularly the Attorney General, while Congress has enforced austerity measures that have resulted in relatively high unemployment and low wages (things like infrastructure pay good wages). Meanwhile, it is the think tanks and Wall Street analysts that are propagating much of the clap trap about “maximizing shareholder value” meaning that jobs should be off-shored and wages kept to a bare minimum.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-22/after-fed-crushed-middle-class-it-targeting-american-family
Seems that during this cycle ( 2009 and up ), there’s a endless number of financial planners (Swedroe: Ignore Interest-Rate Noise) feeding a constant barrage of facts, advice, and information about how investors are making novice, miscalculated investment mistakes in the “Vegas” type atmosphere of the financial markets. Yet, the average “investors” are probably just sitting tight with their holdings and are doing OK. And a handful of (day) traders ( the ones that surface every cycle and then disappear when the bear market occurs) and a large population of money management “professionals” and planners are the ones that are underperforming. Swedroe should direct his advice towards the professionals in his own industry.
Vibrator app article sure to stimulate vertical demand curve. Hopefully they get some seed funds from an Angel. :p