Round out your Sunday morning with our easy like Sunday morning reads:
• Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson’s Blind Spot (TRB)
• Greening Your Portfolio (Slate)
• CNBC’s SquawkBox Has Lowest Nielsen Rating In Its History (Zero Hedge)
• A Cynic’s Guide To Fintech (Medium)
• Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure (NY Times) but see The rich get government handouts just like the poor. Here are 10 of them (WonkBlog)
• It’s the Weekend! Why Are You Working? (HBR)
• How Wall Street captured Washington’s effort to rein in banks (Reuters)
• Anti-vaxx mom abandons movement — after all seven her of her kids get whooping cough (Raw Story)
• How the Drought Is Changing California Forever (Bloomberg) see also Desperate from Drought, California Turns to Desalination (Bloomberg)
• Pesticides Linked to Honeybee Deaths Pose More Risks, European Group Says (NYT)
What are you reading?
Oil Price Falls Ahead of US Inventory Data
Source: WSJ
Rand Paul says that the Clintons “think they’re above the law”
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/rand-paul-slams-hillary-clintons-grand-hypocrisy-n340096
Another wizard who know how people think. Special powers!
Possibly bigger handouts for the rich are the discretionary budget, especially the $450B a year in no risk guaranteed profit “contracts” from the pentagon.
While the F-35 is no risk guaranteed profits over the next 40 years on a $1400B trough.
Federalist #9: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection
A FIRM Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection. It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated …
If it had been found impracticable to have devised models of a more perfect structure, the enlightened friends to liberty would have been obliged to abandon the cause …The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.
NB: What is now termed “American Exceptionalism” was a originally a concept grounded in the belief the United States could be so organized as to be relatively free from the devastating cycles of conflict that plagued virtually all other notable nations in history (ht BDL).
Hope was high in those heady years when the nation was born but now the mythology of states rights and the white-washing of the Civil War appears to have superseded or obliterated much of that early logic, serving as justification for every outrage from the destruction of peoples and nations posing no immediate threat to various forms of domestic sedition, nullification and secession.
Ah well.
Thousands dead, few prosecuted
“Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found. Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.”
http://goo.gl/UIJeXJ (WAPO)
Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
March 28th 2015
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs.
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-422-free-art-books-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html
Megascale Desalination
The world’s largest and cheapest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is up and running in Israel.
On a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved.
…
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/
The link to the “Drought changing California…” story is broken; here is the correct link:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-09/cambria-showers-with-pails-as-drought-shapes-california-s-future
By the way, how does one ordinarily make hyperlinks when replying to a blog post? Do I type out the html by hand, as in <a href="http://.. and so on, or something else?
Back to the dry spell in California. Is it time to start selling California-heavy reits, or is it still too early for that?
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ADMIN: Fixed
You can just paste the hyperlink as you have here or include tags to make things neater; some tags are not allowed but in general it seems to be user’s choice.
Predictions of California;s imminent demise have not only failed on a regular basis but quite often the opposite occurs — CA grows even wealthier or stronger WRT the domain of question — so, other things being equal, I would probably be inclined to buy CA-heavy REITS, growers, etc if bad drought news instigated mass selling of same. YMMD
Re: CNBC … basically unwatchable … Kernan is – arguably – the worst of them. At one point in time his anti-Obama rage had a certain comedic value – now it’s just pathetic.
Re: Green portfolios … I’ve been buying as much Hannon Armstrong as I can. More renewables, conservative accounting, fat dividend yield. What’s not to like? Bring it, “investors”.
Re: honeybees … who needs ’em? Monsanto has your back. The only thing nature has designed well is free corporate naming ideas. Ask the tub that founded ‘Meerkat’.
Lowest ratings in history for Joe Keenan. Shocking with his high school humor, CEO butt licking and encyclopedic knowledge of every Right Wing straw man, ever.
Not a single actionable iota of investible information.
Atom thin sheets of carbon are grapheme (nanotechnology), which when “perforated” deliver reverse osmosis with a lot less energy demand than existing RO.
From EconomistsView:
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs…
Graphene to the rescue!
Desalination with nanoporous graphene membrane
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/03/desalination-nanoporous-graphene-membrane
March 26, 2015 – Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Abstract: Water desalination using nanoporous single-layer graphene http://go.nature.com/vGAFuT
More: ORNL-led team demonstrates desalination
with nanoporous graphene membrane
http://shar.es/1gOifG – Oak Ridge Nat’l Lab