10 Thursday AM Reads

June 18, 2015 7:30am by

Our locally grown, 40 day dry aged morning train reads:

• Does It Really Matter Exactly When the Fed Raises Rates? (NYT) see also June FOMC Recap (Tim Duy)
• Apple Watch: My most personal review ever (Loop)
• Rich people are jerks, explained (Vox)
• GOP bill would repeal federal ethanol mandate (TheHill)
• Unicorns (Stratechery)

Continues here

 

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

What's been said:

Discussions found on the web:
  1. winstongator commented on Jun 18

    I am a climate change believer, but did not worry about the impact to me…until I moved back to Florida.
    http://eyesontherise.org/app/#tab1
    I’m renting a home at an elevation of 4ft, and looking at some very nice homes only marginally higher. Sea level is rising, and I wonder the impact to my investment, and how many years it will take before rising sea levels have an impact on coastal property values. Luckily flooding is not happening where I am, like it is in Miami (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article2564166.html) but is it just a matter of time?
    I know, don’t cry for me, but sea level rise will affect more Americans than we think.

  2. rd commented on Jun 18

    It is very apropos that “Rich People are Jerks” and “Scientist’s Fight to Ban Trans Fats” showed up in the same reading list.

    The wealthy are put on an alter and adulated. Meanwhile they fight very organized battles to make sure that work by dedicated individuals to improve the public health is as long and arduous as possible. Individual scientists were at the heart of decade’s long battles to get lead out of gasoline, eliminate trans fats, etc. While some of these people worked in government agencies, they usually had to expend as much of their energy fighting their own agencies as the outside forces, mainly because the status quo is highly prized by people with power and wealth.

    • VennData commented on Jun 18

      Donald Trump is creating jobs. Well paying jobs. $50 a pop to cheer him.

  4. VennData commented on Jun 18

    Blackhawks Stanley Cup costing Chicago Productivity

    “In Chicago, it’s significant,” said Andrew Challenger, Vice President of the firm. “We have a lot of Blackhawks fans and a lot of wages that are going to be paid to distracted workers or those who don’t show up.”

    http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/699779/analysis-stanley-cup-costing-chicago-lost-worker-productivity

    We need to put a stop to this. Jobs Jobs. Jobs. Drill , Babt, Drill. Boehner and McConnell need to step in where Obama won’t and solve the Chicago productivity crisis.

  5. RightData commented on Jun 18

    Doesn’t the amount of water used and energy consumption required in the production of ethanol kind of neutralize its supposed environmental benefits anyway? This article http://business-ethics.com/2010/06/05/is-ethanol-better-for-environment-than-gasoline/ says “Cornell agriculture professor David Pimentel argues that producing ethanol actually creates a net energy loss. His research shows that a gallon of ethanol contains 77,000 BTUs of energy for engines to burn but requires 131,000 BTUs to process into usable fuel, not including additional BTUs burned from fossil fuel sources to power the farm equipment to grow the corn, and the barges, trains and trucks used to transport it to refineries and ultimately fueling stations.”

    • Crocodile Chuck commented on Jun 18

      Mate, I think its fair to say you don’t know what you are talking about, and miss the point completely:

      1) Franks’s sinecure is a perfect example of the capture of regulators and elected representatives by the industry they are meant to ‘control’, that is, to ‘keep it between the ditches’ [were you around seven years ago when the world was blown up by these idiots?]

      2) Dodd-Frank itself is another dreary example of how the laws are gamed to favour insiders, cronies, & large institutions: the denizens of the status quo. Don’t you know that the largest banks are even larger than they were before the carnage and mayhem post Sept. 14, 2008? Or have you noticed the disappearance rate of smaller community banks across the USA, as they merge or disappear because they can’t afford the compliance costs to ‘Frank ‘n Dodd’?

      3) I dispute your claim of ‘record jobs’ [whatever that means], growth has been anaemic at best, and the run up in equity markets has more to do with QE and central bank intervention in most Western markets. ‘Frank ‘n Dodd’ is irrelevant.

      I commend this piece of advice for you tomorrow: engage brain before posting.

  10. Jojo commented on Jun 18

    NASA data shows global groundwater depletion
    Water is drawn faster than replenished in most of world’s largest aquifers, according to two studies
    June 16, 2015
    by Renee Lewis

    In over half of the world’s largest aquifers, water is being drawn faster than it is being replenished, while some of those wellsprings may be much smaller than previously assumed, according to two studies released on Tuesday.

    As climate change and population growth increasingly stress the world’s water supplies, understanding how much groundwater exists and at what rates it can be sustainably drawn is critical, said scientists behind the studies.

    “Until improved storage estimates exist to determine a system’s full capacity to buffer against renewable ground water stress, continued pressure on aquifer systems could lead to irreversible depletion that seriously threaten the sustainability of groundwater dependent regions,” said a University of California at Irvine report titled “Uncertainty in Global Groundwater Storage.”

    …

    http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/16/nasa-data-shows-global-groundwater-depletion.html

  11. reedsch commented on Jun 18

    The study mentioned in the Vox article is rather enlightening and a bit disturbing:
    http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full

    “Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.”

    But are they assholes because they are rich, or are they rich because they are assholes?

    • rd commented on Jun 18

      “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done” – Honore de Balzac

      often paraphrased as “Behind every fortune there is a great crime”

      So the answer is that the first generation of wealth is often so because they are assholes while the ensuing generation are so because they are rich.

Posted Under