10 Weekend Reads

August 29, 2015 7:00am by

Saturday arrives, and just in time. Pour yourself a tall mug of Two Volcanoes coffee, and settle in for our longer form weekend reads:

• Unreliable Experts: Getting in the way of outstanding performance (What Works On Wall Street)
• 31 million men, 12,000 women: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site (Gizmodo)
• Brad Katsuyama’s Next Chapter: His once tiny dark pool got a big boost from Flash Boys. Now, this unlikely celebrity is out to prove IEX Group has what it takes to become a public stock exchange. (Bloomberg) see also Masters in Business: Brad Katsuyama (BV)
• Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data (The Guardian)
• Making Decisions in a Complex Adaptive System (Farnam Street)
• “Cowboy Doctors” and Health Costs (Harvard Magazine)
• 10 Years After Katrina (NYT) see also Ten years later: New Orleans contends with its disappearing coast (Washington Post)
• The Mystery of ISIS (NY Review of Books)
• Redeeming the Octopus – the most remarkable creature of our nightmares (New Statesman)
• How ‘Born to Run’ Captured the Decline of the American Dream: Bruce Springsteen’s breakout album embodied the lost ‘70s—the tense, political, working-class rejection of an increasingly unequal society (The Atlantic)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Paul McCulley, former chief economist of PIMCO.

 

Chinese-American Property Purchases

Source: World Property Journal

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    • VennData commented on Aug 29

      Savannah State shooting revives focus on campus carry

      “…The fatal shooting of a student at Savannah State University Thursday has trained fresh attention on whether guns should be allowed on college campuses in Georgia…”

      http://www.ajc.com/news/news/campus-carry/nnStC/

    • constantnormal commented on Aug 29

      whoops my mistake, the state paid no money to the NRA to train the Indiana National Guard in the use of concealed handguns … but that does not preclude the NRA’s PACs from invisibly greasing the palms of the pols for the free publicity.

      Amazingly, no one (to my knowledge) has raised the question of why the Indiana National Guard needs to carry concealed weapons … are they barred from carrying military grade weaponry outside of combat situations?

  2. VennData commented on Aug 29

    Hey guys I’ve got an idea for a dot com. It’s a web site where women go who can’t find anybody to bone them!​ We’ll make zillions.

    • howardoark commented on Aug 29

      One does wonder how many of the 12,000 women were looking for women. I also kind of wonder why the class action bar is bothering with the data loss suit. Since the entire site was a scam, why aren’t they suing on behalf of the entire 31,000,000 man class? The benefit is that they can collect and it’s unlikely that any of the suckers will fill out their post cards to get their free dating service or whatever it is that AM will offer up in the settlement (along with the legal fees).

  3. ilsm commented on Aug 29

    ISIS/Zarqawi:

    “But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge.”

    Look at John Adams’, Bolivar’s, Lenin’s, Mao’s, Castro’s, Ho’s…… all survived against imperial power.

    What is improbable is how over 50 years of ‘selling’ the US war profiteers have profited from experimenting with the same failed plan.

    Zarqawi got more aid from western intelligence………. than Iran who know about Sunni insanity.

  6. VennData commented on Aug 29

    Supermoons are Super Dumb

    “…Here’s a little known fact about supermoons: They’re made up and a complete waste of everyone’s time. Supermoons are a by-product of an always-on media machine that demands a constant stream of things to comment on and—in the absence of actual commentary-worthy items—is more than willing to completely fabricate them…”

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490192,00.asp

    What we need is a media that comments on how dumb everything is in the attention-starved media…

    Sarah Palin interviews Donald Trump!

    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/29/sarah-palin-donald-trump-interview

    Ok, media, let’s give it one more try…

  7. RW commented on Aug 29

    Artificial Unintelligence

    …how would you know if the Fed is setting rates too low? Here’s where Hicks meets Wicksell: rates are too low if the economy is overheating and inflation is accelerating. Not exactly what we’ve seen in the era of zero rates and QE: …

    …there are arguments that the Fed should be willing to abandon its inflation target so as to discourage bubbles. …but …they have nothing to do with the notion that current rates are somehow artificial, that we should let rates be determined by “supply and demand”.

    The worrying thing is …crude misunderstandings along these lines are widespread even among people who imagine themselves well-informed and sophisticated. Eighty years of hard economic thinking, and seven years of overwhelming confirmation of that hard thinking, have made no dent in their worldview. Awesome.

  10. VennData commented on Aug 29

    Time on “Dating.”

    “…Times have changed, and that is a good thing—especially the fading-away of cruel taboos that once stigmatized women who engaged in premarital sex or bore children out of wedlock…”

    http://time.com/dateonomics/

    Yeah that’s great, more kids out of wedlock. You ever wonder why regular folks think “the Media” is whacko?

    • lucas commented on Aug 29

      The problem is not the taboo, but the double standard that holds women responsible for the actions of men. Jesus confronted this double standard when he dealt with the woman who was taken in “the very act of” adultery, and brought before him by a crowd of presumably men. Where was the man involved?

      All societies have needed to make rules about sex because we are a species that is always in heat.

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