Welcome to December. Our two-fer-Tuesday morning train reads:
• New Fed Rule Limits Emergency Lending Power (NYT) but see The Case for Further Policy Stimulus in the Euro Area (Petersen)
• Hacking a Hedge Fund: There are worse things than a market crash. (Chief Investment Officer)
• Getting In Cognitive Shape: The Power Of Brain Fitness (Forbes) see also How search engines make us feel smarter than we really are (boingboing)
• The Last 90 VC-Backed Tech IPOs Have Dramatically Underperformed the Market (all in one chart) (Climateer Investing)
• An Ode To Kobe Bryant, In Two Charts (fivethirtyeight)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments
Ted Cruz on Birth Control: ‘We Don’t Have a Rubber Shortage in America’
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ted-cruz-birth-control-dont-rubber-shortage-america/story?id=35501705
How long before people learn not to fall for his Strawmen Arguments?
Americans need to learn that twisting someone’s argument and saying that’s the argument is not “Great debating” it’s “Poor debating.”
Ted Cruz is good at making up strawmen, not debating an issue. He’s a horrible debator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
“…For example, Ted Cruz has criticized the “rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power.” But Reich concedes that “the sincerity behind these statements might be questioned.” Indeed. Cruz has proposed large tax cuts that would force large cuts in social spending—and those tax cuts would deliver around 60 percent of their gains to the top one percent of the income distribution. He is definitely not putting his money—or, rather, your money—where his mouth is…”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/robert-reich-challenging-oligarchy/
Yeah Tea Partiers, Ted Cruz will really stop the elites. ROFL!
The NYT article Short Answers to Hard Questions about Climate Change in today’s reading list provides a reasonable overview of the climate change situation and the need for action but still soft-peddles climate change denialism as ideologically motivated individuals supported in many cases by petrochem corporations. Climate change denialism may be more diffusely organized than the tobacco industry research/sabotage was but it is still quite a bit more concerted in structure and action than the NYT implies; e.g.,
Unearthing America’s Deep Network of Climate Change Deniers
New research for the first time has put a precise count on the people and groups working to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S., according to a paper published today in Nature Climate Change. ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics. As a two-week United Nations climate summit begins today in Paris, it’s striking to notice that a similarly vast infrastructure of denial isn’t found in any other nation.
NB: In this case it required a level of research far above individual or institutional analysis to clearly demonstrate that entities actively engaged in climate change ‘skepticism’ didn’t just share funding sources or organizational affiliations, they were acting like a choir singing different parts from the same hymnal. Similar quasi-coordinated bias has been detected in other research projects including GMO safety research but it would probably take network analysis at this level to adequately demonstrate or rebut that hypothesis.
GMO safety research is understood by the skeptical community to be valid.
The skeptical community are those who understand science and why evolution is true, that climate change is real and the continual dumping of tons into the atmosphere is a big part of the problem, that vaccines are safe and effective, et cetera.
Understanding science means putting the possible biases in perspective and not assuming that money is the only bias or that money is always a bias. For example, Dr. Paul Offit is probably the most knowledgeable vaccine scientist in the country and he has made a lot of money from a vaccine he made. Should we ignore him the way the anti-vaccine community wants us to? Should we join the anti-vaccine community in issuing death threats to Dr. Offit to try to silence him?
The authors of the piece you posted, Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation, included the Seralini paper in their evidence. They do admit that the paper was discredited and retracted by the journal that published it, but include a reference to the authors’ defense of their paper. We see the same approach from the anti-vaccine community trying to make the Wakefield paper seem still relevant. Andrew Wakefield cannot practice medicine any more because of his research fraud, but he is a hero to the anti-vaccination community.
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/andrew-wakefield-the-panel-is-satisfied-that-your-conduct-was-irresponsible-and-dishonest/
Science-Based Medicine is a site dedicated to providing the best care to patients. The doctors are not paid by the drug companies, the insurance companies, or anyone else to publish their articles. They do not even have advertising. They understand how to analyze research.
They have written about GMOs and the similarities between the tactics of the anti-vaccination community and the anti-GMO community. Here are some of their articles.
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-seralini-gmo-study-retraction-and-response-to-critics/
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/antivaccine-versus-anti-gmo-different-goals-same-methods/
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-science-based-blog-about-gmo/
I think that you will find this objective assessment of the evidence to be helpful in determining how good the evidence is and how much can be determined from the available evidence.
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There is still hope for the free market in US health care – a faint heart beat can still be heard:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/express-scripts-seeks-lower-price-alternative-to-daraprim-1448946061
Samsung’s Big Change After Galaxy S6 Failure
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/12/01/samsung-jk-shin-galaxy-s7/
I’ll tell you why I don’t buy Samsung phones after two in a row. They load up so much nonsensical Samsung appointed crapware that you can’t take off.
Until Samsung goes with a clean Android front end and let people do what they want Samsung will continue to fail. Thinking anything else is does not take into account their users.
If you like old Hollywood musicals, you will like this brilliant new take on their dance scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE
Neglected to post this yesterday but it really must be noted that a week has not passed without the usual suspects blithely sharing their confusion about economics and finance.
It’s Monday, So “Silent Samuelson” Wants To Cut Social Security Benefits (Yet Again)
While this is just par for the course for RJS, today’s twist involves emphasizing how there ought to be generational warfare going on, but for strange reasons it does not seem to be happening. He quotes the ridiculous column by WaPo’s new economics columnist/blogger, Jim Tankersley, whom several of us bashed pretty hard, but with RJS apparently unaware that his column has pretty much been torn to shreds by everybody who has commented on it and does not write for WaPo. (My critique of it can be found here.)
Another new twist is that while Samuelson has long claimed to be a boomer while bashing the boomers and calling for benefit cuts for them, he finally outs himself as having been born in 1945, the last year of the Silent Generation, just before the front end of the boomers. …
So part of the claim by Silent Samuelson and Gen-Xer Tankersley is that the boomers were “born into some of the strongest job growth in the history of the US.” Unfortunately for them, that is not as true as claimed. …
Samuelson is an embarrassment to the post and himself.
I used to think he was uninformed; now I just think he is stupid . . .
They just cut benefits in the last budget bill. These guys clearly aren’t paying attention. The eliminated the ability to file and suspend while still collecting a spousal benefit We were plan inning on doing that a decade from now. I estimate that will cut our lifetime benefit by about $30k. Not chicken feed.
However, these clowns keep having to point at 75 year projections for insolvency. SS is just over 75 years old now. Given the wide array of events that have occurred since 1940, I find it hard to believe that there are 75 year projections out there that are believable.