Economics, finance

For every DOWnside, there’s an upside.

With the DJIA falling below 9000 points today, it’s reassuring to know that, right?
Paul Krugman, in his Blog at the NY Times reminds us that

“[o]n a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open.

He’s had a busy day commenting, find the rest here. Including a link to a 38-page pdf-file full of recommendations from economists to policy makers ahead of the upcoming summit season. It’s been published by voxeu, edited by Barry Eichengreen and Richard Baldwin and it’s aptly called “Rescuing our jobs and savings: What G7/8 leaders can do to solve the global credit crisis“. Let’s hope some of the people representing out jobs and savings at these talks will actually read it.

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Economics, finance, US Politics, USA

Paul Krugman agrees…

in the NYTimes after the US House of Representatives voted “no” on the Wall Street bailout plan. He’s right of course, that “flip-flopping” on issues like this in the way it happened isn’t exactly a sign of a well functioning representative democracy. On the other hand, it’s also true that this vote is a sign that Congress still matters, even if it needed a figure with 11 zeros to balk at the administration. So, does that make the US a Banana Republic as Krugman argues? I think the decision on that is still out – after all, the bailout plan would/will have distributive consequences that would have/will make made the US income structure even more reminiscent of a classic Banana Republic.


Paul Krugman – OK, we are a banana republic

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oddly enough, US Politics, USA

Sarah Palin is simply scary.

You know, back in 2000, I said that Americans were so confident in their way of doing things that they actually believed they could afford someone like the current President to be in charge. Now, a couple of years later, they may no longer be too confident about the situation they find themselves in, militarily, diplmatically, economically, and politically. But in a move that illustrates to a scary degree the extent of polarisation of the American electorate, John McCain picked his Vice Presidential candidate according to the simple rules of electoral maths, and we’re now facing the possibility of a President Sarah Palin. And that would probably be when we’d all begin to fondly remember the days of President Bush. If there’s anything the choice of Mrs Palin, just as the Congressional hearings regarding the imminent 700bn bank-bailout, indicate, it is that US politics seems to have become completely dysfunctional now.

Here’s Sarah Palin making that point to CBS news anchor Katie Couric. It would funny, if weren’t so sad and scary.

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australia, battleofthesexes, demography

OZmating

Spiegel Online (German) apparently followed up on the “ugly duckling” Mont Isa, Queensland, story I recently wrote about and comes up with some interesting figures regarding the Australian gender balance. When I was told by an Australian friend late last year that “there are hardly any good men in Sydney these days” I did not think she was talking statistics. But it turns out she was. Apparently, the borough of Annandale is the best place for men to meet women in Sydney, as there are 1.48 of them for each male inhabitant. Unfortunately, they did not add age brackets to the raw numbers, which would have added some more interesting information. The problem is only slightly less pronounced in most other parts of Sydney and other coastal areas in Australia.

In general, the article explains, there are more women living in the coastal cities, and more men in the Outback – like in Mount Isa, or in Glenden, where there are apparently 23 men for every woman. It’s a geographic imbalance exacerbated by the economic boom in raw materials (which is driving men to mostly male mining cities in the Outback) that is adding to Australia’s apparent overall lack of about 100,000 men, most of whom are apparently working abroad nowadays.

Given such an imbalance  – 100.000 is significant for a population of only 21m – one has to wonder what keeps driving Australian men abroad and Australian women from rural areas to the Australian coast.

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Datenschutz, privacy

Google Chrome has a unique ID.

Apparently, just as Google Desktop Search, Google’s new browser, “Chrome”, has a unique ID. That basically means that if you are using chrome with any other Google service, like GMail, Google will be able to create a personalised history of browsing. According to Golem.de, Google say they don’t that. But they could. Easily. If you don’t want that, and there are important, very important reasons not to want it, don’t use Google chrome unless Google changes this ID policy. I will only use it locally to ensure cross browser compatibility for my webpages if it gains some non-trivial market-share. Luckily, the layout engine is based on WebKit, so there won’t be too many bad surprises in that respect.

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sex

Ladies, it’s in his arginine-vasopressine.

Looks like Carrie Bradshaw will lose her job pretty soon. If this research (article from Sueddeutsche.de in German) from the Swedish Karolinska Institut is indeed correct, Ms Bradshaw will no longer need to write advice columns about the mysteries of the alleged male unwillingness to couple up. Instead, in the last installment of her column, she will tell her female readership to take their men and have his genome processed to see if there’s a gene that will allow the production of sufficient levels of arginine-vasopressine. If not, then, with all due scepticism, it is suggested by the research, he may not be too big a fan of monogamy. Although, depending on the culture of your choice, he may still be inclined to marry – even 86 times, like this Nigerian man did, who has apparently been ordered to divorce 82 of his wives by a sharia court…

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australia, oddly enough

Updated: Oddly enough: Mount Isa, Queensland, edition

I’m the last person to deny that demography can be an important variable in social developments. Sex ratios in particular seem to be an important aspect when pondering about East German Hooliganism (75 women per 100 men in some areas) or the recruiting strategies of terrorist organisations in the Middle East (dying as a martyr while hoping to find 72 huris in paradise is could more appealing when the chance of actually meeting a woman while being alive is not just socially low, but also statistically – as in, say, Saudi-Arabia, where there were 100 women for 217 men in 2005, if I remember correctly). Foreign Policy even wondered whether “The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration” -particularly in Asia where the invention of the sonogramm led to widespread female infanticide – were actually the world’s biggest security issue in the early 21st century. So, well, as Edward Hugh puts it so eloquently – demography matters.

And apparently, demography also matters in Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia.

Mount Isa, Queensland

Mount Isa, Queensland

The town’s mayor, John Molony, was apparently so troubled by the excess testosterone in the city that he did not want to wait for a natural equilibrium to develop. In what may be considered a miner-cover of Emma Lazarus – Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free – according to this BBC article and this one from Reuters oddly enough, he has come under fire after saying that female “ugly ducklings” might benefit from the town’s shortage of women.

“with five blokes to every girl, may I suggest that beauty-disadvantaged women should proceed to Mount Isa”.

With a gentlemanly mayor like that, I wonder what kept any woman from moving there in the first place…

Update: The Sydney Morning Herald has a follow-up with some more interesting information – “Beauty-Disadvantaged Singles Outcry“. There’s a good chance Mr Molony will be the first mayor worldwide to have caused his constituents to rally for telling them they’re not sufficiently sexually attractive –

“It paints the women here as second rate and suggests that the men will settle for anything. He has put everyone down,” she said. “We’re going to get together to put forward our opinion.” Up to 100 women, carrying banners and placards, were expected to take part in the protest.

The best thing is, though, that he apparently got his numbers wong – the Sydney Morning Herald cites the 2006 census, according to which males apparently made up 52.6 per cent of the town’s population of nearly 20,000.

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intellectual property rights, music

So art can still be subversive…

This is probably the coolest copyright non-infringement performance anyone has come up with yet. Disabling bureaucracies by DOS-style, yet form-based requests is probably not entirely new as a concept, but putting together a 33 second-long piece of music using 70,200 samples, just to demonstrate some of the fundamental problems of today’s copyright and licensing schemes, as artist Johannes Kreidler is planning to do, is quite an achievement. There’s more if you click on the link, but it’s in German.

http://www.nerdcore.de/wp/2008/08/18/johannes-kreidlers-song-aus-70200-samples-den-er-bei-der-gema-anmelden-will/

And here’s a video by the artist himself. Also in German.

hat tip: nerdcore

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