My afternoon train reading:

Harold Ramis, RIP: Annals of Hollywood: Comedy First (New Yorker)
• Five Myths of Bond Investing (WSJ)
• How To Effortlessly Earn A Riskless 90% On Your Bitcoins Through The Magic of Binary Options Trading, Or, The Nigerian Email Con Comes To Wall Street (Sirf Online)
• The forever elusive α (Statistical Ideas)
• For a glimpse at emerging market problems, follow the gold… (WonkBlog)
• Does Akerlof and Shiller’s Animal Spirits provide a helpful new approach for macroeconomics? (Ideas)
• Where a Higher Minimum Wage Hasn’t Killed Jobs (Bloomberg)
• It takes how much water to grow an almond?! (MoJo)
• Another Obamacare horror story debunked (LA Times) see also Maybe there are no genuine Obamacare horror stories (LA Times)
• Beautiful Maps, and the Lies They Tell (Untapped Cities)

What are you reading?


Emerging Markets Are Cheap For a Reason

Source: Dr. Ed’s Blog

Category: Financial Press


7 Responses to “10 Monday PM Reads”

  1. swag says:

    Finally catching up with Tig Notaro’s incredible comedy routine “Hello, I have cancer,” once hailed by Louis CK as “instantly legendary”

    part 1

    part 2

  2. rd says:

    Re: How much water to grow an almond

    One of the key things to watch over the next few things is the hardening of water demand. The graph in the article looking at per capita usage of non-agricultural water is an example of the varying levels. Palm Springs uses lots of water per person. That means that there is lots of uses that can be cut off in a drought (e.g. watering lawns) without a major impact on the quality of life. However, once numerous water-saving measures have been permanently integrated, then the population will usually expand to continue using the same total amount of water. A drought then can be devastating because critical functions now have to start being dropped as there is little soft demand left to cut.

    So every time a response to a drought results in lower permanent per capita water usage allowing more people to move into the area during non-drought periods, the worse the effects of the next drought will be. There has been a lot of hardening of demand over the past coupleof decades, so expect to see the drought economic impacts getting worse and worse.

  3. swag says:

    Also, gotta say that Doctor Ed’s blog post on emerging markets reads as a numbered list of tautologies. But at least he single-handedly saved us from Y2K.

  4. rd says:

    Re: Harold Ramis

    There was actually a real “Stripes” platoon in WW II that did its own drills in the absence of commanding officers and then was recognized by senior leadership. It became part of the first black paratroopers:

    They were soldiers whose job it was to be servants. They could see the white paratroopers doing their drills, so their sergeant had them do the same drills. The Pentagon was considering starting a black paratrooper unit, so when the general of the white paratroop unit noticed that these black soldiers were doing the same drills as his soldiers on the other side of the fence, he investigated the situation. He realized their self-motivation and brought some of them into the first black paratrooop outfit.

  5. willid3 says:

    is any one really going to address the cause of the financial crises?

    3 ways to do it
    do any of them really do it?

  6. romerjt says:

    Example of Follow the Money and Climate Change

    “Until recently, the (Arctic) region has been covered with sea ice throughout the year, creating a physical barrier to the fisheries,” the scientists wrote. “In recent summers, however, the loss of permanent sea ice has left open water in as much as 40% of these international waters .… A commercial fishery in the central Arctic Ocean is now possible and feasible.”,0,7982828.story#ixzz2uLIy7u8M