Most of the family has seen the new Star Trek film, and reviews have been circulating via email, some positive, and some negative, but my younger brother, Daniel had the best statement about the franchise ever:
I AM SOOOOO SICK OF THE WHOLE SPOCK INNER CONFLICT BETWEEN HIS HUMAN AND VULCAN HALF. Seen it in 3 years of orginal Trek, 6+ movies, even stolen for that stupid android Data! ENOUGH ALREADY. Have him shoot a moose, drink some bud, and read “Juggs” magazine and GET OVER IT!
Word.
Lets lead with some good news, the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve’s Empire State Manufacturing Index hit its highest level since November, 2007, and it’s actually positive, as opposed to the “falling less slowly,” good news we frequently see from hack economic reporters. (See top pic)
We also have home builder confidence, as measured by the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, rising to its highest level in more than a year.
<Paul Harvey>And now, the rest of the story:</Paul Harvey>
We have the delinquency rates at commercial banks rising sharply in Q2, and the banks responded by tightening credit significantly.
This is pushing up the price of treasuries, and thus lowering their yields, as investors flee to quality.
As a result, the Fed has extended its TALF facility for commercial real estate, because they (correctly) see an impending crash.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, where our other partner in corrupt “Anglo-Saxon Capitalism” goes to work, asking prices of UK homes fell by 2.2% this month, (that’s for the month, not annualized) with lack of credit to home buyers being a large factor in this move.
All in all, most of the signs are not good, which is why both crude oil and natural gas fell significantly today, and the US dollar and the Japanese Yen both rose.
Tom Delay will be appearing on Dancing With the Stars.
Not much of a joke, but the best I could come up with.
Please make better ones below.
For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.
So much for the Bush Economy.
Unfortunately, this is not senior staff at Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, or SAIC, but rather a relatively low level employee of a construction firm:
According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.
This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.”
This is why we need to prosecute Bush and His Evil Minions™, torture always comes home.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The most deregulated telecommunications in the market is in the United States, and so is the most expensive cell phone market, and Finland, Netherlands and Sweden have the lowest rates. (OECD report here)
Surprise, surprise, surprise, when you deregulate companies that profit from making it difficult for consumers to switch services, and use the leverage to keep prices high, use this as their business model.
The problem in many areas of our economy is not too much regulation, but too little.
Put this down to “Elections can mean something.”
It looks like the case of Goldman Sachs’s allegedly purloined high speed trading software, aka “Flash Trading”, which a number of observers, myself included, have noted sounds a lot like front-running the entire stock market, now appears to be creating some regulatory push-back.
Basically, this allowed high speed servers co-located with the markets to execute trades in the milliseconds between when other trades are initiated, and when they are completed.
First, as a result of questions raised by Senator Charles Schumer, both Nasdaq and Bats Global Markets have decided to stop allowing brokerages to execute trades in this manner on their exchanges.
The Financial Times notes that this sort of automated trading currently accounts for over ½ of all US stock trades.
Additionally, it appears that the S.E.C. is looking at restricting the process.
Here is a simple solution: Require that any trading done by computers be delayed by at least 15 minutes from initiation to execution.
It also looks like the S.E.C will crack down on “naked” short sales, where an investor sells shares he does not have, as opposed to borrowing shares to sell, which they would purchase and return at a later date.
On the commodities side of the equation, the FTC is issuing new rules to restrict the ability of traders to manipulate the markets.
I’m wondering when the Giethner/Summers shoe will drop, and they will push for elimination of these regulations, because it makes US markets “less competitive.”
But when you hear him answering back, in complete sentences, and he is saying, “Michelle Bachmann, you should run for President….Well, yes, that is batsh%$ insane.
To be fair, Michelle Bachmann is not claiming that God told her to run for President, though she did say that God told her to run for Congress, she’s just saying that she expects God to ask her to run for president.
“The phrase ‘paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur’ is not in the aardvark’s vocabulary, so, in his mind, he substitutes ‘crazy as a panrovian monk’ . . . ” (Cerebus #5 p 13)
I feel embarrassment sharing a country with her….How do her constituents not go through life with bags over their heads to conceal their identities.
Yeah, I know, the life of Nobel Prize winners is so glamorous.
And now, rest of the story.
O’Donnell, asks if Culberson would vote to repeal Social Security or Medicare, and shows where he is lying.
What’s the word for this behavior???
Oh, right….journalism.
*Ownage.
Seriously, there are 60 Dems in the Senate. It is reasonable to expect that all 60 of them will vote for cloture, whether or not they vote for the bill.
After looking at Smart Money’s predictions, I feel much better about my record of predictions.
Forecast: Next Year Will Arrive in 2010-ish
The article itself is mostly whining from prognosticators, but the hed is prize.
Krugman nails it on MSNBC:
Of course, this does not prevent the White House from capitulating on the public option, because, as I’ve said before, Barack Obama does not care about healthcare reform, he cares about being able to sign some sort of healthcare reform bill, even if it is bad and has no real reform, because he gets to claim success.
They are talking Co-Ops, which we know won’t work, because they haven’t worked. If they were even marginally successful, we would see hundreds of them, some of them huge, and we don’t….They can be counted on the fingers.
H/T CNET
You can see the picture on the left.
The top stages are inert mass-representative, and the first stage is just a lengthened shuttle solid booster, so the pic implies a greater level of technical readiness than actually exists.
There are definitely reasons for such a craft, but I think that unmanned ambulance is not one of the better applications.
If you are evacuating someone, you want have a doctor or paramedic on site to administer things like plasma, etc., and they would likely need to monitor the patient for the trip if it is any longer than about 10 minutes, and once you have to do that, having a pilot too makes sense.
That being said, things like remote resupply would be a viable application.
Actually, it’s going to Sikorsky West Palm Beach test facility, which is some distance from the Orlando region.
The compound helicopter is going there so that they can expand the flight envelope to what they hope will be something in the 250+ kt range.
When I interviewed with Lockheed-Martin Fort Worth in the late 1990s, I talked with 3 or 4 people, and they all took pot-shots at the recently discovered problems with wing drop on the then new F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet.
In tight turns in the transonic range, there would be unequal lift generated because the shock wave locations would be slightly different, and so you would get wing drop.
It now appears that that the F-35 JSF is at risk of the same behavior, at least for the extended wing CTOL carrier C model (also here), so they have put some spoilers outboard of the wing fold (see picture) just in case they cannot deal it with flap scheduling.
In the scheme of things, it’s not a particularly big deal, but considering the constant razzing the boy in Fort Worth gave Boeing over the Super Bug, it is a bit amusing.
Mouse over once the Flash loads….It’s worth it…..And remember to left click too.
Link.
Graph Pr0n, courtesy of