In this case, Jeremy Corbyn.
Month: July 2016
This is the Least Surprising News in ……… Ever
One of the theories in modern economics is that people will engage in behavior that will provide them with a perceived benefit.
This is literally Economics 101. (Really. It’s in the text books.)
It’s called Rational Choice Theory, and it is a bedrock of Neoliberal (free market mousketeer) economics.
One of the blind spots amongst the followers of Rational Choice Theory is that whenever excessive executive compensation or control fraud is brought up, they suggest that managers operate in the best interests of the shareholders, and further argue that their bloated remuneration is what leads them to take this course.
Of course this has never happened in the history of ……… ever:
It won’t surprise any market-watcher to learn that in the run-up to earnings season, companies tend to lower the bar for top and bottom line performance, thereby giving themselves better odds of exceeding analysts’ expectations.
However, a new working paper suggests that the sins of omission that occur during the corporate “cheating” season, as it was dubbed by Societe Generale Global Head of Quantitative Strategy Andrew Lapthorne, are far more insidious.
Authors Kenneth Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik, and Ronnie Sadka conclude that managers mislead analysts and shareholders during earnings reports, and that their penchant for massaging expectations downwards may be employed in order to open up a window to buy their stock on the cheap in the near future.
It’s not just about buying stocks, its about manipulating the price of stock options.
The researchers developed two hypotheses: either managers make disclosures in a timely matter (and their forward-looking information is quickly reflected in stock prices) or members of the C-Suite actively “lean against the wind” to understate good or bad news — or even offer the completely wrong impression of what’s transpired since the last quarter ended.
Their findings suggest that guidance (or “bundled forecasts”) provided by managers as well as the general tone of the conference call (analyzed using a “bag of words” approach) “point toward rejection of Timely Disclosure in favor of the Leaning Against the Wind alternative.”
“Leaning against the wind,” huh?
I would call it lying, and some would call it fraud, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
No Charges on the Email
The FBI has announced that it has completed its probe, and that it feels that no charges are justified.
It was a whole lot of nothing from the perspective of a criminal investigation, though some people involved should have their clearances pullec.
While at the Other Ocean………
It appears that the elections called by Malcolm Trumbull just made Australia’s approval of the TPP next to impossible in the near future:
With a new Senate likely to be hostile to free trade deals, the road to signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership just got bumpy, writes Richard Denniss.
One thing that is certain after Saturday’s election, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead, and along with it the Coalition’s economic agenda and narrative. The free trade agreements that Andrew Robb signed with China, Korea, and Japan were some of Tony Abbott’s proudest achievements, yet they are exactly the sort of deals that Pauline Hanson, Nick Xenophon, and Jacqui Lambie believe cost Australian manufacturing workers jobs.
And thanks to Malcolm Turnbull’s new Senate voting rules and double dissolution election, Hanson, Xenophon, and Lambie are now the block of votes that the Coalition will need to win over to pass their legislation when the ALP and Greens are opposed.
This may not kill the TPP, but it has the effect of making the timetable Obama that wants (he sees it as a presidential legacy issus), where there is a lame duck vote, next to impossible.
It is not clear who will win the election, but it is clear that the Colalition will not have the votes to pass TPP without significant support from smaller parties because the Senate is looking to be a complete mess, and unlike other upper houses in the British Commonwealth, the Australian Senate is much more powerful, being somewhat analogous to the US Senate in power.
Again, good news, because much like CETA and the TPIP, the TPP is a horribly flawed “trade deal.”
Looks Like the EU Just Threw a Roadblock in Front of CETA
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada now must be approved by individual parliaments, and not the European Council and European Parliament:
The European Commission performed a startling U-turn on its landmark trade agreement with Canada on Tuesday, succumbing to pressure from France and Germany by deciding that national parliaments would have to ratify the deal.
The need for approval from almost 40 national and regional assemblies not only threatens to scupper the Canadian deal itself, but delivers an ominous signal to British politicians who insist that the U.K. could negotiate a quick post-Brexit trade accord with the EU.
Speaking in Strasbourg, Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the EU had decided to call the Canada deal a “mixed agreement.” This means that the bloc’s most significant trade deal to date is now hostage to hostile lawmakers in parliaments ranging from Romania to the Belgian region of Wallonia.
I think that this development is being driven by two things:
- Concern that the British Brexit vote is spreading to other EU members, particularly on the periphery.
- Setting a precedent of allowing every member of the EU to have a potential veto over the conditions over which the UK would negotiate its leaving the EU.
I think that this also means that the trade deal, which is a kind of mini-TTIP will not happen in the next 12 months or so, if at all:
The decision, taken during a meeting of the EU’s commissioners in Strasbourg, represented a surprising volte-face because the Commission had hoped to treat the accord as an EU-only deal, meaning it would require approval only from the European Parliament and national governments in the Council.
The Canadian deal has stoked sensitivities across Europe primarily because it is seen as a precursor to the far more contentious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the U.S.
Matthias Fekl, France’s trade minister, said it was “unbelievable” that Brussels had been planning to treat the deal as an exclusively EU competence.
“I find it even more hallucinatory only a few days after the result of the British referendum that one could envisage this type of procedure at the level of the European Commission,” he told the news agency AFP in an interview.
The tortuous path to approve the deal will sound alarms in London, where politicians are pinning their hopes on a quick settlement with the EU after Brexit. Debates in national parliaments could potentially add years of delay to the Canadian accord, which has already taken seven years to finalize.
It isn’t often that you get a diplomat using the adjective hallucinatory.
This also does not bode well for the TTIP.
Considering the impacts of such trade deals, inflated pharmaceutical prices, destructive capital flows, increased financialization of economies, etc. This is a good thing.
Tweet of the Day
The warning signs were there for Team Trump: pic.twitter.com/8Nwc30Ddnl— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) July 5, 2016
If you don’t get the reference, just read a f%$3ing newspaper.
I Called This
A few days ago, I made a comment on a Facebook post in response to the an assertion that the British have no leverage in negotiating the Brexit.
I noted that Britain is by far the most EU migrants of any nation in the organization, and that they could use that as leverage in negotiations.
FWIW, the numbers are pretty stark: 1.2 million Britons living in other EU countries versus 3.3 million EU citizens living in the UK.
I would also argue that a larger proportion of the British expats are pensioners than the EU expats, because people don’t tend to move to England to retire, they move to England to work.
In any case, the Conservative Party has announced that any decision on the status of EU citizens living in the UK would be the product of the negotiating process:
British immigration minister James Brokenshire told the House of Commons Monday that the government cannot make any promises about the future of EU citizens in the U.K.
It would be “unwise” to tell them they can stay before the U.K. has negotiated with other EU countries about the rights of British nationals living elsewhere in Europe.
Brokenshire added that if the government made a promise now, that could trigger more migrants to come to the EU.
He also said that “EU nationals continue to be welcome here in the meantime.”
“EU nationals can have our full reassurance that their right to enter, work and study in the U.K. remains unchanged.”
………
The debate came after Home Secretary Theresa May, who is in the race to become the next Conservative party leader, on Sunday said that the position of EU nationals remains unclear.
The irony here is that May is an opponent of Brexit, while her opponents for party leader, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom, are both saying that expelling EU nationals in the UK should not be on the table.
Needless to say, the status of EU nationals in the UK has to be on the table, particularly if Article 50 is invokes, as Brussels has no reason to negotiate in good faith otherwise, and every reason to allow the clock to run out, so as to punish the UK for leaving.
Quote of the Day
People ignore experts because the experts have been systematically misleading them about what the benefits of policies are likely to be.
—Sandwichman at Angry Bear
He is talking about how various “experts” are perplexed by the fact that a majority of the voters in the UK ignored them and voted for Brexit.
As he notes, the experts for years have been saying that structures can be established for the winners to support the losers, but the policies they support not only make 90% of the population worse off, but it diminishes the political, economic, and, social power of the bottom 90%, which means a withdrawal of support.
This leads to more policies that disadvantage a majority of the population, further increase the power and wealth of the elites.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
This is Good News, Not Bad News
It appears that in response to the Brexit vote, house prices in London have fallen.
This is actually a good thing. Ordinary people have been priced out of London by overpaid parasites from the City of London (investment banking), and foreigners who are using London real estate to as a way to hide and protect their ill gotten gains:
Thousands of London homes have had their prices slashed since the Brexit vote a week ago amid warnings of a slump in the stunned housing market, the Standard reveals today.
An Evening Standard analysis has found a huge spike in nervous home owners cutting their asking prices after the surprise result of the referendum last Friday morning unleashed what was described as “a perfect storm” by one leading investor.
The impact is expected to be most severe in the new luxury development along the river from Vauxhall to Docklands where falls of as much as 40 per cent are feared.
One central London branch manager at one of the capital’s biggest firms said: ”The whole thing is a disaster. The uncertainty will cause the markets to crumble and who knows when that is going to get better.
This is things getting better.
Rich people lose money, and ordinary people may be able to shorten their commute a bit.
A Witness has Left Us
Elie Wiesel, has died at age 87:
Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.
Mr. Wiesel, a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor, was the author of several dozen books. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.
He will be missed.
Like a Dog That Has Finally Caught the Car
As more political fallout from the Brexit vote accumulates we have another supporter of leaving the EU is calling it quit.
The head of UKIP, Nigel Farage is stepping down as head of the party:
He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave.
Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party, saying, “I’ve done my bit.”
Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back.”
But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the self-made insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters.
………
But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015.
I don’t think that any of them expected to win the referendum, and now they don’t know what to do.
This is rather ironic.
Trial By Fire Recap
As I mentioned yesterday, I participated in a historical cooking competition Trial by Fire.
The basic rules are that the medieval dishes must be prepared under camping conditions.
Unfortunately, because the prep took longer than I thought, I could only complete one dish (the apple pastys)
in the 4 hours available, though I did complete all the dishes in the 2 hours following.
Note to self: I am never going to do two baked dishes in Trial by Fire again. Camping ovens turn out to be a choke point, and my camp oven was balky, so between the two of these, I ran out of time.
All the recipes turned out well, though.
Recipes are below
Pastys are made with a shortcrust (non-rising) dough, and is the core of any pasty recipe.
Shortcrust Dough
| 500 g | strong bread flour |
| 120 g | solid fat (shortening, lard, suet, or schmaltz) |
| 25 g | unsalted margarine or butter |
| 5 g | salt |
| 175 g | cold water (important, because you want little bits of fat to make the dough flaky and tender) |
Mix salt and flour, and then grate the frozen fat and margarine into the flour, and work until it resembles coarse cookie crumbs.
Slowly add the ice cold water, and work the dough until it pulls together enough to pull off the walls of the mixing container.
Place dough in a cold place (cooler or refrigerator) for at least an hour tightly wrapped so that it can come together.
Making multiple batches instead of making larger batches unless you are using an industrial strength stand mixer, it gets unmanagable
Beef Filling
| 450 g | quality beef (skirt steak is preferred) |
| 450 g | red potato |
| 250 g | Swede (Rutabaga) |
| 4 tsp | chopped garlic |
salt and pepper to taste
Slice ingredients to about a ⅛” thickness by ½” x ½”.
Roll out he dough into 4 equal balls, and then flatten into disks about ⅛”-¼” thick, and then add filling by layering, from bottom to top, with Swede, beef, potato, onion, and garlic, putting salt and pepper on each layer as you lay them out.
Seal with an egg wash , and crimp along the side (Cornish) or along the top (Devonian), cut vent holes, and then paint the top side of the pasty with an egg wash.
Bake at 400°F for hour, until the pastry is a golden brown, and shiny from the egg wash.
Allow to rest for at least 10 minutes before eating. Otherwise, you will likely burn your mouth.
It is traditional to eat with a hot English mustard, both this and a Dijon are next to the pasties.
Chicken Filling
As per the beef filling, except for brining the1 lb of chicken strips for 30 min to 2 hours.
| 2 cups | water |
| 1 tbsp | kosher salt (half that if table salt) |
| 1½ tbsp | brown sugar |
| ¼ tsp | oragano |
| ½ tsp | marjoram |
Fruit Dessert Pastys
It’s pretty much the same as the meat pastys, except that you divide the shortcrust dough into 8 rather than 4 to make smaller pasties.
Also, sprinkle granulated sugar on the top of the pastys before cutting vents in the pastys and check at about 45 minutes, as it cooks faster.
Apple filling
| 1 | Granny Smith apples, peeled and cut thin |
| 1 tsp | lemon juice |
| 1 tsp | crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen) |
| ½ tsp | cinnamon |
| 1 tsp | arrowroot |
| 1 | small pinch kosher salt |
Mix lemon juice, salt, and arrowroot thoroughly, and then toss with the rest of ingredients and allow to marinate.
Blackberry filling
| ½ cup | blackberries |
| 1 tsp | lemon juice |
| 1 tsp | crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen) |
| 1 tsp | arrowroot |
| 1 | small pinch kosher salt |
Exhausted
We went to an SCA event today, a historical cooking competition called Trial by Fire.
So, I drove there and back, and spent 5 hours on my feet wrestling with a balky camping oven and dough.
I was making various forms of pastys, both fruit and the Cornish variety.
The dishes went well, but took longer than expected, so only one dish was entered.
But I’ve spent the day in the sun cooking, and I am completely wiped.
I will post recipes tomorrow.
Posted via mobile.
Oh F%$#
A ruling by the ConstitutionalCourt of Austria means that Austrian presidential election result have been annulled, and a new election must be held.
Last time, the candidate from the right wing Freedom Party came within a fraction of a percent of winning, so what happens in a post Brexit vote is a complete crap shoot:
Austria’s Freedom party will get another go at providing the first far-right president in the European Union, after the country’s constitutional court annulled the result of May’s presidential election.
The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the run-off vote, in which Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party (FPÖ) narrowly lost to Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen, would have to be repeated across the whole country after an investigation revealed irregularities in the count of the vote in several constituencies.
The unprecedented ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office. Hofer had lost out to his rival in a knife-edge election on 22 May by only 30,863 votes.
While the Austrian presidency is a largely ceremonial role, the outcome has been seen as hugely symbolic, with the Freedom party seemingly buoyed by growing anti-refugee sentiment and disaffection with the country’s political establishment.
The Austrian President has one significant power: He can dissolve parliament and force new elections.
The citizens of the EU are living in interesting times.
First Up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes
Anyone who unironically write an article titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” is clearly beyond help.
In this case it’s one James Traub.
This man is a fellow at a “think tank”.
He probably does not get the irony.
General Strangelove Breedlove Revealed
I have wondered if former SACEUR (military leader of NATO) Phillip Breedlove is completely nuts.
Well, it appears that someone hacked his email and removed all doubt as to his insanity:
Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.
Obama defied political pressure from hawks in Congress and the military to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government, fearing that doing so would increase the bloodshed and provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with the justification for deeper incursions into the country.
Breedlove, during briefings to Congress, notably contradicted the Obama administration regarding the situation in Ukraine, leading to news stories about conflict between the general and Obama.
But the leaked emails provide an even more dramatic picture of the intense back-channel lobbying for the Obama administration to begin a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
In a series of messages in 2014, Breedlove sought meetings with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for advice on how to pressure the Obama administration to take a more aggressive posture toward Russia.
………
Breedlove attempted to influence the administration through several channels, emailing academics and retired military officials, including former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark, for assistance in building his case for supplying military assistance to Ukrainian forces battling Russian-backed separatists.
………
Phillip Karber, an academic who corresponded regularly with Breedlove — providing him with advice and intelligence on the Ukrainian crisis — verified the authenticity of several of the emails in the leaked cache. He also told The Intercept that Breedlove confirmed to him that the general’s Gmail account was hacked and that the incident had been reported to the government.
………
In the European press, Breedlove has been portrayed as a hawkish figure known for leaning on allied nations to ditch diplomacy and to adopt a more confrontational role again Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. Breedlove, testifying before Congress earlier in February of this year, called Russia “a long-term existential threat to the United States and to our European allies.”
Der Spiegel reported that Breedlove “stunned” German leaders with a surprise announcement in 2015 claiming that pro-Russian separatists had “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of the most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” sent to Donbass, a center of the conflict.
Breedlove’s numbers were “significantly higher” than the figures known to NATO intelligence agencies and seemed exaggerated to German officials. The announcement appeared to be a provocation designed to disrupt mediation efforts led by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
………
The emails, however, depict a desperate search by Breedlove to build his case for escalating the conflict, contacting colleagues and friends for intelligence to illustrate the Russian threat. Karber, who visited Ukrainian politicians and officials in Kiev on several occasions, sent frequent messages to Breedlove — “per your request,” he noted — regarding information he had received about separatist military forces and Russian troop movements. In several updates, Breedlove received military data sourced from Twitter and social media.
Not just a dangerously bellicose general officer, but an insubordinate one as well.
He wanted war with Russia, and he was using tweets in an attempt coerce the President of the United States to go along with his folly.
That is completely nuts.
Google™ Adsense™ Strikes Again
As near as I can figure out, a bot, and a possibly actual human Google employee, came across this post, which is about a judge dismissing the entire DA’s office from a case where they were prosecuting a mass murderer because of prosecutor misconduct.
In any case, I got a notice from Google™ Adsense™(click image for screenshot) warning me not to post pr0n .
The title of the judicial post was, “This is H a r d C o r e”, and Google India flagged it as sexually explicit.
Of course, there is no way to contact anyone about this, so I re-titled the post, and clicked “resolved”.
Once again, the colossus of the internet proves themselves to be staffed by f%$#ing idiots, both organic and aogorythmic.
My standard disclaimer on any post about the aforementioned service applies:
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
Anyone out there know of another (better) internet advertising firm out there?
I would expect better service from a company that is paying me something less than $0.00035/word.
Google™ Adsense™ sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.