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rePost::UK, Not OK – NYTimes.com

April 27, 2011, 9:18 AM
UK, Not OK
The bad GDP number for the UK isn’t a surprise — in fact, judging from market response, investors seem to have expected something even worse. Still, if you step back and look at what has been happening, it’s doubleplusungood: zero growth over the past 6 months, with every reason to be worried on the downside looking forward, as Cameron’s austerity bites deeper.
Jonathan Portes gets to the nub of it:
On fiscal policy, the message is that we should listen to economists, not credit rating agencies. Most mainstream economists argued that the impact of the government’s fiscal consolidation on confidence and consumer demand would be negative; so it has proved.
…
Meanwhile, the argument that fiscal overkill was necessary to appease the credit rating agencies has again been disproved by market reaction – or the lack of it – to the Standard & Poor’s outlook warning last week in America, where US Treasury yields hardly budged.
In short, there is no confidence fairy; and S&P can call invisible bond vigilantes from the vasty deep, but they won’t actually come when called.
Portes hits, in particular, on a point I’ve tried to make a number of times, here and more recently here: right now, we’re living in a world in which basic economics points to conclusions utterly at odds with what Very Serious People are supposed to believe, in which radical outsiders base their views on standard economics while orthodox types turn to heterodox, highly dubious speculations.
Econ 101, buttressed if you like by fancier New Keynesian models, says that contractionary fiscal policy is, well, contractionary. Yet much of the world of movers and shakers bought into the exotic notion that expectational effects — the confidence fairy — would make contractionary policy expansionary. And they clung to this belief even as the supposed historical evidence in favor of expansionary austerity was thoroughly debunked.
via UK, Not OK – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::Data Miconceptions – NYTimes.com

Second, about unemployment: the U.S. unemployment numbers have nothing to do with unemployment benefits. The Census surveys households, and asks whether adults are employed, and if not, whether they are actually searching for a job. So searching but not employed is the definition. And that in turn means that expiring benefits, whatever you may think of them, don’t have any direct effect on measured unemployment.
via Data Miconceptions – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World – By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo | Foreign Policy

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. Weve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What weve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesnt necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
via More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World – By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo | Foreign Policy.

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rePost :: The Pale King – Boing Boing

People keep asking me if somehow DFW’s suicide invalidates the message his writing, if it casts doubt on all his life’s work. I can’t say no strongly enough. No no no, it doesn’t. And I say this in part out of my own need to survive. Had someone not walked in and seen me certainly my life would have still been more than a prelude to that arbitrary moment. If someday my disease takes me, it takes me, but it can’t take away a single precious moment I have fought it off, a single moment I have shared with you, or a single moment he shared with us. Please forgive us our trips to the rafters, and don’t reduce us to that moment.
via The Pale King – Boing Boing.

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rePost::Auntie Janey’s Old Fashioned Agony Column #12 | JessicarulestheUniverse

This is also true with emotional baggage. Some people expect you to take their shit because you are their friend. The highest respect should be reserved for your friends. Yes, you can have small fights with them, fool around with them, go crazy with them, have occasional tantrums because of them, but never ever treat them as if they exist for your convenience. For me that is the highest form of disrespect. Friends bear some of our faults because they know that these are part of who we are. They will freely take this burden upon themselves for they believe it is a small price to pay to continue enjoying your company. They will not buckle under the weight because they are bearing it with glad hearts.We should always strive to make ourselves light, especially for those people who are constantly around us: family, friends, co-workers, etc. People are carrying their own weight too and we should do our best not to add to their burden. We can make ourselves light by making ourselves strong enough to lift ourselves. True, there are burdens that are too heavy for us to carry and we can ask our friends to help us but never shift most of the burden to them. That would be unfair. It is the same thing with shopping bags and luggage. Bring only what you can carry. If you need to bring more than you can carry, politely ask your companions to help you and do not expect them to carry everything. Or if there are just too many bags, hire a porter with a cart.
via Auntie Janey’s Old Fashioned Agony Column #12 | JessicarulestheUniverse.

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rePost :: Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO // bens blog

A classic peacetime mission is Google’s effort to make the Internet faster. Google’s position in the search market is so dominant that they determined that anything that makes the Internet faster accrues to their benefit as it enables users to do more searches. As the clear market leader, they focus more on expanding the market than dealing with their search competitors. In contrast, a classic wartime mission was Andy Grove’s drive to get out of the memory business in the mid 1980s due to an irrepressible threat from the Japanese semiconductor companies. In this mission, the competitive threat—which could have bankrupted the company—was so great that Intel had to exit its core business, which employed 80% of its staff.
via Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO // bens blog.
 

Pakiramdam ko papunta sa wartime ang company ngayon , naku patay.p