so. much. data.

xkcd: Money

BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?

BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?: The circle below shows the gross external, or foreign, debt of some of the main players in the eurozone as well as other big world economies. The arrows show how much money is owed by each country to banks in other nations. The arrows point from the debtor to the creditor and are proportional to the money owed as of the end of June 2011. The colours attributed to countries are a rough guide to how much trouble each economy is in.

Wow (from Facebook)

Four degrees of separation.

The idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ -- that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections -- was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, and made popular by the John Guare play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation. The idea was first put to the test by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s. Milgram selected 296 volunteers and asked them to dispatch a message to a specific individual, a stockholder living in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts. The volunteers were told that they couldn’t send the message directly to the target person (unless the sender knew them personally), but that they should route the message to a personal acquaintance that was more likely than the sender to know the target person. Milgram found that the average number of intermediate persons in these chains was 5.2 (representing about 6 hops). The experiment showed that not only are there few degrees of separation between any two people, but that individuals can successfully navigate these short paths, even though they have no way of seeing the entire network.

While we will never know if it was true in 1929, the scale and international reach of Facebook allows us to finally perform this study on a global scale. Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops). It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing. Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found.

Like everyone in media isn't like this....

Sarah Palin Got Scolded by Roger Ailes for Not Announcing Her Non-Candidacy on Fox News -- Daily Intel: Sarah Palin's announcement that she wouldn't run for president disappointed her legions of admirers — but it infuriated Roger Ailes. The Fox News chief wasn't angry about the decision itself. Rather, he was livid that Palin made the October 5 announcement on Mark Levin's conservative talk-radio program, robbing Fox News of an exclusive and a possible ratings bonanza.

Pay Some Students To Drop Out?

Pay Some Students To Drop Out?:

A couple of Yale Law professors make the case for a first-year rebate option:

Consider the innovative employment policy of the Internet shoe seller Zappos. At the end of a four-week training course, Zappos offers new employees a one-time offer of $3,000 to quit. In part, the company uses the offer as a screening device. If you’re the type who prefers a quick three grand to the opportunity to work at a great company, then Zappos isn’t the place for you. 

Law schools might analogously offer to rebate half of a student’s first-year tuition if the student opts to quit school at the end of the first year. (If the student has taken out government loans, this rebate would first go to repay this debt.)  A half-tuition rebate splits the loss of an aborted legal career between the school and the student. Each has skin in the game, so students will not go to law school lightly, and law schools will have better incentives not to admit students likely to fail.

How We Were All Misled by John Lanchester | The New York Review of Books

How We Were All Misled by John Lanchester | The New York Review of Books: The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we’re doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.

Truth is not always obvious

The pride of the Galax Police is not the Lenco Bearcat rather it is the young men and women who serve the City of Galax on a daily basis. The vehicle was not purchased by the City of Galax it is housed here as part of a regional partnership. The vehicle is a multi-faceted incident response vehicle that is designed for operation in high risk situations including hazardous material spills, explosions and other disasters.

"superior leverage?"

We all understand the necessity to compromise, but we would expect to enjoy benefits from such compromise that are commensurate to our superior leverage.  Let’s review the scorecard of the debt deal:

Benefits for Democrats

• Obamacare is preserved and shielded from cuts


• Obama-era discretionary and mandatory spending levels are permanently enshrined


• All welfare programs are exempt even from baseline cuts


• After accruing $4 trillion in debt, Obama gets green light to run up an additional $2.1 trillion


• Obama doesn’t have to request another politically damaging debt increase – until after the election


• The creation of Supercommittee charged with deficit reduction, not spending cuts, opens the door for tax increases, while endangering Bush tax cuts – an opportunity they would have never enjoyed


• Failure of Supercommittee leads to automatic cuts in defense – an opportunity they would have never enjoyed


• Dems are not forced into transformational change with passage of BBA


• The deal overwrote the entire Ryan budget, obviating any further GOP leverage on budget policy for the rest of the year

Benefits for Republicans

• $917 billion in baseline discretionary cuts over 10 years


• The creation of 18^th debt commission is somehow the Republican part of the deal


• There is a required vote on a BBA


• The only saving grace is Phil Gramm’s jujitsu plan to preempt sequestration with an alternative privileged amendment that repeals Obamacare with a simple majority.  Will they have the guts to use it?

As The Hill reporter Molly Hooper noted last week, “Democrats’ Satan Sandwich is starting to taste pretty good.”

UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car (higher quality) - YouTube

UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car (higher quality) - YouTube

Economics focus: Exports to Mars | The Economist

Economics focus: Exports to Mars | The Economist: *
*

ECONOMISTS are constantly urging governments to adopt policies that would reduce global imbalances—which, in crude terms, means that China should slash its current-account surplus and America its deficit. Yet they ignore the biggest imbalance of all: the current-account surplus that planet Earth appears to run with extraterrestrials. In theory, countries’ current-account balances should all sum to zero because one country’s export is another’s import. However, if you add up all countries’ reported current-account transactions (exports minus imports of goods and services, net investment income, workers’ remittances and other transfers), the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014.

............I find this piece sanctimonious at best

Four Basic Principles That #OWS Can Implement to Address its White Privilege, Colonialist, White Supremacy [First Draft]: OWS has a white, cis male, able-bodied face and agenda. But before I get to that, I want to acknowledge and honor that there have been people of color (POC), lgtbq people, people with disabilities and many other people who experience oppression every day that are fighting to have their voices heard within this movement and who have been doing the work that is necessary to make this an inclusive movement. What I am now proposing is that those people in a position of privilege do the work necessary to make OWS across the country a safe space for more people to participate.

7 Charts That Sum Up Our Jobs Mess

7 Charts That Sum Up Our Jobs Mess: The problem today is that education isn't keeping up with changes in technology -- that's the race against the machine. With it comes a winner-take-all environment and all kinds of inequalities, not the least of which is the reality that the real winners of today's economy are those who can invest, not those who can work. That gap will eventually rebalance, but getting there is slow, painful, and can potentially leave a generation of workers behind.

No justification

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi | UCDavis Bicycle Barricade: Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

I think this ignores the "owns" versus "works at" phenomenon.

Inequality and Occupy Wall Street 4: daddy put you in the top 1% ! � milescorak: The bottom line is that about 40% of us have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed our fathers. But if dad’s earnings put him in the top 25% these chances are above average, they start taking off if dad was in the top 5%, and reach the stratosphere for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top earning dads had a job with his employer.

wow

Climb-down of the day - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

Climb-down of the day - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com: NEWSBUSTERS: As you are now the lone conservative host on MSNBC, conservatives around the country, especially our readers, see you as being the lone conservative voice on an extremely liberal network, and as such when that lone conservative voice is moving to the left because, and maybe it’s warranted…

SCARBOROUGH: Wait, but hold on. I think you have a fair point, but before you finish, let me interrupt you.

A Trip to Bhutan

A Trip to Bhutan:

The Kingdom of Bhutan is a small Himalayan country east of Nepal, nestled between China and India, with an estimated population of 700,000. Last month, Bhutan celebrated the wedding of monarch Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the fifth Druk Gyalpo ("Dragon King"), to 21-year-old commoner Jetsun Pema, now Druk Gyal-tsuen ("Dragon Queen") of Bhutan. The deeply traditional nation has been slow to adopt modern development; a country-wide ban on television and the Internet was only lifted in 1999, and only after the previous king abdicated power in 2006 did the nation have its first parliamentary elections. Bhutan, often rated as one of the happiest countries in the world, is the birthplace of the concept of "gross national happiness," an alternative to the more traditional measure of gross domestic product. The popular Oxford-educated king is now seeking to strengthen ties with other nations while preserving as much of Bhutan's independence and culture as possible. Collected here are recent images of people and places within the Kingdom of Bhutan. [38 photos]

The Paro Taktsang Palphug Buddhist monastery, also known as the Tiger's Nest, in the Paro district of Bhutan, viewed on October 16, 2011. The first temple was built on this cliffside location in 1692. (Reuters/Adrees Latif)

Good politics, though.

"Centrist Pundits":

Tom Friedman, November 16.

Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.

Paul Krugman, November 17:

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”

You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.

New York Times columnists don't go after one another by name, adhering to a longstanding policy of warmth and kindness. It's left up to other columnists to criticize Friedman by name, and point out that almost nothing he pines for in his occasional "o, grand bargain, where are thou" columns has been rejected by Barack Obama.

The End of Cheap Coffee: Why the Diner Staple Is About to Become a Luxury - Lifestyle - GOOD

The End of Cheap Coffee: Why the Diner Staple Is About to Become a Luxury - Lifestyle - GOOD: Watts calls the prices during that period “unsustainably low.” Farmers barely made enough money to survive, let alone invest in the long-term viability of their farms. Some growers even shifted focus: to pineapples in Costa Rica, soy in Brazil, and livestock in Colombia (as well as drug crops like coca and poppy).

With coffee supplies running short, prices escalated at a rapid clip, outpacing even gasoline’s monumental ascent. Between spring 2010 and spring 2011, coffee roughly doubled in price. On the futures exchange in New York City, the price per pound crossed a frightening milestone—the $3 mark—hitting a three-decade high on May 3, 2011.