Previously:Florida Man attempts to bring snow to Florida, resulting in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer, a sewage spill and several sunburned seals. https://t.co/JS8Jzy8ead pic.twitter.com/D25JNSO7Va— Florida Man (@FloridaMan__) December 16, 2018
Also, the lemur escaped. https://t.co/JjoZWToBG1— Florida Man (@_FloridaMan) December 11, 2018
A €230 billion money laundering scandal put Danske Bank ahead of a record 22 other contenders to win the 2019 Corrupt Actor of the Year award from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
For the past seven years, the non-profit media organization has spotlighted the individual or institution that has done the most over the previous 12 months to advance organized criminal activity and corruption in the world.
“Danske Bank is a worthy recipient of this prize. It highlights the role of the criminal services industry in enabling international corruption and crime,” said OCCRP co-founder and editor Drew Sullivan. The term “criminal services” refers to the banks, law firms, registration agents, accountants, and others who help criminals and corrupt officials hide their assets and legitimize their operations.
“In the past 20 years, they’ve globalized organized crime and autocracy and helped everyone from Mexican drug cartels to Russian President Vladimir Putin to terrorists, autocrats, and almost every global threat,” he said. Sullivan was one of nine judges who made the final selection. Nominations were submitted by journalists and the public....MUCH MORE. including a look back at prior year's winners
Finalists for the award meant to identify the world’s most influential rogues included:
In the end, the OCCRP jury settled on Danske Bank for the role its Estonian branch played in allowing billions of dollars to be laundered over the past decade. The Guardian newspaper has described the most recent scandal as involving “32 currencies, companies from Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and the Seychelles.”
- Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former OCCRP Person of the Year;
- Hungarian President Viktor Orban, who has enriched himself and his friends while cracking down on migrants and turning his country away from democracy;
- Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, implicated in the death and dismemberment of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as in jailing dissidents and shaking down and torturing rivals;
- US President Donald Trump, whose charitable foundation, family business, and presidential campaign are embroiled in investigations.
In one operation, billions of dollars flowed through Danske’s Estonian branch from Azerbaijan to offshore companies, high-ranking officials, and even European politicians who praised the nation’s regime despite its chronic human rights abuses, according to an OCCRP report.
“In Azerbaijan, Danske Bank was the conduit for bribes, parking stolen assets, and the theft of national resources for one of the most vindictive and corrupt regimes in the world,” said Paul Radu, OCCRP co-founder and judge. “The corrupt Aliyev family couldn’t have done this without the bank.”...
Once upon a time, in the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever. The web formed its own special exception to just about everything humanity had faced before. Personal relationships, private identity, and communication styles were all different “in cyberspace.” Logically, this also suggested the demise of the usual principles of business and economics.
What else could one conclude when, in the 2000s, a tiny blog could outdo an established media outlet? When startups seemed to come from nowhere, gain millions of users overnight, and make their founders and employees wealthier than old-school tycoons? The man who described the mood was author John Perry Barlow, who in the 1990s implored those interested in cyberspace to “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs, where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”
Excerpted from "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age" by Tim Wu
Tim Wu is a policy advocate, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is best known for coining the phrase "net neutrality." He worked on competition policy in the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission and served as senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General.
Everything was fast and chaotic; no position was lasting. One day, AOL was dominant and all-powerful; the next, it was the subject of business books laughing at its many failures. Netscape rose and fell like a rocket that failed to achieve orbit (though Microsoft had something to do with that). MySpace, the social media pioneer, was everywhere and then nowhere. Search engines and social media sites seemed to come and go: AltaVista, Bigfoot, and Friendster were household names one moment and gone the next.
The chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. If anything, it seemed that being big, like being old, was just a disadvantage. Being big meant being hierarchical, industrial, dinosaur-like in an age of fleet-footed mammals. Better maybe to stay small and stay young, to move fast and break things.
All this suggested that in cyberspace, there could be no such thing as a lasting monopoly. The internet would never stand for it. Business was now moving at internet speed: A three-year-old firm was middle-aged; a five-year-old firm almost certainly near death. “Barriers to entry” was a 20th-century concept. Now, competition was always just “one click away.”
Even if a firm did manage to gain temporary dominance, there was nothing to be afraid of. We were not speaking of the evil monopolists of old. The new firms were instead devoted to spreading sweetness and light, goodwill toward all men—whether access to information (Google), good books for cheap (Amazon), or the building of a global community (Facebook).
Not only did they not charge high prices, sometimes they didn’t even charge at all. Google would give you free email, free map apps, free cloud storage. Hence, businesses like Facebook or Google needed to be seen as more akin to charities. Who would sue the Red Cross for its “monopoly” on disaster relief? In these heady times, only a malcontent would dare suggest that just maybe, business and economics had not quite been reinvented forever. Or that what was taken to be a new order might, in fact, just be a phase that was destined to come to an end as firms better understood the market and its new technologies. The good times were on.
After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. They hit that five-year mark of obsolescence with no signs of impending collapse or retirement. Instead, the major firms seemed to be sticking, even growing in their dominance. Suddenly, there weren’t a dozen search engines, each with a different idea, but one search engine. There were no longer hundreds of stores that everyone went to, but one “everything store.” And to avoid Facebook was to make yourself a digital hermit. There stopped being a next new thing, or at least, a new thing that was a serious challenge to the old thing.
Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. That is best exemplified by the Facebook story. Launched in 2004, Facebook quickly dispatched its rival, MySpace, which had been a rare Los Angeles tech-success story but had become a mess of intrusive advertising, fake users, and trolls. In just a few years, Facebook achieved an early dominance over general-purpose social networking.
But by the 2010s, Facebook faced one of its most serious challengers, a startup named Instagram. Instagram combined a camera app with a social network on which it was easy and fast to share photos on mobile. It was popular with younger people, and it was not long before some of its advantages over Facebook were noticed. As business writer Nicholas Carlson said at the time, Instagram “allows people to do what they like to do on Facebook easier and faster.”
Having already gained 30 million users in just 18 months of existence, Instagram was poised to become a leading challenger to Facebook based on its strength on mobile platforms, where Facebook was weak. By the doctrine of internet time, Facebook, then eight years old, was supposed to be heading into retirement....MUCH MORE
But the disruption narrative was rudely interrupted. Instead of surrendering to the inevitable, Facebook realized it could just buy out the new. For just $1 billion, Facebook eliminated its existential problem and reassured its investors. As Time would put it, “Buying Instagram conveyed to investors that the company was serious about dominating the mobile ecosystem while also neutralizing a nascent competitor.”
When a dominant firm buys its a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover. The American analysis remains secret, but we have the United Kingdom’s report. Its analysis, such as it was, went as follows: Facebook did not have an important photo-taking app, meaning that Facebook was not competing with Instagram for consumers. Instagram did not have advertising revenue, so it did not compete with Facebook either. Hence, the report was able to reach the extraordinary conclusion that Facebook and Instagram were not competitors.
It takes many years of training to reach conclusions this absurd. A teenager could have told you that Facebook and Instagram were competitors—after all, teenagers were the ones who were switching platforms. With this level of insight, the world’s governments in the 2010s did nothing to stop the largest firms from buying everyone and anyone who might be a potential threat, in a buying spree worthy of John D. Rockefeller himself. And nothing was learned from the Instagram failure: Facebook was able to buy its next greatest challenger, WhatsApp, which offered a more privacy-protective and messaging-centered competitive threat. The $19 billion buyout—as suspicious as J. P. Morgan’s bribe of Andrew Carnegie—somehow failed to raise any alarm. At the time, many were shocked at the price. But when one is actually agreeing to split a monopoly as lucrative as generalized social media, with over $50 billion in annual revenue, the price suddenly makes sense.
In total, Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions, which seems impressive, unless you consider that Amazon undertook 91 and Google got away with 214 (a few of which were conditioned). In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce....
Sept. 2014but nothing since his book, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age" came out.
Brookings Institution: "Our Cyborg Future"
December 2017
"The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction"
March 2018
Saaay...Has Anyone Mentioned The Circular Resemblance Of Apple's Headquarters To A Panopticon? (The New Surveillance Capitalism)
Facebook Inc. is working on making a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app, focusing first on the remittances market in India, according to people familiar with the matter.See, for example 2017's "Whatever Happened to Amazon Coin? (AMZN)"
The company is developing a stablecoin -- a type of digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar -- to minimize volatility, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal plans. Facebook is far from releasing the coin, because it’s still working on the strategy, including a plan for custody assets, or regular currencies that would be held to protect the value of the stablecoin, the people said.
Facebook has long been expected to make a move in financial services, after hiring former PayPal president David Marcus to run its Messenger app in 2014. In May, Marcus became the head of the company’s blockchain initiatives, which haven’t been discussed publicly in detail. Facebook has been on a hiring spree, and now has about 40 people in its blockchain group, according to employee titles on LinkedIn.
"Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology," a company spokesman said in a statement. "This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share."
WhatsApp, the company’s encrypted mobile-messaging app, is popular in India, with more than 200 million users. The country also leads the world in remittances -- people sent $69 billion home to India in 2017, the World Bank said this year.
The past year has seen a boom in crypto projects related to stablecoins. At one point, there were more than 120 ventures related to this theme, according to Stable.Report, a website that tracks stable tokens. The concept was created to create a digital coin that would be far easier to use on daily purchases because it would be more stable than currencies like Bitcoin.
The idea has proven tough to carry out in real life, with at least one high-profile project shuttered in recent weeks. A stablecoin known as Basis recently closed after eight months. The Hoboken, New Jersey-based company said there was no apparent way around being classified as a security as opposed to a currency, which could significantly reduce the number of potential buyers. The swift collapse came after Basis drew well-known backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Kevin Warsh, a former governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Perhaps the most high-profile stablecoin to date, Tether, has also been surrounded by controversy. While Tether’s creators say each of its tokens is backed by one U.S. dollar, the company’s refusal to be audited has raised questions about whether that’s the case....MORE
Introducing Amazon Coins: A New Virtual Currency for Kindle FireThere was a small flurry of excitement, Amazon was giving them away as a sort of "loyalty reward" and then.....nothing.
October 2013But the Wall Street Journal declared the hipster's last claim to fame is passé.
How Hipsters Ruined Berlin
June 2015
Mathematical Model Explains Why All Hipsters Look the Same
Jan. 2017
Brexit: "Berlin to Send Back Thousands of British Hipsters"
July 2018
"Peak Hipster: Nordic miniature shaving axe"
We've passed the peak haven't we?
Please tell me we've passed the peak, seeing faux lumberjacks in the city is still jarring even after a half-decade....
... Here is the paper's indisputable proof: According to a 24-year-old—the hippest age—who works in sales—the hippest field—at Ralph Lauren—the hippest brand—beards are bad: "You go to a bar, and all you see are bearded dudes. I don't like it," he told the Journal....Like some great herd on the African plain, the migration has already begun:
In general this would be deserving of a ‘This is nuts. When’s the crash?‘ headline, but Bernstein don’t seem to be going quite that way:
Chinese pop idol Lu Han this week launched a venture capital firm focusing on lifestyle trends among Chinese millennials. Han is joining a cohort of celebrity investors like Angelababy (who managed to beat us to the name AB Capital) and Zhao Wei, who co-invested in Jack Ma’s Alibaba Pictures. These kinds of things don’t happen when consumer sentiment is negative and a “get me out” investor psychology has taken hold. They happen at the exact opposite end of the business cycle. So, is China imploding… or overheating?We think the questions they’re asking here are: Can the Chinese economy really be in trouble when its hipsters are thriving? Can a serious drive to get capital out of the country co-exist with demand for fancy cars and nice meals at fancy restaurants that are growing apace?
Or, what does it matter that reserves dropped below $3tn for the first time in five years — according to IMF estimates and UBS, China needs between $1.75tn (with capital controls) and $2.82tn (with no capital controls) to withstand a currency attack — if consumers are feeling perky?....MORE
....
From Bernstein’s Michael Parker by way of an answer:
We may be making a meal of the restaurant data but it is simply impossible for us to reconcile the two competing narratives about China at present....
It was only a small shop in an unfashionable part of London, but it had a most peculiar clientele. From Mondays to Fridays the place stayed locked, and its only visitors were schoolboys who came to gaze through the windows at the marvels crammed inside. But on Saturday afternoons the shop was opened by its owner—a “genial frog” of a man, as one acquaintance called him, small, pouched, wheezy, permanently smiling and with the habit of puffing out his cheeks when he talked. Settling himself behind the counter, the shopkeeper would light a cheap cigar and then wait patiently for laborers to bring him treasure. He waited at the counter many years—from roughly 1895 until his death in 1939—and in that time accumulated such a hoard of valuables that he supplied the museums of London with more than 15,000 ancient artifacts and still had plenty left to stock his premises at 7 West Hill, Wandsworth.
“It is,” the journalist H.V. Morton assured his readers in 1928,
perhaps the strangest shop in London. The shop sign over the door is a weather-worn Ka-figure from an Egyptian tomb, now split and worn by the winds of nearly forty winters. The windows are full of an astonishing jumble of objects. Every historic period rubs shoulders in them. Ancient Egyptian bowls lie next to Japanese sword guards and Elizabethan pots contain Saxon brooches, flint arrowheads or Roman coins… There are lengths of mummy cloth, blue mummy beads, a perfectly preserved Roman leather sandal found twenty feet beneath a London pavement, and a shrunken black object like a bird’s claw that is a mummified hand… [and] all the objects are genuine and priced at a few shillings each.This higgledy-piggledy collection was the property of George Fabian Lawrence, an antiquary born in the Barbican area of London in 1861—though to say that Lawrence owned it is to stretch a point, for much of his stock was acquired by shadowy means, and on more than one occasion an embarrassed museum had to surrender an item it had bought from him. For the better part of half a century, however, august institutions from the British Museum down winked at his hazy provenances and his suspect business methods, for the shop on West Hill supplied items that could not be found elsewhere.
Among the major museum pieces that Lawrence obtained and sold were the head of an ancient ocean god, which remains a cornerstone of the Roman collection at the Museum of London; a spectacular curse tablet in the British Museum; and the magnificent Cheapside Hoard: a priceless 500-piece collection of gemstones, broaches and rings excavated from a cellar shortly before the First World War. It was the chief triumph of Lawrence’s career that he could salvage the Hoard, which still comprises the greatest trove of Elizabethan and Stuart-era jewelery ever unearthed. Lawrence’s operating method was simple but ingenious. For several decades, he would haunt London’s building sites each weekday lunch hour, sidling up to the laborers who worked there, buying them drinks and letting them know that he was more than happy to purchase any curios—from ancient coins to fragments of pottery—that they and their mates uncovered in the course of their excavations.
According to Morton, who first visited the West Hill shop as a wide-eyed young man around 1912, and soon began to spend most of his Saturday afternoons there, Lawrence was so well known to London’s navvies that he was universally referred to as “Stoney Jack.” A number, Morton added, had been offered “rudimentary archaeological training” by the antiquary, so they knew what to look for.
Lawrence made many of his purchases on the spot; he kept his pockets full of half-crowns (each worth two shillings and sixpence, or around $18.50 today) with which to reward contacts, and he could often be spotted making furtive deals behind sidewalk billboards and in barrooms. His greatest finds, though, were the ones that wended their way to Wandsworth on the weekends, brought there wrapped in handkerchiefs or sacks by navvies spruced up in their Sunday best, for it was only then that laborers could spirit their larger discoveries away from the construction sites and out from under the noses of their foremen and any landlords’ representatives. They took such risks because they liked and trusted Lawrence—and also, as JoAnn Spears explains it, because he “understood networking long before it became a buzzword, and leveraged connections like a latter-day Fagin.”
Two more touches of genius ensured that Stoney Jack remained the navvies’ favorite. The first was that he was renowned for his honesty. If ever a find sold for more than he had estimated it was worth, he would track down the discoverer and make certain he received a share of the profits....
"Man sues Google because he can't read a chart" [The Verge]...MORE
"Charlie Daniels issues grim warning to Taco Bell about the Illuminati" [The Wrap]
"A plane carrying dozens of plumbers was forced to turn back because of toilet problems" [The Washington Post]
"Loaded grenade launcher left at Florida Goodwill store" [NBC Chicago]
"Blind bisexual goose named Thomas who spent 6 years in a love triangle with 2 swans and helped raise 68 babies dies at the ripe old age of 40" [The Daily Mail]
"The White House chief calligrapher has a higher clearance than Jared Kushner" [CNN]
"Man with red sauce on face accused of stealing meatballs" [The Oregonian]
"Rafael 'Ted' Cruz accuses his Democratic opponent of changing his name to appeal to voters" [The Washington Post]
"Shia LaBeouf says Kanye raided his closet: 'He took all my f**king clothes'" [Twitter Moments]
"Florida men — 1 disguised in bull costume — allegedly tried to burn down ex-boyfriend's home with spaghetti sauce" [KTLA 5]
"Woman sues restaurant for $50K over lasagna that caused 'mental anguish'" [The Daily Meal]
"'Very angry badger' causes part of Scottish castle to be closed" [The Guardian]
China has opened the door to imports of rice from the United States for the first time ever in what analysts took to signal a warming of relations between the world’s two biggest economies after a frosty year marked by tensions and tit-for-tat tariffs....MORE
The green light from Chinese customs, indicated in a statement posted on the customs authority’s website on Friday, comes in the run-up to talks between the countries in January after U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a moratorium on higher tariffs that would affect trade worth hundred of billions of dollars.
It was not immediately clear how much rice China, which sources rice imports from within Asia, might seek to buy from the United States. But the move, which comes after years of talks on the matter, follows pledges from China’s commerce ministry of further U.S. trade openings earlier this week.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see importers trying to move rice into China from California but I don’t know if it will be in breathtaking quantities right away,” said Stuart Hoetger, an analyst and physical rice trader based in California....
Trying to figure out what caused the biggest single-day stock turnaround since 2010? At least one analyst attributes it to buying by pension funds that dove into equities after December’s carnage.
The S&P 500 Index posted the biggest upward reversal in eight years during Thursday’s session, rallying back from a 2.8 percent deficit. The about-face could reflect end-of-quarter adjustments by pension funds that have $60 billion of shares to buy this month, among the most ever, according to Wells Fargo’s Pravit Chintawongvanich.Institutional investors with large holdings in stocks and bonds use the end-of-quarter period to balance out holdings, adding to losers and cutting on winners. This time, they went big on U.S. large and small caps, adding $35 billion and $21 billion to indexes that are set to post the worst month since 2009. Money got pulled from fixed income that’s outperformed stocks, he said.
“While the $60 billion rebalance is historically large, its effect is probably exacerbated by the low market liquidity conditions,” Chintawongvanich said in a note to clients. “A given dollar to buy or sell is moving the market more than it normally would.”Nothing guarantees the rally will be repeated, Chintawongvanich said, as such phenomena are quickly exploited by other traders. Now that the end-of-day rebalancing is well known, traders may buy ahead of pension funds only to sell high during the end-of-day rally. Those waiting for the right moment to dump a lot of stock may could do so in the last hour of the session....MORE
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and functionally they resemble classifiers in East Asian and sign languages....
Natural gas prices continued to retreat from recent highs, with January tumbling 20 cents on average during the Dec. 19-26 period as mild weather was expected to continue through the first week of the new year.
The sharpest declines occurred in the Northeast, where truly intimidating cold was expected to remain at bay for most of the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the end of several pipeline events in and around the Permian Basin lifted forward prices there by the double-digits, according to NGI’s Forward Look.
Light holiday demand and mild weather blanketing much of the country leading up to the Christmas holiday put market bears in control of forward markets for the better part of the Dec. 19-26 period, although some hints of cold returning in early January were enough to revive markets Friday and again on Wednesday.
Still, some market observers saw Wednesday’s rally as more reflective of the typical volatility that accompanies the expiration of Nymex futures contracts. The January contract is set to expire Thursday, and sure enough, prices were up about a nickel at the start of trading but then fell to a roughly 10-cent discount to Wednesday’s settle later in the morning. The prompt month went on to expire Thursday at $3.642, up 9.9 cents on the day. February rose 8.8 cents to $3.546.
On the weather front, the overnight Wednesday European weather model guidance showed slightly more cold risks at the end of the run but still indicated a generally mild pattern winning out before then as gas-weighted degree days (GWDD) easily run below seasonal averages, according to Bespoke Weather Services.
Overnight Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) model guidance was decently warmer, sending gas prices initially lower before the more bullish ending on the European guidance, which indicated more of a negative Eastern Pacific Oscillation ridge upstream that could lock cold in the East.
“This is a trend we do expect models to gradually move towards into next week, but we also note that GEFS guidance has been breaking this ridge down occasionally and limiting eastern cold,” Bespoke chief meteorologist Jacob Meisel said.
Although Bespoke sees risk skewed colder beyond Jan. 10, weather models “are still noisy and struggling” to show much cooler weather with the gradual Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) progression.
The tropical MJO remained on track for phases 7 and 8 during the 11- to 15-day period, according to Radiant Solutions. Historically, these phases have resulted in a colder outcome across the Eastern half of the United States this time of year.
“However, models are reluctant to weaken tropical convection west of the International Dateline or firmly extend that convection eastward. As a result, this lowers confidence in the forcings role in changing the pattern,” the forecaster said.
The midday data on Thursday continued to show a strong cold shot sweeping across the country Jan. 2-4 but with a milder trending break Jan. 5-7. The data still showed at least some cooler air arriving across the East Jan. 8-10, but it was not as cold as the data showed a couple days ago, according to NatGasWeather.
“Overall, weather patterns don't look quite cold enough the next couple weeks besides the Jan. 2-4 system,” the firm said.
Meanwhile, the recent and coming weather patterns are expected to lead to storage withdrawals that are lighter than five-year averages for the next two Energy Information Administration weekly storage reports, according to NatGasWeather. The expected pulls would improve deficits from 720 Bcf to near 620 Bcf, then stall or improve a little further in the weeks after, the firm said.
“Deficits will still be quite hefty, but for the markets to regain the bullish fire, the markets clearly want sustained cold, which the overnight weather data failed to provide due to notable breaks between cold shots,” the firm said.Watching the MJO, qu'est-ce que c'est?
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is scheduled to release its weekly storage report at 10:30 a.m. ET on Friday, a day later than usual due to the Christmas holiday....MUCH MORE
Slowly inching his segmented exoskeleton across the sea floor, a local marine arthropod, class Trilobita, reported that Earth's natural evolution was "progressing quite nicely."Neanderthal Man Flocking To Caves
"Things are looking mighty fine," announced the prehistoric invertebrate, taking measure of his surroundings through a series of small, hexagonal eyelets located at the tip of his thorax. "Sulfurous gas seems to be bubbling up to the surface pretty good, and several single-cell organisms appear to be mutating at a rather steady pace. Also, just today, I developed the ability to roll into a small protective shell in order to avoid predators."
Added the trilobite, "Yup, this evolution thing is going great."
According to the 4-inch-wide arthropod, the entire planet—once nothing more than a large, tedious mass of molten rock—has really taken shape recently....
All over Western Europe and Central Asia, Neanderthal man is inhabiting caves in record numbers. What do you think?
Early Humans Finally Drunk Enough To Invent Dancing
Prominent ethnochoreologists now believe that roughly 20,000 years ago, early humans finally consumed an amount of fermented fruits and vegetables staggering enough to develop the impulsive series of rhythmic movements known today as dancing. "While human beings had experimented with rudimentary forms of shimmying and gyration as early as the Neanderthal period...Deaths Of 550,000 Confirm Which Mushrooms Are Okay To Eat
Following the lethal poisoning of more than a half million people over the course of several millennia, cultures across the globe finally learned how to identify which mushrooms could be safely consumed.Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
"Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed themselves to determine which varieties of wild mushroom are delicious and which will paralyze and kill you on the spot," historian Marcus Whiting told reporters....
Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.Four Or Five Guys Pretty Much Carry Whole Renaissance
According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.
"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."...
Following 1,000 years of cultural decline and societal collapse known as the Dark Ages, the 15th century brought forth the Renaissance, an unprecedented resurgence in learning and the arts, which four or five guys pretty much just strapped onto their backs and carried the whole way.Some Of Man's Most Important Inventions
"Our research indicates that da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Galileo basically hoisted the entire intellectual transformation of mankind onto their shoulders while everyone else just sat around being superstitious nimrods," said Sue Viero of the Correr Museum of Art in Venice, Italy. "Here's da Vinci busting his ass to paint such masterpieces as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, while some loser like Albrecht Dürer is doing these dinky little woodcuts that are basically worthless."...
Inclined Plane: A simple machine consisting of a flat surface whose topmost point is higher than its bottommost point, this is yet another example of mankind's propensity for "inventing" things they just found lying around.
Printing Press: The mass production of printed matter was an instant hit with readers everywhere, who at the time numbered nearly 1,000 and were spread out over some 57.4 million square miles.Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization
Easy Cheese: A pioneering aerosol-powered food- delivery system that made it possible for people
to discharge high-velocity streams of cheese directly into their mouths, usually from a prone or inverted position [the correct spelling is 'cheez' -ed]....
Researchers conducting the Friendster excavation say the site has been deserted since the year 2005 A.D....videoThe Ones We Lost
- Cro-Magnon Grok, 20, drowned in a river in 24,900 B.C. after a failed attempt to eat his own reflection.
Ramses II
...MORE
Tesla Inc.’s addition of Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison to its board is a “home run appointment” for the company that will boost the stock on Friday, according to one analyst.
Walgreens Boots Alliance’s WBA, -0.88% Global Chief Human Resources Officer Kathleen Wilson-Thompson will be the “second impressive” independent director, said Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, a longtime Tesla bull.
Tesla TSLA, +1.75% announced the addition of the two new directors earlier Friday, as it moved to comply with one of the conditions of the settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission struck by Chief Executive Elon Musk over his going-private tweet earlier this year.
Musk irked the regulator with a tweet that implied he had secured funding for a deal when he had not. The executive agreed that he and his company would each pay a $20 million fine, that he would resign as chairman of the board and that the company would add two new independent directors to beef up corporate governance.
“Given Ellison’s stature in tech circles, strong reputation in the Valley and on the Street, and vast accomplishments at Oracle ORCL, -0.11% among other achievements over the past 40 years, the addition of Mr. Ellison on the board, in our opinion, is another key step forward for Tesla and Musk as the company starts to build an independent and well regarded board that can help the company navigate through transformational opportunities in the electric vehicle market over the coming years with competition and production complexity a key factor that needs to be handled without a major speed bump,” Ives wrote in a note....MORE
Highlights
- Nuclear submarines could be effective refuges from several types of global catastrophes.•
- Existing military submarines could be upgraded for this function with relatively low cost.•
- Contemporary submarines could provide several months of surface independence.•
- A specially designed fleet of nuclear submarines could potentially survive years or even decades under water.
Dear Word Detective: From where does the phrase “pish posh” come? — Michelle.I've decided I should use it more often.
Hey, that’s a good question. As an aficionado of dismissive phrases (“High voltage? Fiddlesticks!”), I’m always up for an investigation of the wonderful world of casting contemptuous scorn on the solemn pronouncements of other people....MORE
Around ten years ago a sharp young analyst gave me his five-minute kidneys and dialysis pitch. It made quite an impression on me, I remember it to this day. Unfortunately for him and his firm we were just coming off the Dotbomb crash and everything looked really cheap so I filed the idea under "stuff I'll get to".And last year:
Davita is up seven-fold since that day, $103.44 at the close. Fresenius, the largest in the industry is up ten-bagger in ten years, no lost decade there..
There's an opportunity in here, somewhere. The direct costs of healthcare for diabetics has to be five grand a year per. That gives us a half-trillion dollar market to address. Plus, who really wants a countryside full of blind amputees on dialysis?Here's the latest:from the Milken Institute, Oct 30, 2018:
LOS ANGELES, Tuesday, October 30, 2018—The impact of obesity and overweight on the U.S. economy has eclipsed $1.7 trillion, an amount equivalent to 9.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to a new Milken Institute report on the role excess weight plays in the prevalence and cost of chronic diseases.There is opportunity everywhere, if you just look.
The estimate includes $480.7 billion in direct health-care costs and $1.24 trillion in lost productivity, as documented in America’s Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Impact of Excess Weight. The study draws on research that shows how overweight and obesity elevate the risk of diseases such as breast cancer, heart disease, and osteoarthritis, and estimates the cost of medical treatment and lost productivity for each disease.
For example, the treatment cost for all type 2 diabetes cases – one of the most prevalent chronic diseases connected to excess weight – was $121 billion and indirect costs were $215 billion. On an individual basis, that comes to $7,109 in treatment costs per patient and $12,633 in productivity costs.
America’s Obesity Crisis assesses the role excess weight plays in the prevalence of 23 chronic diseases and the economic consequences that result. To mention a few, obesity and overweight are linked to:
The findings suggest that more effective weight-control strategies could reduce both the health and economic burdens of chronic diseases, according to co-author Hugh Waters, director of health economics research at the Milken Institute.
- 75 percent of osteoarthritis cases
- 64 percent of Type 2 diabetes cases
- 73 percent of kidney disease cases
“Despite the billions of dollars spent each year on public health programs and consumer weight-loss products, the situation isn’t improving,” Waters said. “A new approach is needed.”
The impact of obesity on chronic disease is not limited to the stress that added weight places on joints and the cardiovascular system. For example, research indicates that hormones secreted by fat cells may trigger inflammation and increase insulin resistance. These reactions can, in turn, contribute to greater risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers....MORE
MOSCOW, December 23. /TASS/. The implementation of the Nord Stream-2 project proceeds as scheduled, with about 370 kilometers of the pipeline have already been laid, Nord Stream 2 AG, the pipeline construction’s operator, said on Sunday.While LNG World News had:
"By now, about 370 kilometers have already been laid," the company said in a press release.
The Pioneering Spirit pipe-lay vessel has joined the Nord Stream-2 flotilla in Finland’s exclusive economic zone. It will supersede the Solitaire vessel which has been working in Finland since September. Now, the Solitaire will head to the southern part if Sweden’s exclusive economic zone to lay a 510-kilometer section of the pipeline.
Both ships, the Pioneering Spirit, measuring 382 by 124 meters, with a multinational crew of 570, and the Solitaire, 300 by 41 meters, with a crew of 420, are operated by Allseas co.
According to earlier reports, Nord Stream-2 has obtained all the necessary permissions from four out of five countries. Works are conducted in Sweden, Finland, Germany and Russia. Construction proceeds in Russia’s and Germany’s coastal sections. The Audacia pipe lay vessels finished works in Germany’s waters yesterday....MORE
Polish LNG terminal operator, Polskie LNG, started the tender procedure for the expansion of the President Lech Kaczyński facility in Świnoujście.So, if Norway can get their new field supplying Britain and/or Europe as the Americans work out the logistics to supply Ireland, Wales and the west of England on a greater than one-off basis, everyone should be snug and warm.
The company is seeking to select a contractor for three key projects within the first Polish LNG import facility, which includes construction of the third LNG storage tank, delivery of additional process installations increasing the regasification capacity to 7.5 billion cubic meters per year, and the LNG transshipment installation together with a railway siding.
The tender process includes the bidders’ prequalification stage, negotiations with short-listed bidders and signing the contract with the selected contractor by the end of 2019, the operator said in a statement.
Reaching the target capacity of 7.5 bcm/year is planned for 2021, while the other two projects are scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2023....MORE
These ships are basically two oil tankers strapped together...An earlier post, May 2017, had Pioneering Spirit showing off with a world-record lift:
The giant offshore installation and commissioning vessel Pioneering Spirit has set the new world lifting record with the successful removal of Shell’s 24,000 tonne Brent Delta platform in the North Sea in a single lift.
Pioneering Spirit’s owner Allseas confirmed the safe and successful completion of the topsides removal operation on April 28.
Located in the Brent field approximately 115 miles off the northeast coast of Shetland, the Brent Delta topsides sat on a three-legged, gravity-based structure in 140 meters of water.
The topsides is now sea-fastened on board Pioneering Spirit for transport to the Able UK decommissioning yard in Teesside, northeast England for recycling and disposal.
The Pioneering Spirit entered service in 2016 and, by design, has set a number of records. At 382 meters long and 124 meters wide, the purpose-built vessel is the largest offshore construction ship ever built. The bow features a large slot and lifting beams that allow the vessel to straddle a platform and remove entire topsides weighing up to 48,000 tonnes in a single lift. This single lift method is considered a major departure from traditional decommissioning, where topsides are usually taken apart piece by piece....MORE
...The Pioneering Spirit, which has been rumored to cost about $3 billion, was built in South Korea by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering and arrived in Rotterdam for final outfitting in January 2015. The vessel had been under construction since at least 2010, but its concept dates back nearly three decades and is based on two large tankers placed side-by-side. Allseas founder and CEO, Edward Hereema, who first came up with idea, has called the vessel one of the biggest bets of his career....
Dow Jones futures fell modestly late Thursday, along with S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures. The Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite rebounded from deep intraday losses to close with modest to solid gains Thursday. That's after Wednesday's huge stock market rally. We're a long way from a confirmed uptrend, but Thursday's action — after tumbling intraday — is definitely positive. Also, leading stocks led the rebound, with PayPal (PYPL), ServiceNow (NOW), Workday (WDAY), CyberArk Software (CYBR) and Atlassian (TEAM) making notable moves. It's time to pay close attention to the stock market and get serious about watch lists.
Dow Jones Futures Today
Dow Jones futures fell 0.4% vs. fair value. S&P 500 futures lost 0.35%. Nasdaq 100 futures slid 0.3%. Remember that overnight action in Dow futures and elsewhere doesn't necessarily translate into actual trading in the next regular session. Dow Jones futures overnight Thursday certainly didn't foreshadow Wednesday's stock market rally or Thursday's upside reversal.
Stock Market Rally
At Thursday's stock market lows, the Dow Jones, S&P 500 index and Nasdaq composite gave up more than half of their Wednesday rally. That would have been discouraging. The afternoon rally was very positive. For the second straight session, the stock market rallied into the close with gains. That's a reversal of the recent bear market action of decent opens and weak closes.
The Dow Jones climbed 1.1%, the S&P 500 index 0.7%, and the Nasdaq composite 0.4%. The Nasdaq lagged as Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) fell 0.6%, while Microsoft (MSFT), Facebook (FB), Netflix (NFLX) and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) had fractional gains.
Thursday's action arguably was more bullish than Wednesday's. With stocks crashing to new lows on Christmas Eve, the market was due for a bounce. The real question is whether a sustained rally will take hold.
What Investors Should Do Now
One day is not a confirmed uptrend. Neither is two days. But a classic follow-through day could come as soon as Dec. 31, the fourth day of a stock market rally attempt. Pay close attention to the major averages and leading stocks. Read the Stock Market Today columns as well as The Big Picture every market day.
You've spent enough time with your family during the holiday season. The Santa Claus rally is coming to town, and you need to work on your own naughty-or-nice list. IBD's Stock Lists, including the IBD 50, are a great place to find top stocks that should be on your watch list. Check out Leaderboard, IBD's premium service that offers detailed annotated charts of a select handful of leading stocks at or near buy points.
PayPal stock, Atlassian stock, ServiceNow stock and CyberArk stock are all members of the IBD 50 list.
PayPal Stock
On Thursday, PayPal stock rose 1.8% to 84.31, reclaiming its 50-day and 200-day averages. The relative strength line, which tracks a stock's performance vs. the S&P 500 index, is at a new high. PayPal hit a recent low on Oct. 11, then made a couple of higher lows as the stock market correction turned into a bear market. PayPal is working on a 93.80 buy point, though the 89 level has acted as resistance.
Atlassian Stock
Atlassian stock has held above its 50-day line throughout December. On Thursday, shares rose 2.6% to 87.57, approaching a cup-with-handle buy point of 89.92. The RS line is at a new high even though Atlassian stock is well off of its 98.21 peak....
Dow futures plunged over 760 points after tagging yesterday's highs overnight, but those darn algos ripped the market higher in the last hour erasing the entire drop... with the biggest buy program since February...
And the 4th biggest buy program of all time...
In words...
And pictures... Dow futs exploded over 900 points higher, taking out yesterday's highs and ending like yesterday at the highs of the day...
On the day, Small Caps ended red but The Dow led the rest green......MORE
We are fans.Then in March 2017 we noted:
Before we go any further, our NVIDIA boilerplate: we make very few calls on individual names on the blog but this one is special.
They are positioned to be the brains in autonomous vehicles, they will drive virtual reality should it ever catch on, the current businesses include gaming graphics, deep learning/artificial intelligence, and supercharging the world's fastest supercomputers including what will be the world's fastest at Oak Ridge next year.
Not just another pretty face.
Or food delivery app.
After hours the stock is changing hands at $38.31 up 7.70% which, if it holds through tomorrow's regular session, beats the old highs from 2007....
...We focus on the stock, not the company. The company should be fine for at least the next couple years until the artificial intelligence biz catches up to NVIDIA and either takes a different approach or a really different approach and goes quantum computer....Well, we're approaching that two-year mark and the competition is coming on and the stock knew it back in September as it made the first peak of the double top that culminated in that second high at $292.76:
Shares of Nvidia slipped Thursday morning after RBC Capital lowered its price target on the graphics chip maker's stock to $200 per share from $230.
Shares of Nvidia Corp. (NVDA - Get Report) slipped 3.44% to $128.52 Thursday morning after RBC Capital lowered its price target on the graphics chip maker's stock to $200 per share from $230.
Analyst Mitch Steves said in a note to investors that average selling prices have been coming down in secondary markets. RBC still rates the stock "outperform."
Steves wrote that ASPs have decreased over the past month, which he thinks is due to additional secondary market sales. Focusing on Nvidia's GTX gaming graphics processing unit, Steves said "as this is a gaming chip, Nvidia is unlikely able to discern if sales are for pure gaming purposes or crypto currency mining."
"When we look at the price trends, we notice a slight downward move that aligns with our belief that sales could be a bit more muted in the month of December," Steves said. "While this is likely a near-term issue and doesn't impact the long-term story, we think it is prudent to remain conservative for next quarter."
Steves said Nvidia recently ramped up its efforts within the automotive segment.
"Beyond the addition of sensors and connected devices," Steves said, "we note that display technology should also increase in the future, which creates the need for more computing power...MOREWhat the analyst doesn't mention is the data center business which, if our crystal ball is showing the right picture, will really start ramping about a year from now.
