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In war, everything not censored is a lie.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

North Korea's Kim Jong Un at the New Year

Via DPRK News Service:
New year resolutions for Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un include increased production of buckwheat and coal, ideological harmony of Korean people, and bringing about thermonuclear armageddon for United States.
— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) December 29, 2017
Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un predicts bitterness, frustration, and continued impotence in United States football match between University of Southern California and Ohio State.

No winner prePublished (28887)dicted.
— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) December 29, 2017
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea assurance of Russian Federation borders staves off Polish invasion in 2017.
— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) December 27, 2017
It was a close-run thing but thanks be to Kim.

DPRK News Service
Posted by climateer at 11:24 AM
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On This Date in 1935 the Game "Monopoly" Was Patented (economist Henry George does a cameo)

"I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly"
-comedian  Steven Wright

We've looked at Henry George a few times, links after the jump.
First up, from BT.com:

December 31, 1935: Charles Darrow patents the board game Monopoly 
A salesman granted himself a licence to print money when he patented the World's most popular board game on this day in 1935. 
The most successful board game of all time, Monopoly - which would go on to be printed in more than 40 languages and licensed in well over 100 countries – was patented on this day in 1935 by a salesman from Philadelphia named Charles B. Darrow.

After convincing the Parker Brothers company to publish the game, its ongoing success would make Darrow the first ever millionaire game designer. It would later be established, however, that Monopoly was simply a development of other, previously existing board games which dated back to the turn of the century.
Charles B. Darrow with his money-spinning invention.
In 1903, an anti-monopolist named Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Magie had created what she called The Landlord’s Game, intended to show the negative aspects of allowing too much land to be held by private monopolies. She took out her own patent a year later....MORE
BT knows a thing or two about monopolies, past and present.

And From Henry George.org:

How Henry George's Principles Were Corrupted Into the Game Called Monopoly
History is filled with surprising stories of how people and ideas are connected. One such story is that of the origins of the most popular board game in modern history. It's an American classic: each new generation of Monopoly players learns to love (harmlessly) indulging its cutthroat, ruthless, greedy impulses. Players begin the game as equals. Luck — and a bit of strategy — eventually enables one player to dominate all others. That player ends up amassing a huge fortune in cash and real estate. Most Monopoly players don't know (or care) that this game was originally the product of a passion for social and economic justice. In the late 1800s, a young woman named Elizabeth Magie was introduced to the writings of Henry George by her father. She eventually became one of many people who took on the task of trying to teach others what she had learned from studying Progress and Poverty and George's other works.
Collaborating with friends in her Brentwood, Maryland community, Elizabeth Magie created The Landlord's Game. She applied for a patent, which was granted on January 5th, 1904 (No. 748,626). She explained that the game was to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences."

While still a young, single woman, Elizabeth -- or "Lizzie" as she came to be called -- became a regular visitor to the Single Tax enclave of Arden, Delaware. This was around 1903. Whether on her own or in conjunction with other Single Taxers in Arden, Lizzie continued to work on the design of The Landlord's Game as a way to explain how Henry George's system of political economy would work in real life.

Arden landmarks: Stephen's Theater and the Craft Shop.
For a close-up look at the game board used in Arden, Click here.

The First Commercial Versions of The Landlord's Game

In 1906, Elizabeth moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she met, and in 1910 married, Albert Phillips. I have not been able to find any reference to Albert as a follower of Henry George, but evidently he was sympathetic to his wife's efforts. At some point in 1906 Elizabeth and a number of other followers of Henry George established the Economic Game Company of New York, which published The Landlord's Game.
Sometime soon thereafter Elizabeth and Albert moved to Clarendon, Virginia, in the Washington D.C area and eventually patented a new edition of The Landlord's Game in 1924 (No. 1,509,312) under her married name of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. This new edition, published by the Washington, D.C. firm, Adgame Company, appeared in 1932 and included named streets and other changes in the appearance of the board. More importantly, the new edition included a second, alternative, set of rules and a second name for the game, Prosperity.


Connections with Academe

Around 1900, Scott Nearing was introduced to The Landlord's Game by either Lizzie Magie or other residents of Arden. He was at the time a full-time resident of Arden. Nearing went on to become a member of the economics department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1906, where he used The Landlord's Game in his teaching. His support of Henry George's proposals to raise pubic revenue exclusively from those who owned land, and his opposition to child labor, caused him to be dismissed from the university in 1915.
Burton H. Wolfe, in "The Monopolization of Monopoly" (San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1976), says that "Nearing played The Landlord's Game with his brother, Guy Nearing, who lived in the Henry George single tax community of Arden, Delaware." Then:
As the students and single taxers played the game, they began a process ... of altering the rules. The main change was that instead of merely paying rent when landing on a property block, the players could hold an auction to buy it.       They also made their own game boards so that they could replace the properties designated by Lizzie Maggie with properties in their own cities and states; this made playing more realistic. As they drew or painted their own boards, usually on linen or oil cloth, they change the title "Landlord's Game" to "Auction Monopoly" and then just "Monopoly".
Burton Wolfe also tells us that a young Rexford E. Tugwell was one of the players. One of Tugwell's own students, Priscilla Robertson -- long-time editor of The Humanist -- provided the following details on the early history of the game: "In those days those who wanted copies of the board for Monopoly took a piece of linen cloth and copied it in crayon. It was considered a point of honor not to sell it to a commercial manufacturer, since it had been worked out by a group of single taxers who were anxious to defeat the capitalist system." (I am obliged to note here the considerable misrepresentation of the objectives pursued by Single Taxers who shared Henry George's principles. Defeating monopoly in all its forms (but, particularly, monopoly of nature), not capitalism, was - and is - the cause embraced then and today.)

Other writers note the game was played by students at Princeton University and Haverford College. Changes were made to the board design, gathering the properties into groups, allowing buildings to be added to the locations and increasing the amount of rent charged based on the number of like properties owned.

By the late 1920s, the version of the game being played by college students and others had evolved quite a bit from Elizabeth's design. The game was now generally referred to as "Monopoly." A young student at Williams College (Reading, Pennsylvania) produced a commercial version under the name Finance, but the game was essentially Monopoly. Then, a woman named Ruth Hoskins who learned the game in Indianapolis moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey and supposedly created the version that included the Atlantic City street names.

Then the plot thickens. The game was introduced by Eugene (Colonel) and Ruth Raiford, friends of Ruth Hoskins, to Charles Todd, who lived in Germantown, Pennsylvania; and, Charles Todd then introduced the game to Charles and Esther Darrow. Eugene Raiford, Charles Todd and Esther Jones Darrow all attended the Quaker Westtown School from 1911 to 1914 or 1915. The subsequent connection with Atlantic City occurred because of the close association of the Westtown School with the Atlantic City Friends' School. As Todd later recalled: "The first people we taught it to after learning it ... was Darrow and his wife Esther. ...It was entirely new to them.... Darrow asked me if I would write up the rules and regulations and I wrote them up ... and gave them to Darrow."...
...MUCH MORE

And Henry George?
...In a January 1936 interview in The Washington Star, Elizabeth was asked "how she felt about getting only $500 for her patent and no royalties ever. She replied that it was all right with her "if she never made a dime so long as the Henry George single tax idea was spread to the people of the country."...
Previously: 
Sunday, February 21, 2016 
Forgetting History: "Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before"
Back in 2012 there occurred one of those eruptions of comment* that seem to happen for no discernible reason other than some combination of network effects and echo chambers.

The eruptions peak and die away as the crowd moves on leaving almost imperceptible ripples where there had been much thunder and fury.

This is a reflection on one of them, Henry George and the land tax, updated for current values and valuations.

From TechCrunch, Jan. 29, 2016:
“Capitalists both in the Old World and the States, even now, have but little faith in California. They regard this country and everything relating to it as one grand bubble, liable to burst at any moment…. This is how it should be. The wealth of California is thereby passing into the hands of young, active, enterprising men, who in an older country and with these same old capitalists as competitors might have worked to the end of their days, and realized but a mere pittance.” — San Francisco Daily Journal of Commerce, 1850
“It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
...MUCH MORE

*Even by the time we posted "The Economist Calls for More Taxes on Land" in July 2013 the commentariat was moving on:
They are a bit late getting to the party, this discussion has been pursued in relation to the means of production for years and as far as our little corner of the www goes, we made mention of the FT Alphaville robo-rentier commentary back in 2012's "The Road to Serfdom: Where the Robots Are Taking Us":
Not Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". Rather this is a journey back to medieval society where all income is subject to taxation by the Church or the manor or both. At least in the current case it is freehold rent which is paid in cash rather than the labor rent that villeins and serfs owed their liege.

Let me explain....
In September 2013's "Ben Franklin on Labor Economics (or how to create an underclass)" I intro'd with:
The easiest way to create a dependent class is to price them out of the real estate markets.
In countries fully settled…those who cannot get land must labor for others that have it; when laborers are plenty, their wages will be low; by low wages a family is supported with difficulty; this difficulty deters many from marriage, who therefore long continue servants and single....
In the United States The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the cost of land purchased from the government at $1.00 per acre in sections of 640 acres.

This price was raised to $2.00/acre in 1800 but purchase was paid for in four equal annual payments.
In 1820 the price of Federal lands was reduced to $1.25 per acre with payment in cash.
An alternate conveyance in the 1862 Homestead Act maintained the $1.25 price.

Compare  the wages various craftsmen could command:

In 1785 a journeyman carpenter in New York City was paid  $1.12 ½ per day.  
Here are the average hourly wage for various years, note the post Civil War inflation in the 1870 numbers and the decreases of the latter 1800's deflation:...
By January 2014 it was just a few stragglers:
"Land Value Tax Won't Fix San Francisco" 
The first thing I thought of when I saw Mr. Smith's post was "Zoning" (it wasn't some flash of brilliance on my part, we've been down this road before)
Yglesias at Moneybox:...
 Finally, our final post, in May, 2014:
Last Word on Piketty
The headline is probably a lie.
Readers who have been with us for a while know I'll see something, somewhere, sometime in the future and want to save it to the blog. I'll do so and lose any pretense to statement/action integration. Which word probably has the same Latin root as integrity.
Oh well.

Hell, I can already foresee a future post that will require making a lie of the headline:

If we are going the route of a Piketty wealth tax we need to look at doing one of these:



A Domesday Book!... 
Posted by climateer at 10:24 AM
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"The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction"

There is no right to attention.
That's what makes stories such as this one at The Hill last month giggle-worthy:

"Eminem angry Trump ‘not paying attention to me’"

https://static.spin.com/files/2017/11/Eminem_Group-Shot-1-1510949788-640x422.jpg

In the words of Larry the Cable Guy: "I don't care who you are, that's funny right there".

Fortunately, most children usually have it figured out by age three-or-so and come up with other strategies.
See also the closely related: "Don't you know who I am?"

From Philosophical Disquisitions, May 19, 2017:
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about technology.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9p_imTmNBTczSh2uHDWOdGvAmW_8h25001oJ7iSsF6-ODER9M_WrMEAs0slvl8AaOhWK7brNfxfBGdox5ivdjSKPQyNkUi8Zwk67UqVjpOTolZcQjNGc8CxPm8UiyQJf2YemNr6yXNNc/s1600/bullhorn-2026013_960_720.png
That’s how Matthew Crawford starts his 2015 book The World Beyond Your Head, his inquiry into the self in an age of distraction. He was prompted to write the book by a profound sense of unease over how the ‘attentional commons’ was being hijacked by advertising and digital media. One day, he was paying for groceries using a credit card. He swiped the card on the machine and waited for a prompt to enter his details to appear on the screen. He was surprised to find that he was shown advertisements while he waited for the prompt. Somebody had decided that this moment — the moment between swiping your card and inputting your details — was a moment when they had a captive audience and that they could capitalise on it. Crawford noticed that these intrusions into our attentional commons were everywhere. We live, after all, in an attentional economy, where grabbing and holding someone’s attention is highly prized.

There is something disturbing about this trend. What we pay attention to, in large part, determines the quality of our lives. If our attention is monopolised by things that make us unhappy, anxious, sad, self-conscious, petty, jealous (and so on), our lives may end up worse than they might otherwise be. I am sure we have all shared the sense that the social media platforms, video and news websites, and advertisements that currently vie for our attention can have a tendency to do these very things. I find I have become obsessed with the number of retweets I receive. I constantly check my Facebook feed to see if I have any new notifications. I’m always tempted to watch one last one last funny cat video. My attention is thus swallowed whole by shallow and frivolous things. I am distracted away from experiences and activities that are ultimately more satisfying.

Given this state of affairs, perhaps it is time that we recognised a right to attentional protection? In other words, a right to do with our attention as we please, and a corresponding duty to protect our attentional ecosphere from intrusions that are captivating, but ultimately shallow and unfulfilling. I want to consider the argument in favour of recognising that right in this post. I do so by looking at the arguments that can be made in favour of three propositions:
Proposition 1: Attention is valuable and hence something worthy of protection.
Proposition 2: Attention is increasingly under threat, i.e. there is greater need/cause for protecting attention nowadays.
Proposition 3: We should (consequently) recognise a right to attentional protection (doing so might be politically and practically useful)
My analysis of these propositions is my own, but is heavily influenced by the work of others. Jasper L. Tran’s article ‘The Right to Attention’ is probably the main source and provides perhaps the best introduction to the topic of attentional rights. He casts a wide net, discussing the importance of attention across a number of domains. But there is something of an emerging zeitgeist when it comes to the protection of attention. Tristan Harris, Tim Wu, Matthew Crawford and Adam Alter are just some of the people who have recently written about or advocated for the importance of attention in the modern era.

1. Attention is Valuable
It would probably help if we started with a definition of attention. Here’s a possible one:
Attention = focused conscious awareness.
We all live in a stream of consciousness (occasionally interrupted by sleep, concussion, and coma). This stream of consciousness has different qualitative elements. Some things we are never consciously aware of — they are unseen and unknown; some things we are only dimly aware of — they hover in the background, ready to be brought into the light; some things we are acutely aware of — they are in the spotlight. The spotlight is our attention. As I sit writing this, I am dimly aware of some birds singing in the background. If I force myself, I can pay attention to their songs, but I’m not really paying attention to them. The screen of my laptop is where my attention lies. That’s where my thoughts are being translated into words. It’s where the spotlight shines.

This definition of attention is relatively uncontroversial. Tran, in his article on the right to attention, argues that there is, in fact, little disagreement about the definition of attention across different disciplines. He notes, for example, that psychologists define it as ‘the concentration of awareness’, and economists define it as ‘focused mental engagement’. There is little to choose between these definitions.

So granting that the definition is on the right track, does it help us to identify the value of attention? Perhaps. Think for a moment about the things that make life worth living — the experiences, capacities, resources (etc.) that make for a flourishing existence. Philosophers have thought long and hard about these things. They have identified many candidate elements of the good life. But lurking behind them all — and taking pride of place in many accounts of moral status — is the capacity for conscious awareness. It is our ability to experience the world, to experience pleasure and pain, hope and despair, joy and suffering, that makes what we do morally salient. A rock is not conscious. If you split the rock with a pickaxe you are not making its existence any worse. If you do the same thing to a human being, it’s rather different. You are making the human’s life go worse. This is because the human being is conscious. Cracking open the human skull with a pickaxe will almost certainly cause the human great suffering and, possibly, end its stream of consciousness (the very thing that makes other valuable things possible).

That consciousness is central to what makes life worth living is fairly widely accepted. The only disputes tend to relate to how wide the net of consciousness expands (are animals conscious? do we make their lives worse by killing and eating them?). Given that attention is simply a specific form of consciousness (focused conscious awareness), it would seem to follow that attention is valuable. A simple argument can be made:
  • (1) Consciousness is valuable (hence worth protecting).
  • (2) Attention is a form of consciousness (focused conscious awareness).
  • (3) Therefore, attention is valuable (hence worth protecting).
But this argument throws up a problem. If attention is merely a form of conscious awareness, then what is the point in talking specifically about a right to attentional protection? Shouldn’t we just focus on consciousness more generally?...
...MORE
Posted by climateer at 9:29 AM
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"1914: The Year in Review"

From The Awl:

Over the holidays, while watching two children create Lego worlds at the foot of a glowing Christmas tree, it suddenly hit us that in only five years, it will be the twenties again. Feeling old, my cousin and I took swigs of white wine and shoved our faces with ham. So, instead of reflecting on 2014, let’s take a look at 1914:

— On June 28th, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot and killed, triggering a cascade of violence. The “Great War” was disease-ridden, fought in ungodly trenches, saw the deaths and injuries of millions and set the stage for World War II.

— In August, president Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, died of Bright’s disease. In reviewing 1914, I found that many stories conclude with Chekhovian despair over losses like Wilson’s. Death and disease permeated culture then in a way far beyond what most of us can comprehend today. The average death rate was 13.6 per 1,000, a record low at the time, but much worse than today’s 8.07, while life expectancy was 52 years for men and 56.8 years for women; Tom Cruise and Geena Davis would likely be dead, not still acting.

— On Lexington Avenue near 103rd St., a bomb intended for John D. Rockefeller exploded in an anarchist’s apartment. The incident became Known as the “Lexington Avenue bombing;” four people died and dozens were injured. It was one of many politically charged acts of violence of the time, among them bombings and assassination attempts by anarchist Luigi Galleani and his followers. Meanwhile, at Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Wisconsin, an angered servant killed seven people, including Wright’s mistress and her two children, and torched the place. The “Wright-mare” was a national news sensation at the time, and became the stuff of architecture student lore....MORE
Never Better, a collection of essays from writers we love, is The Awl’s goodbye to 2014.

First posted Wednesday, December 31, 2014.
Posted by climateer at 9:06 AM
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"Betting Against Boredom: A Field Guide to 2018 Volatility Trades"

From Bloomberg Dec. 27:
  • Volatility has been below 10 about 20% of the time this year
  • Global short vol trade has $2 trillion in strategies: Cole
It’s pretty simple: in three decades since the Cboe Volatility Index was invented, 2017 will go down as the least exciting year for stocks on record. There are three trading days left and the VIX’s average level has been 11.11, about 10 percent lower than the next-closest year.
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iGpiiuxMXO2o/v2/800x-1.png
It’s tempting to say nobody thinks it will last, but that would be to ignore the walls of money that remain stacked up in bets that it will. Going just by the sliver represented by listed securities, about $2.4 billion is in the short volatility trade as of this month, the most on record. Hundreds of billions more are betting against beta in things like volatility futures.

Still, that doesn’t mean investors are ignoring the possibility of a resurgence, or at least a reversion to the mean. Here’s a look at volatility positioning as it stands now.

Surging Cost of Protection Against VIX Upside
Nervousness about next year is visible in the relative cost of betting on an increase in volatility, which has surged to a peak compared with wagers on a decline. (The spread is based on three-month VIX skew in data compiled by Bloomberg.) Someone, somewhere is spending money to capitalize on a rebound in the gauge.

But it’s the furthest thing from a one-way bet. The global short volatility trade currently has more than $2 trillion in various strategies, according to an October report by Christopher Cole, the founder of Artemis Capital Advisers hedge fund. He compared the strategy of betting that volatility, already near record lows, will fall even further, to a snake “blind to the fact that it is devouring its own body.”
Reptilian autosarcophagy aside, as of December 2017, betting against volatility has been the trade that worked. An analysis on the ETF.com website Tuesday said that seven of the 20 worst-performing exchange-traded securities this year were long VIX and other volatility measures.

Investors see a 74 percent probability that equity price swings will widen next year as the current levels of volatility are “unsustainable,” according to a survey of 229 investors representing $6 trillion in managed assets conducted by Absolute Strategy Research. The VIX rose for a second day to 10.25 on Tuesday after hanging below 10 for about 20 percent of the time this year.

Record Number of Investors See Stocks as Overvalued
Between rising corporate profits, a pick-up in global growth and laudable message-management by central banks, volatility has had few catalysts. But as the S&P 500 Index has reached 62 all-time highs this year, a record number of investors see stocks as overvalued, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey last month.

Perhaps as a result, smart-beta exchange-traded funds purporting to offer a haven from chaos have taken in more than $3.5 billion in 2017....MORE
Previous visits with Mr. Cole and Artemis; as noted in the intro to May 18's "VIX Surge Is Unwelcome Lesson in Duplicity of Volatility Wagers"--UPDATED:

FT Alphaville's Izabella Kaminska used to talk with Chris Cole of Artemis Capital about volatility but I haven't seen him mentioned in a while. What he's up to is on a whole different level from the usual. Here's an example: The shadow convexity risk in the machine (and the VIX)
Or 2014's "An Awful Lot of People Are Shorting Volatility (VIX; VXX; XVIX; XXV)":
I'm starting to wonder if Izabella likes posting on volatility because, in addition to talking to Chris Cole who is pretty sharp, the ETP symbols read like Roman numerals?

As to the headline, I mean "awful lot" in both the colloquial and the literal....
But, instead of listing our links to FTAV, you can go directly to the source:
site:https://ftalphaville.ft.com Chris Cole
More recently, both August's link to "'Volatility and the Prisoners Dilemma'—CBOE Risk Management Conference Asia, December 1, 2015" and October 19's "Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk" are worth a read to help get the bigger picture.
 
And while I attempt to synthesize these concepts, here's a 1992 Mack Daddy beat:
"I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie, You vol sellers can’t deny..."

From The Mercenary Trader:
Baby Got Black (Swan)
(With apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot)
I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie
You vol sellers can’t deny
When a hot trend breaks with a well-timed stop
and a great big black swan pop you get
Paid… P&L year gets made
‘Cause you noticed that trade was packed
Buncha mean reversion suckers got jacked

Oh baby I wanna get lumpy
Long gamma for when it gets bumpy
Central banks tried to haze me,
But those carry trades just don’t faze me!...MORE
Genius or madman?
Posted by climateer at 7:03 AM
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Career Change: How A UFC Fighter Stole $100 Million In Cash

From Sports Illustrated:

BREAKING the BANK
How a UFC fighter pulled off the biggest bank heist ever
At first glance it seemed like typical MMA clickbait, a low-rent version of Conor McGregor threatening to box against Floyd Mayweather, or Demi Lovato trolling for a professional fight.

England’s Daily Star recently “reported” that Alex Reid and Lee Murray were in talks to meet in a cage. Reid, a former MMA fighter and British tabloid heavyweight, is best known for his brief marriage to model Katie Price and his turn on Celebrity Big Brother.

As for Murray, he too is a former fighter; he made it to the UFC and once went the distance with the great Anderson Silva. It’s hard to imagine how he could meet an assignation to fight, however, given that he’s currently incarcerated in Morocco. While he’s there on drug-related charges, he’s best known for having masterminded the Securitas Heist, this century’s equivalent of the Great Train Robbery.

In 2006, with his professional fighting career on the decline, Murray rounded up a group of friends and training partners. Posing as policemen, they abducted a guard, entered a repository where currency was transferred among banks, and absconded with £53 million, or roughly $100 million at the time. (It would have been more, if only Murray and his crew had thought to rent a larger van.) As it was, theirs constituted the largest cash heist in history—pulled off without a single physical injury or even a bullet being fired.

As slick and organized as the thieves were during the actual heist, they were equally clumsy afterward. Because they hadn't thought through where to store the cash, they ended up stashing bills in closets. They abandoned one of the vehicles used in the crime and set it afire in the middle of a field, attracting attention. Inside another vehicle the bandits carelessly left ski masks, guns and more than £1 million in bills. The gang members soon began accusing each other of informing the police.
The son of a British mother and a Moroccan father, Murray fled to Morocco, which does not have an extradition policy with the U.K. But there Murray found himself involved in an altercation in a Rabat shopping mall, and when his home was searched police found drugs. He was sent to prison in Morocco, where he has resided since 2007, notwithstanding an attempted escape using tiny saws that were snuck in inside of biscuits. In ’10, Murray was convicted of masterminding the Securitas Heist and he faces 25 years in prison. It is still to be determined whether he will be extradited.

In 2008, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED covered Murray and the Securitas Heist in a magazine story titled “Breaking the Bank.” While the piece was optioned by Universal Studios and ran in print, British laws about ongoing criminal cases prevented the story from running online at the time. With the case’s criminal trials finally resolved, we are permitted to present this SI True Crime classic.

With flashing blue lights illuminating his rearview mirror, Colin Dixon pulled his car to the side of a deserted road. It was around six on the evening of Feb. 21, 2006, and Dixon had just clocked out from his job at the Securitas cash depot in Tonbridge, England, 30 miles southeast of central London. A purposely nondescript, brown building tucked behind a car repair garage, the depot serves as a regional warehouse of sorts, where cash for the Bank of England is stored and disbursed. Dixon, 52, was the manager.

Now, driving home, he figured he was getting pulled over by an unmarked police car for a routine traffic stop. A tall, athletic-looking man in a police uniform approached. Though it would turn out that the cop was no cop at all—the uniform was fake, the Kent police badge he flashed had been purchased on eBay, and the guy's face had been distorted with help from a professional makeup artist—Dixon was compliant. He got out of his Nissan sedan and was handcuffed and placed in the back of the other car.

He would later testify that the driver, a second man in uniform, turned and said menacingly, “You will have guessed we are not policemen.... Don't do anything silly and you won't get hurt.” When Dixon tried to adjust his handcuffs, he says the “officer” who'd apprehended him brandished a pistol and barked, “We're not f------ about. This is a nine-millimeter.”
Police examine the car of Securitas depot manager Colin Dixon, which was found abandoned by a pub. 
GARETH FULLER/AFP/Getty Images
Dixon was blindfolded and transferred to a van, then taken to a remote farm in western Kent. Meanwhile, two other fake cops drove to Dixon's home in the nearby town of Herne Bay, along with accomplices in a second van. Greeted at the door by Dixon's wife, Lynn, they explained that her husband had been in a serious traffic accident. They said that Lynn and the couple's young child needed to accompany them to the hospital. Outside the home, the Dixons were placed in the back of the second van and taken to the farm, where the Dixons were reunited. At once relieved and terrified, they were bound and held at gunpoint. Colin Dixon was ordered to give the plotters information about the depot. “If you cooperate, no one will get hurt. Otherwise,” one abductor warned, “you'll get a hole in you.”
“If you cooperate, no one will get hurt. Otherwise,” one abductor warned the bank depot manager, “you'll get a hole in you.”
A group of at least seven men then drove to the Securitas depot, Colin Dixon accompanying a phony police officer in a sedan and his family bound in the back of a large, white Renault truck. By now it was after midnight on the morning of Feb. 22. Surveillance video shows Dixon being buzzed into the depot with an officer beside him. Once inside, the fake cop overpowers the security guard and buzzes in the rest of the robbers wearing ski masks and armed with high-powered weapons, including an AK-47. Dixon told the 14 staffers working the graveyard shift, “They've got my family,” and instructed them not to touch the alarms. He proceeded to deactivate the security system and hand over the keys to the vault. The Dixons and the staff were then bound and placed in metal cages normally used for storing cash. The truck can be seen backing up to a loading dock.
The truck used to transport the money, parked at the loading dock of the Securitas depot.
Kent Police via Getty Images
The robbers clearly knew their way around the depot—where the doors were located and how they locked—and with good reason. One member of the gang, Ermir Hysenaj, 28, an Albanian immigrant, was the classic inside man. Months earlier, after just a 10-minute job interview, Hysenaj had been hired for roughly $11 an hour to work the evening shift at the depot. It was later revealed that in the weeks before the robbery, he had come to work wearing a small video camera hidden in his belt buckle....MORE
Posted by climateer at 6:15 AM
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100 Artificial Intelligence Startups That Have Raised $11.7B in aggregate funding

From CB Insights, December 12:

The 100 startups on our list have raised $11.7B in aggregate funding across 367 deals.
Today, CB Insights unveiled the second annual AI 100 —  a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across 25+ industries, from healthcare to cybersecurity — at the A-Ha! conference in San Francisco.

The companies were selected from a pool of 2,000+ startups based on several criteria, including investor profile, tech innovation, team strength, patent activity, mosaic score, funding history, valuation, and business model.

The market map below categorizes the AI 100 companies based on their industry focus.


https://s3.amazonaws.com/cbi-research-portal-uploads/2017/12/20105345/121917-AI-100-Market-Map-V5.png
(click to enlarge)
This analysis contains:
  1. Key trends and highlights
  2. Top company categories
    • Healthcare AI
    • Cybersecurity AI
    • Enterprise AI
  3. Complete list of companies
  4. 2017’S AI 100
Some of the startups are specializing in specific use cases within the industries. For instance, AiCure specializes in medication adherence, Gong on caller analytics for sales teams, and Zest Finance on credit underwriting.

The startups are in various stages of research and funding, from seed/angel (Mobalytics, Text IQ, Merlon Intelligence) to Series E+ (Affirm, C3IoT, and InsideSales).
  • Most well-funded: China-based ByteDance (known as Toutiao) has raised $3.1B so far. It uses artificial intelligence for personalized news recommendations.
  • Geographic distribution: Startups from 9 different countries – including France, Israel, Spain, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, and United Kingdom — made it on to AI 100 this year. Majority of the companies, 76%, were from 13 states in the United States. China’s AI startup scene has been buzzing with activity. Five of the 8 companies from China are unicorns, with 4 of them reaching $1B+ valuations just this year.
  • Active investors in the 100: Data Collective has backed 14 startups on the list, including Vicarious Systems, Trifacta, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Intel Capital has invested in 20 of the startups, followed by GV, which backed 8 companies. Other top investors include The SoftBank Group and Lux Capital.

TOP COMPANY CATEGORIES

Cybersecurity
The recent string of high profile cyber-attacks – including the Equifax breach that compromised personal information of over 143 million Americans – has resulted in an increased interest in AI-based solutions.
From healthcare institutions and government agencies to insurance companies and retail stores, the client base of the AI 100 cybersecurity companies spans across various industries.
11 of the AI-100 companies are focused on aspects of different cybersecurity, from anomaly detection to web security.....
.....MUCH MORE
Posted by climateer at 5:20 AM
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Saturday, December 30, 2017

The Guardian Decides to Advertise and brag (a little)

First posted November 30, 2012.
Original post: 

Still crazy after all these years (1821).
From the Guardian:

Cannes Lions Awards, June 2012
The Guardian's Three Little Pigs TV campaign was among the material honoured at this year's Cannes Lions awards, which took place last week during 17 - 23 June. The campaign, by Bartle Bogle Hegarty London, won a gold lion in the Film category, one gold and five silver lions in the Film Craft category and a silver in the Titanium and Integrated category. Andrea Stillacci, one of the judges of the Film section, praised the campaign calling it very "today."...


...The Guardian was also rewarded in the Outdoor Lions category, scooping seven silver lions for Bartle Bogle Hegarty's campaigns 'egg', 'pyramid', 'gold coin', 'pill', 'record', 'orange' and 'pie chart.'...MORE
HT chain: Freakonomics>Poynter>AdWeek 
Posted by climateer at 8:38 PM
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"The endangered iconic hyperlink... "

https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-287e40682e30f970f57692be6e039178

Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher:

Hyperlinks
"Hey, send me that link!" You'll hear that phrase everywhere and in every language around the world. The hyperlink is as core part of our global culture as it is core to the Internet itself.

It's how we share photos, videos and pay our bills; it's how billions of dollars in e-commerce are transacted daily; it's our most fundamental and foundational Internet technology.

Yet the hyperlink -- this blue-underlined iconic symbol of the Internet -- is under threat as criminal organizations and secret foreign government agencies step up attacks on Domain Name System (DNS) servers to hijack traffic, inject spyware into corporate networks and dupe consumers into exposing private financial data.

Domain Name System (DNS) servers power every hyperlink. They rapidly translate the text of a dotcom address into numbers that can then pinpoint the root server and map the precise locations of every every web page, every image, video, file -- no matter where it is worldwide.

Good DNS services speed up web sites, balance traffic loads and protect against a wide spectrum of cyber threats. Bad DNS makes sites slow and unstable and makes it easy for criminals to change the address of links on a web page to their malware....MORE, including why it matters.
Previously on DNS:
Uh Oh: Internet Security Pro Hit By Botnet Made Of Internet-of-Things Connected Cameras
This is very bad....

Details Emerge On The Big Internet-of-Things Hack: This Is Just Sick

The Dyn Blog Post On Taking Down The Internet: As With Humor, Timing Is Everything
Yes, their analysis of Distributed Denial of Service attacks using the Internet of Things (the attacks on Krebs) was posted less than 24 hours before they themselves were attacked.... 

"This Is Probably Why Half the Internet Shut Down Today [Update: It’s Happening Again]"

On the other hand, from Dilbert.com:

Elbonians Will Rue The Day - Dilbert by Scott Adams


And many more, use the 'Search blog' box or just enjoy my frustration back in 2009:

Creative Writing: "How CBO budget scoring devalues efficiency ... WITH PUPPIES!"
I tried sending this link to a friend who can't pull it up. When she tries the link she gets "Database Error: Unable to connect to your database. Your database appears to be turned off or the database connection settings in your config file are not correct...." I'll just copy it out and get back to the other Aryans in the next post.

My smartest tech guy, Siva, (a streetwise Hindu boy, Caltech postdoc) starts talking DNS; SQL or some such.

I thought Sanskrit was a litugical language....
From Grist:
The Congressional Budget Office is back in the news, after director Doug Elmendorf testified before Congress about the economic impacts of clean energy legislation....
And so concerned reader understands the Aryan reference: it wasn't Aryan nation or Nazis or somesuch, it was the residual effects of the post immediately preceding my frustration:
"Ja, ja, So Your U.S. Market is Up a Bit, Ever Hear of Berlin, 1923?"
Posted by climateer at 11:19 AM
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"The Inside Story of Glencore's Hidden Dealings in Democratic Republic of the Congo"

This is going-on two months old but is good background for some stuff that will be coming out in 2018.
From The Guardian, November 5:

Leaked files reveal for the first time how the secretive firm enlisted a controversial diamond tycoon – ignoring ‘red flags’
A secretive multinational company worth billions, whose founder turned fugitive was pardoned by a president.

An Israeli diamond tycoon, rumoured to be the inspiration for a Hollywood blockbuster.
And a struggling African nation, blessed and burdened by natural resources, riven by war and corruption.

Behind the black letters of the Paradise Papers lies a world of extraordinary colour.
Obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian and more than 90 media partners across the globe, the Paradise Papers reveal the reality of the arcane world of offshore tax havens and global finance.

And they raise serious questions about the conduct of the commodities multinational Glencore and the Israeli mining billionaire Dan Gertler in Africa.

They show that in 2009, Glencore, the world’s biggest mining company, gave a secret $45m loan to Gertler’s company after it enlisted him to secure a controversial mining agreement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Over hundreds of pages, the papers expose in forensic detail how Gertler, whose previous diamond monopoly in DRC was described by the UN as a “disaster” for the country, held Glencore’s imprimatur as key negotiator with Congolese authorities.

The ‘nightmare’ diamond deal
In 1997, the 23-year-old scion of one of Israel’s most famous diamond trading families landed in Kinshasa, the dusty capital of DRC, seeking rough stones and a fresh fortune.
The African nation, bitten as hard as any by the resource curse of the developing world, had just emerged from a military coup, which changed the name of the country from Zaire and put Laurent-Désiré Kabila in control.

It was the self-declared president Gertler befriended, a move that would prove politically and commercially astute.

In Kinshasa, Gertler first met the president’s son Joseph and then the president. A friendship had begun and, according to a 2001 UN investigation, a deal was struck: $20m in cash from Gertler that Kabila would use to buy weapons and fund his war against rebels to consolidate his grip on power.
In exchange, Gertler’s company IDI was granted a monopoly on the DRC diamond trade, worth hundreds of millions a year. The deal was a “nightmare” for the country, the UN report found.

Gertler’s lawyers said he denied all allegations in the UN report and was not given an opportunity to comment before publication. The UN has not cited him “in any negative context” since 2001, his lawyers said.

The diamond deal would be the first of many. In the nearly two decades since, Gertler has become an unofficial gatekeeper in dozens of mining deals across DRC – a country the size of western Europe with a surfeit of natural resources.

But those valuable resources have not uplifted the country from poverty. Instead, they have brought war and exploitation. DRC remains one of the least developed nations. Devastated by long-running conflict and famines, it remains a place of chronic communal and state violence, where infants die at almost the world’s worst rates and nearly half of all children are stunted by chronic malnutrition.
According to the 2013 estimate of the Africa Progress Panel, headed by the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, the unique ability of companies linked to Gertler to win cut-price mining licences and agreements in DRC cost the country more than $1.3bn, almost twice the nation’s combined health and education budgets, in one three-year period alone. Gertler’s lawyers said his companies “categorically refute” the allegations in the 2013 report, which they were not given an opportunity to respond to.

While DRC has suffered, Gertler – speculated in media reports to have been the loose inspiration for the Leonardo DiCaprio film Blood Diamond – has amassed a fortune. Forbes values his wealth at $1.22bn.

A broad, bearded man, Gertler is described as an “adventurer with a short fuse”. Fiercely private, he is shown at mines in most of the extant public photos, wearing a high-vis vest over a suit and, on his head, a helmet or yarmulke.

Gertler was raised in a secular household but in adulthood has grown increasingly religiously observant. He typically spends his working week in Africa, but flies home for the sabbath in Israel with his family.

He has brought some development to DRC, building a 1,500-acre kibbutz-style farm to help address chronic food insecurity. And, in a country where sexual violence is systematically used as a weapon of war, the Gertler Family Foundation supports teenagers who become mothers after being raped, one of 50 programmes benefiting “tens of thousands of Congolese every year”, according to his lawyers.
But the Paradise Papers cast new light on background dealings between Gertler and Glencore that appear to have saved them hundreds of millions of dollars – money lost to DRC and its people.

The Glencore room
The Paradise Papers are an insight into the inner machinations of Appleby, one of the “magic circle” of leading offshore investment firms.

Glencore is one of Appleby’s most important clients. So central, in fact, has the company been that at one time, on the second floor of Appleby’s Bermuda headquarters, was the Glencore room.
Across the hall from the women’s bathroom, it was nondescript and rarely used. Glencore executives never visited. It contained no more than a filing cabinet, computer, telephone, fax machine and chequebook.

But the room gave Glencore a “robust footprint”, in the words of one Appleby MD, in the zero-tax island of Bermuda: a helpful asset in the event of any taxation investigation.

The files that are likely to have once lived in that room, and the contents of which were known only to a handful of people, are now globally exposed by the Paradise Papers.

The papers reveal some of the complexity of Glencore’s global operations and the breadth of its reach. Glencore is the largest commodity trader in the world and the biggest supplier of zinc and cobalt. The fruits of its products are used every day by millions, including anyone who drives a car or makes a call on a smartphone.

And Glencore is a company with an extraordinary history, founded in 1974 as Marc Rich and Co.
Rich, a former child refugee who became a naturalised US citizen after fleeing Nazi-occupied Belgium with his family, led his eponymous firm for two decades....MUCH MORE
Posted by climateer at 7:28 AM
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Cryptography and Quantum Computers

The author seems optimistic - note headline - but I'm not so sure.

From Nautil.us:

How Classical Cryptography Will Survive Quantum Computers
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, certainly raised the profile of quantum computing a few notches last year, when he gamely—if vaguely1—described it for a press conference. But we’ve heard a lot about quantum computers in the past few years, as Google, I.B.M., and N.A.S.A., as well as many, many universities, have all been working on, or putting money into, quantum computers for various ends. The N.S.A., for instance, as the Snowden documents revealed, wants to build one for codebreaking, and it seems to be a common belief that if a full-scale, practical quantum computer is built, it could be really useful in that regard. A New Yorker article early this year, for example, stated that a quantum computer “would, on its first day of operation, be capable of cracking the Internet’s most widely used codes.” But maybe they won’t be as useful as we have been led to believe.
Some are looking at ways to “fight quantum with quantum”—but there is another (and cheaper) option.
Quantum computation is based on the superposition principle of quantum physics. Bits in a normal computer are either 0 or 1. Quantum physics allows bits to be in a superposition of 0 and 1, in the same way Schrödinger’s cat can be in a superposition of “alive” and “dead.” This sometimes lets quantum computers explore possibilities more quickly than normal computers. For a general search problem, such as trying to find the key to a secret code by trying all of them, quantum computers are expected to have quadratic speed-up. For example, the Advanced Encryption Standard, approved by the United States government, has up to 2256—or about a 1 followed by 77 zeros—keys. A quantum computer could make that same search as if there were only 2128 keys—about a 3 followed by 38 zeros. On the one hand, that’s a lot faster. On the other hand, it’s still an awful lot of searching to do.

But there’s another type of cryptography, called public-key cryptography, which was invented in the 1970s. As the name suggests, these are systems where two people can agree on a key, or part of a key, by exchanging only public information. This is incredibly useful in modern electronic commerce—if you want to send your credit card number safely over the Internet to Amazon, for instance, you don’t want to have to drive to their headquarters to have a secret meeting first. Public-key systems rely on the fact that some mathematical processes seem to be one-way—they are easy to do but difficult to undo. For example, for you to take two large whole numbers and multiply them is relatively easy. But for someone to take the result and factor it into the original numbers seems much harder. This particular one-way function is used in RSA cryptography, one of the most popular public-key systems.

Unfortunately for RSA, not all one-way functions are created equal. The factoring problem falls into a category known as “hidden subgroup problems.” A group is a particular type of mathematical structure and a hidden subgroup is another structure inside it unknown to the codebreaker—in the factoring example, the product produces the group and the unknown factors produce the hidden subgroup. On hidden subgroup problems, quantum computers are predicted to get exponential speed-up. Factoring is faster than searching to begin with, so an ordinary computer could factor a number of size 215360 in the time it takes to search 2256 keys. But a quantum computer could factor that same number in more like the time it takes to search 20,000 keys. That’s an enormous speed-up. It would pretty much destroy RSA, and the situation is similar with all of the other public-key systems currently in common use.

That would be a big shake-up for public-key cryptography, but cryptographers aren’t just giving up. Some are looking at ways to “fight quantum with quantum”—but there is another (and cheaper) option. Research is also being done into what is often called post-quantum cryptography, although a more precise name might be quantum-resistant cryptography. These are systems running on ordinary computers but based on problems that are not in the hidden subgroup category. These problems include solving systems of multivariable polynomials, finding the shortest distance from a point to an n-dimensional skewed grid of other points, and finding the closest bit string to a set of other bit strings.

For example, if Alice wants to send Bob a message, she could identify it with a point in Bob’s n-dimensional grid and then add some “noise” to it by moving it off the grid a small amount. If n is very large and the angles in the grid are skewed—very far from right angles—it seems difficult for Eve the Eavesdropper to figure out Alice’s original point, and a quantum computer doesn’t seem to help much. But if Bob (and only Bob) has a different set of lines drawn through the same points, but with angles closer to 90 degrees, then he has a “trap door” which allows him to recover the point and the message. Variations on this idea are known as lattice-based cryptography, and are some of the front-runners for post-quantum use.....MORE
Posted by climateer at 7:04 AM
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Corrected—Urban Planning and Energy

Correction: We inadvertently dropped the first two paragraphs and though the article still read surprisingly well, it's like coming into a movie twenty minutes late.
Regret the error.
*****
This piece comes to us via a recommendation by Richard Florida.
From the Congress for New Urbanism's Public Square Journal:

Nov. 2, 2017 
James Howard Kuntsler
The infinite suburb? They must be joking
https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/styles/public_square_feature_image/public/jetsons.jpg?itok=WKsKEkOp
In their visions of the future, the elite graduate schools of urban planning lately see a new-and-improved suburbia, based on self-driving electric cars, “drone deliveries at your doorstep,” and “teardrop-shaped one-way roads” (I think that means cul-de-sacs) as the coming sure thing. It sounds suspiciously like yesterday’s tomorrow, the George Jetson utopia that has been the stock-in-trade of half-baked futurism for decades. It may be obvious that for some time now we have lived in a reality-optional culture and it’s vividly on display in the cavalcade of techno-narcissism that passes for thinking these days in academia.
Exhibit A is the essay that appeared last month in The New York Times Sunday Magazine titled “The Suburb of the Future is Almost Here,” by Alan M. Berger of the MIT urban design faculty and author of the book Infinite Suburbia — on the face of it a perfectly inane notion. The subtitle of his Times Magazine piece went: “Millennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient, and sustainable.”
Note the trio of clichés at the end, borrowed from the lexicon of the advertising industry. “Smart” is a meaningless anodyne that replaces the worn out tropes “deluxe,” “super,” “limited edition,” and so on. It’s simply meant to tweak the reader’s status consciousness. Who wants to be dumb?
“Efficient” and “sustainable” are actually at odds. The combo ought to ring an alarm bell for anyone tasked with designing human habitats. Do you know what “efficient” gets you in terms of ecology? Monocultures. GMO Corn grown on sterile soil mediums jacked with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and fast-depleting fossil aquifer water. It’s very efficient for producing corn flakes and Cheez Doodles, but has poor prospects for continuing further into this century. Likewise, conventional suburban sprawl, as we’ve known it. Efficiency in ecological terms beats a path straight to entropy and death.

Real successful ecologies, on the other hand, are the opposite of efficient. They are deeply redundant. They are rich in diverse species and functions, many of which overlap and duplicate, so that a problem with one failed part or one function doesn’t defeat the whole system. This redundancy is what makes them resilient, i.e. sustainable. Swamps, prairies, and hardwood forests are rich and sustainable ecologies. Monocultures, such as agri-biz style corn crops, and “big box” retail monopolies are not sustainable and they’re certainly not even ecologies, just temporary artifacts of finance and engineering. What would America do if WalMart went out of business? (And don’t underestimate the possibility as geopolitical tension and conflict undermine global supply lines.)

Monocultural suburbia
Suburbia of the American type is composed of monocultures: residential, commercial, industrial, connected by the circulatory system of cars. Suburbia is not a sustainable human ecology. Among other weaknesses, it is fatally prone to Leibeg’s Law of the Minimum, which states that overall health of a system depends on the amount of the scarcest of the essential resources that is available to it. This ought to be self-evident to an urbanist, who must ipso facto be a kind of ecologist.
Techno-narcissists such as Alan M. Berger take it as axiomatic that innovation of-and-by itself can overcome all natural limits on a planet with finite resources. They assume the new-and-improved suburbs will continue to run on cars, only now they will be driverless and electric, and everything in their paradigm follows from that.

I don’t think so. Like it or not, the human race has not yet found a replacement for fossil fuels, especially oil, which has been the foundation of techno-industrial economies for a hundred years, and it is getting a little late in the game to imagine an orderly segue to some as-yet-undiscovered energy regime.

By the way, electricity is not an energy source. It is just a carrier of energy generated in power plants. We have produced large quantities of it at the grand scale using fossil fuels, hydropower, and nuclear fission (which is dependent on fossil fuels to operate). And, by the way, all of our nuclear power plants are nearing the end of their design life, with no plans or prospects for them to be replaced by new ones. We have maxed out on potential hydroelectric sites and the existing big ones are silting up, which will take them out of service inside this century.

Electricity can also be produced by solar cells and wind turbines, but at nowhere near the scale necessary, on their own, for running contemporary American life. The conceit that we can power suburbia, the interstate highway system, truck-based distribution networks, commercial aviation, the US Military, and Walt Disney World on anything besides fossil fuels is going to leave a lot of people very disappointed.

 The truth is that we have been running all this stuff on an extravagant ramp-up of debt for at least a decade to compensate for the troubles that exist in the oil industry, oil being the primary and indispensible resource for our way of life. These troubles are often lumped under the rubric Peak Oil, but the core of the trouble must be seen a little differently: namely, a steep decline in the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) across the oil industry. The phrase might seem abstruse on the face of it. It means simply that it is becoming uneconomical to extract oil from the ground, even with the so-called “miracle” of “fracking” shale oil deposits. It doesn’t pay for itself, and the EROI is still headed further down.

In the 1930s, the oil industry could get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil in energy they put into production. Drilling on the Texas prairie was like slipping a straw in a milk shake and the oil gushed out of the ground under its own pressure. Today, those old wells are far into depletion and we’re left with unconventional oil. Horizontal drilling and fracking into shale is enormously more expensive to carry out, and offshore deepwater drilling that requires a $100 million floating oil platform is nothing like slipping a straw into a milkshake. They have to go down a mile or more beneath the surface and then another mile into the undersea rock. It’s very expensive plus dangerous. (Remember the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010?)

The aggregate ratio of oil-out-for-energy-in these days is 17 to 1, and for shale oil it’s more like 5 to 1. You cannot run industrial civilizations at those EROI ratios. 30 to 1 is probably the minimum. And you can’t run renewable alternative energy systems without an underlying support platform of fossil fuels. The implacable reality of this dynamic has yet to sink in at the graduate school fantasy factories.

The world’s major oil companies are cannibalizing themselves to stay in business, with balance sheets cratering, and next-to-zero new oil fields being discovered. The shale oil producers haven’t made a net dime since the project got ramped up around 2005. Their activities have been financed on junk lending made possible by arbitrages on the near-zero Fed fund rate, itself an historical abnormality. The shale oil drillers are producing all-out to service their loans, and by producing all-out they have driven down the oil price, negating their profit....MORE 
So, other than that, it's all good?

Here's "The future of America’s suburbs looks infinite" op-ed piece by Chapman U's Joel Kotkin and MIT's Alan Berger at the OC Register.
Posted by climateer at 6:13 AM
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Friday, December 29, 2017

"The Slow Train To Tallinn"

From New Statesman:
In the first in a new series about the European nations we are soon to leave behind, Matthew Engel visits the Baltic state of Estonia, where people place great trust in technology – but not the motives of their neighbours.

As you travel east across the world’s 129th largest country towards the largest, even the skies seem to change. They get bigger; the clouds become more voluble, more expressive. Certainly the passengers on the train get more voluble and expressive. This is Estonia, where three quarters of the population vies with its Finnish neighbours to be regarded as the coolest, most untheatrical people on the planet. This is not the reputation of its other neighbours in Russia, nor of the remaining quarter of the Estonian population, who are ethnically Russian.

Almost all of the Russian-Estonians are clustered round the capital, Tallinn, and the train’s destination, the border city of Narva 130 miles away, where for 500 years two huge castles have glowered at each other across the river Narva, a well-aimed arrow’s flight apart. This has been a potential flashpoint throughout history: there were battles of Narva in 1558, 1581, 1700, 1704, 1918 and 1944. Soon after that Estonia was marched by force into the Soviet Union. Twenty-six years on from the great escape, Narva is primarily a crossing-point. It is not, however, a relaxed one.
On one bank, a new fortress has been built, dominating the city centre: a hi-tech command-and-control frontier post finished off with a 20-foot-high fence guarding the sides of the road bridge almost to midstream. The other side of the river appears invitingly open and welcome. This is not a new Iron Curtain, though, for here’s the twist: the new fortress is Estonia’s; it is the east that beckons beguilingly.

That is an illusion. Money has been lavished on the Estonian side because it is now – thanks to the Schengen Agreement on free movement – the country’s only significant border post. And not just a national border, a quadruple one, marking the edge also of the Schengen zone, the European Union and Nato. The EU paid for it all. The Russians use more time-honoured methods to keep undesirables at bay: undermanning and bureaucratic obstreperousness. The traffic backed up on the bridge is eastbound. After all, Russia has hundreds of important border posts to maintain; Estonia has only the one.
When I visited Estonia in mid-September, the Estonians had an extra reason to be nervous. Not far over the horizon, on the Luzhsky training ranges, the Russians were hosting Zapad 2017, neither a sporting event nor a rock festival, but their quadrennial military exercise involving 12,700 troops (Moscow’s figure) or up to 100,000 (the most alarmist Nato sources). On some reckonings, Zapad could be the prelude to the Kremlin’s next coup de théâtre: a full-scale invasion of Estonia. Straight over the bridge or through the unmarked forests to the south.

At present this is far-fetched – but it is not utterly ludicrous. Estonia is twice the size of Wales, with a population of 1.3 million; Russia is 330 Waleses and has 150 million. The two have, let’s say, history. And a large slice of Estonia’s ethnic Russians have not been granted citizenship. They have “grey passports”, depriving them of basic rights such as voting, although they can travel to both sides of the border and could walk unhindered, if they fancied, from Finisterre to Vladivostok. Narva’s loyalty to Estonia cannot be taken for granted. I asked the city’s deputy mayor if he was worried about Zapad. “I don’t give a poop!” he roared in reply.

Actually he did give a poop, which is why he was cross. The deputy mayor’s name is Vyacheslav Konovalov, and he lives with the tortured loyalties that come from being Russian-Estonian. “So what?” he went on. “It’s all hype, it’s the same old stuff. The Kremlin’s coming after you. Ugh! This is not Ukraine.”

Yet the fear that Estonia and its Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, might be the next Ukraine is the central underlying fact of the region’s politics. Logic suggests the cost would exceed the gain. But we do not live in logical times. The Kremlin’s reputation is that they do stuff because they can.
Estonia’s Russians are the Afrikaners of Europe: representatives of the old masters shorn of their pride and power, their language hounded into irrelevance. Less than 30 years ago Estonia spoke Russian; now the language is treated as an irritating patois. Most of the signs at the border complex are bilingual – but in Estonian and English. Russian has vanished from the road signs and even from the supermarkets. Children from Russian-speaking families have to learn Estonian or face being unemployable.

Modern Estonia was part of the EU’s great opening to the East in 2004 and in many ways the great success story among the EU’s 21st-century intake. However, its failure to err on the side of magnanimity when dealing with its minority may come back to haunt it. The Russians came here to work in heavy industries which collapsed with communism. Freedom was a mixed blessing in Narva; and the economy has recovered patchily. Estonia has only recently bothered to set up a Russian-language TV station, so the Kremlin’s world view still seeps out of almost every screen in Russian-Estonian households.

No one I spoke to believes that Narva would greet an invading army with tea and kisses, although that is seen as a pragmatic calculation rather than a patriotic imperative. The borderers see enough of life over the river to know they are better off where they are. “When they go to Tallinn they say they are going to Estonia,” said Raivo Vetik, professor of politics at Tallinn University. “But our surveys show that when they go to Russia they do not feel at home there either.”

“The local Russians do not have very warm feelings about Estonia,” said Kristina Kallas, the director of Narva College. “This town has suffered a lot. It is like some of the northern English towns that have been marginalised while London is doing fine. But that doesn’t mean they love Russia. Everyone has bombed this place throughout history. They just want geopolitics not to happen here.”
Just in case, though, a few hundred British soldiers from the Rifles regiment, under Estonian command, backed up by a detachment of French legionnaires, are now stationed halfway between Narva and the capital. Other Nato countries are manning similar bases in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It is not a military decision: no one believes these outposts could delay a Russian invasion for more than a few hours – but it is an important statement to the Estonians. At the very least our brave boys would have to be Dunkirked. Britain could not just wring its hands and say, “Oh dear.

Estonia is as due for an invasion as California is for an earthquake. Perhaps nowhere, even in eastern Europe, has had so much geopolitics dumped on it. Of the past 750 years it has been independent for just 49: 1918 to 1940 and again since 1991. Otherwise, it has been sat on by the Danes, the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes (comparatively benignly), the tsars, the Nazis and the communists. In the Second World War most Estonians had to fight for whoever forced them. “There were no good choices at that time,” said Kallas. “Only bad choices, very bad and horrific.” A quarter of the population is thought to have died.

And yet Estonians have never enjoyed being lumped together as one of those indistinguishable, put-upon, who’s-invading-us-this-time Balts. They look north to their long-lost cousins in Finland, whose language is as impenetrably Finno-Ugric as their own. Even in the depths of the Soviet night, the communists never found a way of stopping them watching Finnish TV. The Times correspondent Michael Binyon went to Tallinn in 1980 and told a Moscow contact how much he liked Estonia. “Ah,” he replied, “now I can see you are anti-Soviet.”

And on release from jail, the Estonians bounded for freedom with a self-confidence no one else matched. Helsinki offered Tallinn a telephone exchange, brand-new but pre-digital. It was turned down. As hi-techery moved forward Estonia became a world leader rather than a supplicant. Skype was an Estonian invention, originally sold to eBay for £1.4bn in 2005 and now owned by Microsoft. “The founders invested that money back in Estonia,” explained Kevin Tammearu of the British-Estonian Chamber of Commerce. “That created the venture capital market here, and it flourished.”...
...MUCH MORE
Posted by climateer at 10:11 PM
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News You Can Use: "How Wealthy People Use the Government to Enrich Themselves"

Alternate sub-head: Tricks You May Have Been Missing

From New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer:
The progressive narrative about America’s skyrocketing levels of inequality goes something like this: Since the 1970s or so, conservatives have racked up a series of victories in rolling back government’s role in taxing and regulating the rich and powerful. As a result, the rich and powerful — who often lavish conservative politicians with donations — have run roughshod over poor and middle-class people, sucking up a horrifying proportion of the nation’s wealth in the process.

In their new book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles argue that this is only part of the story. “What this approach misses is the role of government action itself, rather than the government’s mere failure to act, as a cause of inequality,” they write. This means that anyone concerned about addressing inequality should be focusing on the many ways in which government policy itself actively redistributes money upward.

Lindsey, vice-president and director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and Teles, a fellow at the Center and a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, focus on four key areas in which, they say, government policy has been ruthlessly taking money from the have-nots and bestowing it upon the haves: finance, intellectual property (that is, the patent system), occupational licensing, and land use.

Whereas the standard progressive narrative about inequality and government inaction is fairly intuitive, Lindsey and Teles’s arguments are sometimes a bit more nuanced. Take their occupational-licensing case study, for example: They argue that many state licensing laws pertaining to physicians and attorneys are much more about artificially constricting labor supply in these fields than any sort of compelling quality-control argument, which in turn drives up the salaries of physicians and lawyers (the desired effect from the physicians and lawyers who lobby for strict licensing laws), which in turn drives up costs for consumers, which in turn cuts off the access poor and middle-class people have to the sometimes literally life-saving services of a good attorney or physician.

What this and other examples show is that sometimes the “conservative” argument that deregulation and a scaling-back of government intervention can reduce inequality is, well, true. It’s just complicated, and depends on a lot on context. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to solving anything as complicated as America’s inequality crisis.

In a recent email Q&A, Teles answered some questions about his book’s theses and the ways he wished progressives would reframe their thinking about inequality.

I think the ways in which conservatives get inequality-talk wrong are pretty well-documented among progressive-minded folks — among other things, they have a delusional amount of misplaced faith in the power of “the market” itself to bring about fair outcomes. But what’s your elevator-pitch version for the ways in which progressives might reconsider their own positions by reading your book?
Progressives have a hard time seeing how much government policy actively contributes to inequality by redistributing upwards. Progressives typically think of inequality as the natural result of unrestrained markets and see more government power as the solution. Yet in many important cases — in our book we focus on financial regulation, intellectual property, occupational licensing, and land-use regulation — misused government power is the problem and greater reliance on markets is the egalitarian solution.

Progressives have no problem recognizing the political power of big corporations and the rich, yet curiously their implicit assumption is that this power is wielded with amazing restraint. They understand that the rich and powerful can unfairly dominate the policymaking process, but their main worry is that they will use their power to restrain government — to keep their taxes and regulatory compliance costs inappropriately low. But doesn’t it make sense that if you have all this power, you’ll use it for more than just playing defense? If you’ve got that power, you can go on offense as well, empowering government to restrain competition from outsiders so that the rich and powerful benefit at the expense of everybody else. And that is precisely what has happened.

Maybe one reason for the progressive blind spot you mention is that government regulation used to have much more progressive distributional consequences — that is, it did a lot of redistributing from richer to poorer. You argue that the main action is now in the other direction; in your words, “rent-seeking,” or lobbying for special privileges, “has moved upmarket.” Explain what’s happened.
What economists call rent-seeking is bad for economic efficiency by definition: it’s the attempt to make profits through the political process rather than by creating value for customers. The effects on the distribution of income, however, are unclear: rent-seeking could be progressive, regressive, or a wash. When the era of activist government really kicked off during the New Deal, lots of regulatory interventions in the economy — some of which we consider bad policies that stifled competition and cartelized industries — nonetheless had progressive consequences. Think rent control, universal service requirements, and of course pro-union labor legislation. Even when policies favored big business, those businesses frequently had large, semi-skilled, unionized workforces, so some of the rents got shared with workers in the form of higher pay. In more recent decades, though, regulatory interventions that favor the rich have been the norm.

One reason is the decline of unions: nothing has replaced them as a muscular lobby for government interventions on behalf of the less-well-off. Meanwhile, the biggest, most technologically progressive industries (which are usually the focus of regulatory activity) now hire mostly highly skilled workers. So subsidies to these companies don’t leak out much to ordinary workers.

Isn’t it simply the case that a ton of powerful progressives benefit greatly from the rent-seeking you document in the book? I don’t expect the doctors and lawyers and finance types who provide the Democratic Party with a big chunk of its funding, for example, to be all that sympathetic to the idea that they’re contributing to the inequality some of them rail against every two or four years. This seems like a pretty serious impasse.
When we were writing the book, we joked that we were doing our best to antagonize the very people most likely to read a serious nonfiction book from Oxford University Press: doctors, lawyers, financial professionals, and affluent homeowners in big coastal cities. But you’re right, we’re also picking fights with some of the biggest funding sources for the Democratic Party: Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. You can see our book as a critique of progressives from the free-market left. The Affordable Care Act didn’t do nearly enough to address doctors’ inflated fees and incomes; Dodd-Frank didn’t do nearly enough to roll back the regulatory subsidies for financialization and excessive risk-taking.

Of course what we’re proposing is difficult. It’s never easy to take privileges away from a well-organized lobby, especially when it represents the interests of extremely rich and powerful people......MORE
Posted by climateer at 11:10 AM
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