. . . . I hope they eat his sniveling little prissy ass for lunch.


I was once told that alligators have very little strength in their jaws for opening, which is why it's very east to hold their mouths shut. But they have enormous strength for closing those jaws quickly and keeping them closed. Hmmmmmm.......

We have a retention pond next to the Irish Pub where we watch the Browns games. It's got a 4 foot concrete wall topped with a 6 foot steel fence. And inside resides a 10 ft gator. He's probably been in there since he was a puppy gator, and he has no way out. Since he's not in the wild, we feed him.

The other day after lunch I was tossing him french fries, one at a time and he was eating them. So, I ran over to Aldi's and bought him a couple of chickens.

Feeding him that asshole would be cruelty. Gotta cause heartburn and indigestion. We thought about tossing him a few Steelers fans, but that would be worse.

Just saying. If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport.

"Fly, my pretties, fly!"

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/inherited-vs-self-made-a-map-of-how-the-worlds-richest-built-their-fortunes-2015-10-26?siteid=YAHOOB

?uuid=4ef2c466-7c03-11e5-8f43-0015c588e0f6

There’s a mostly even split among the world’s richest, at least when broken down in each country by who made their own money and who had it handed down from mommy and daddy.

That’s the conclusion illustrated on this map posted by Raul Amoros on cost-estimating website HowMuch.net. Overall, the breakdown shows that 52% of the wealthiest people from each nation were born with a silver spoon. The rest had to create their own vast sums.

Of note, the self-made riches tend to have more, with an average wealth that’s 58% greater than those who inherited their money. Three of the richest men in the world — Bill Gates, Spain’s Amancio Ortega and Mexico’s Carlos Slim — all fall on the “self-made” side and are far wealthier than the biggest beneficiary of family riches — L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt of France.

“One might be forgiven for thinking that around the world, the richest of the rich were all born into their money," Amoros wrote. “After all, a self-made person would have to accumulate wealth so quickly that within one generation they surpass a family that’s been accumulating it for several. “

1 minute video

It's different this time
A business doesn't need any revenue
It's not about how much you earn, it's what you are worth!

City elections next week; only one ward has a contest, but we are doing it city-wide anyway. During the easy elections we poll workers practice up for the Big One next November 2016, trying out new equipment and procedures.

It makes for a long day, 6 AM until at least 9 PM. But it's nice to be appreciated.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ibm-nears-2b-deal-for-weather-channels-digital-assets-2015-10-27?siteid=YAHOOB

International Business Machines Corp. is nearing a deal to acquire the digital and data assets of Weather Co., owner of the Weather Channel, according to people familiar with the situation.

The deal, which would be valued at more than $2 billion, could be announced as early as Wednesday, one of the people said. The deal doesn’t include the traditional TV channel business but does include such digital businesses as the website and app, intellectual property, infrastructure and data, the people said.

IBM IBM, -4.04% is particularly interested in Weather Co.’s forecasting group, WSI. That division houses technology and weather data that the Weather Co. collects, manipulates and licenses to companies ranging from airlines to utility companies to insurance providers.

Weather Co. is owned by a consortium that includes private-equity firms Bain Capital LLC and Blackstone Group LP, and Comcast Corp.’s CMCSA, -1.03% NBCUniversal. They bought the company in 2008 for roughly $3.5 billion. Weather Co. Chief Executive David Kenny is expected to join IBM after the deal closes, according to one of the people.

Weather Co. had courted various types of potential buyers. More than a year ago, Google Inc. GOOG, -0.60% GOOGL, +0.23% was offered the chance to bid on the Weather Channel’s digital assets but the company wasn’t interested, according to a person familiar with the matter.

IS THIS WHY WEATHER UNDERGROUND IS OFFLINE THIS EVENING?

Spring-like temperatures.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-administration-cracks-down-on-banking-on-college-campuses-2015-10-27?siteid=YAHOOB

The government is making it harder for financial institutions to market their products to one of the most captive — and lucrative — audiences: College students.

Under new rules announced by the Department of Education Tuesday, colleges that partner with financial institutions to disburse financial aid funds will be required to ensure that students have a choice in the way they receive those funds and have access to a way to receive them without onerous fees.

In the process of making the new rules, the Department identified some “troubling practices” in the college debt and prepaid card space, such as a scarcity of options available to students looking to access their financial aid dollars and a lack of transparency, Ted Mitchell, the Department’s undersecretary said on a conference call with reporters. The goal of the new rules, which largely take effect on July 1, 2016, is to curb these practices and increase opportunities to make informed choices, he said.

Consumer advocates have argued that the financial aid process is rife with opportunities for companies to take advantage of students. Colleges often partner with outside companies to distribute a students’ leftover financial aid funds after the school takes what it’s owed from the pool of federal financial aid dollars it draws down from the federal government...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-delivery-workers-sue-say-they-should-be-full-employees-2015-10-27?siteid=YAHOOB

Amazon.com Inc., which has quickly built a network of on-demand workers for its one-hour delivery service, now faces a lawsuit over how those workers are treated.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County, Calif., Superior Court on behalf of four couriers, seeks back wages and compensation for expenses like fuel and workers’ compensation insurance. The workers are contracted through Scoobeez, a unit of closely held ABT Holdings Inc.

The action potentially thrusts Amazon AMZN, +0.49% into the center of a debate roiling Silicon Valley over whether on-demand workers should be treated as employees or independent contractors. Companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Postmates Inc. have faced similar suits over their workforce.

Amazon’s Prime Now service, available in more than a dozen U.S. metropolitan areas, promises delivery of thousands of goods within one hour for $7.99 or two hours or more free. The Seattle retailer recently introduced the service in San Francisco and San Antonio. Amazon recently began a separate delivery program that relies on couriers not under contract with third-party companies. The Flex service allows regular people to sign up for shifts using their smartphones and make package delivery for Amazon in Seattle.

In the suit, the couriers allege Amazon pays less than minimum wage and treats them like employees, including requiring they wear uniforms and work at set times.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/27/senate-passes-cybersecurity-threat-sharing-bill-that-tech-hates/

In a crushing blow to the tech industry and privacy advocates, the Senate today passed the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). The bill, which passed the Senate on a 74-21 bipartisan vote, is intended to allow companies to share information about cybersecurity threats with the government. However, critics, particularly those in the tech industry, say the bill will extend the surveillance capabilities of government intelligence agencies while doing little to prevent hacks.

The bill has already passed the House of Representatives. The White House backs CISA, and it will likely sign the bill into law.

Prior to the bill’s passage on Tuesday, senators fought for amendments that would reign in CISA and offer more privacy protections. However, all amendments intended to increase the removal of personal information from threats failed. Senators adopted a 10-year sunset clause for the bill, though privacy advocates like Senator Al Franken hoped the bill would expire in six.

Though the bill was expected to pass, today’s vote was a huge setback for tech’s lobbying efforts on surveillance issues. In the wake of the revelations of former government contractor Edward Snowden, large tech companies have pushed the government to curtail surveillance practices, most recently with the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act.

AND I THOUGHT IT WAS THE CENTRAL BANKING QE PONZI SCHEME....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/10/28/ben-bernanke-identifies-the-global-economys-largest-problem-bankers-short-term-memories/

Tim Worstall: I’m not sure that I actually agree with this identification of the global economy’s largest problem by Ben Bernanke. The pointing to it as “a” problem in the short to medium term, yes, that I’ll go along with. But I’m afraid that I have a rather different problem in mind for the largest one we face. Still, Bernanke’s the economist, not me, so perhaps we should take his idea as being correct. And what he’s really saying here is that our major problem is that the collective memory of the banking industry just seems to be too short:

I can certainly see that as being a large problem. The Fed did indeed slash interest rates, as they should have done, and investors did indeed go off searching for yield. That was rather the point of QE in fact, to get investors going off searching for yield by moving out along the risk curve. So, in the short term, mission accomplished because investors did exactly what the central bank wanted them to do. However, there’s been rather a lot of leakage of this into those emerging markets. And that’s not so comfortable. For the problem is that the borrowings are generally in US dollars while the earnings to repay them, even if not the denomination of the loans themselves, are in the local currencies. And in many of those emerging economies the earnings were between somewhat and largely dependent upon the commodity boom as China developed. So far, nothing wrong with this. However, now we’ve got a combination of China’s growth slowing and also various commodity production schemes coming on line, increasing supply. Increasing supply just as demand growth starts to falter. The result has been what we’ve seen, collapsing commodity prices.

That means in turn lower earnings from said commodities: and as this is happening the currencies of many of those emerging economies are falling against the US dollar, as they would. So, we get a double whammy: lower earnings in currencies that are worth less, against which the value of the debt isn’t going down at all. And that could indeed be a serious problem. But this is just an example of, a symptom of, what might be a larger problem for us free market types. For we generally think that people learn from past mistakes and don’t do them again. Thus we don’t, say, have to worry about people over stoking the US housing market as the memories of how that played out are still fresh. On the other hand there’s the financial markets meme that banking mistakes aren’t repeated until all the people who remember the last one have retired. At which point someone rediscovers the perpetuum mobile and off we all go into another bubble and crash.

So what Bernanke is really pointing to is that in the 90s we really did learn that currency mismatches in lending can be rather dangerous. But only 20 years later we seem to have the same mistake looming. And that’s not comforting for the free market types like me. Because it means that finance is a whole lot dumber than we thought it was: if the institutional memory is that short then it must be. So, not a comforting thought. And one that leads to the conclusion that perhaps more risk oversight is needed. Not, by the way, on Wall Street or in the City. They can take care of themselves and the amounts outstanding aren’t of systemic importance to them. But in those developing countries, perhaps more of an eye should be kept on “hard currency” borrowing than has been so far.

As to what I do think is our largest problem it’s that, despite the stunning success in poverty reduction, at the end of this year still a little under 10% of humanity will be stuck in the peasant destitution of absolute poverty. That strikes me as the world’s greatest problem for moral if no other reasons. Policy should be devoted, as far as it can be, to dealing with this and all other issues come behind it in the queue.

My latest book is "The No Breakfast Fallacy, why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources." Amazon and Amazon.co.uk. $6.99 and relevant prices in other currencies.

http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/what-the-steve-jobs-movie-wont-tell-you-about-apples-success

Mariana Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex. Her widely-acclaimed book, The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths, reveals the critical role that we, the taxpayers, play in the creation of the most exciting innovations of our time through publicly-funded investment. (The new U.S. edition hits the shelves October 27th). Mazzucato debunks common myths about how innovation works and shapes a new narrative on how to grow a robust and inclusive economy. Think that iPhone in your pocket is simply a product of Silicon Valley magic? Think again! (Join Mazzucato in New York for a talk and conversation with Time Magazine’s Rana Foroohar and The New School’s Mark Setterfield on October 28).

Lynn Parramore: We constantly hear that anything to do with government is incompetent and inefficient. Yet as you show, many of the industries and products that make our lives better wouldn’t exist without government-funded research. The whole process of economic growth is hugely interdependent with governmental action. What about something like the iPhone? Is it a product Silicon Valley magic and the genius of Steve Jobs? Or is there more to the story?

Mariana Mazzucato: Economists have recognized that government has a role to play in markets, but only to fix failures, like monopolies, for example. Yet if we look at what governments have done around the world, they have not just stepped in to address failures. They have actually actively shaped and created markets. This is the case in IT, biotech, nanotech and in today’s emerging green economy. Public sector funds have not only supported basic research, but also applied research and even early-stage, high-risk company finance. This is important because most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.

I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets, because what makes the iPhone ‘smart’ and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touch screen display and even the SIRI voice activated system —all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA!

These agencies are all ’ mission driven’, which matters to their success, including who they are able to hire. The Department of Energy (DoE) was recently run by Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who wanted the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to do for energy what DARPA did for the Internet. Would he have bothered leaving academia to join the civil service just to ‘fix’ markets? Surely not. That’s boring.

LP: So what Steve Jobs and his team did was not central to the greatness of Apple?

MM: It’s not that Steve Jobs was not a genius—of course he was! But the problem is that the narrative we tell around entrepreneurs like him, Bill Gates or Elon Musk is so unbalanced. We pretend that government at best was important for some infrastructure and basic science behind their empires. We see the new Steve Jobs film, which is based on a 600-page book where not one word mentions any of the public funding behind Apple’s empire. But the real iPhone story — or the story behind biotechnology — reveals a very different narrative in which government-funded research made the most exciting innovations possible. The same could be said of Elon Musk today —Tesla and Space X not only benefit from government-funded basic research through agencies like the DoE and NASA, but they have also, as companies, received high-risk investments by the public sector. Just one example is the $465 million guaranteed loan received by Tesla by the DoE. As recently shown by an LA Times article, the entire Musk empire has received close to $5 billion in direct and indirect support.

Do we hear about that? No. Is that ‘story’ helpful for future innovation? No.

AND DOES APPLE PAY FEDERAL INCOME TAXES? NO!

Wolf Richter: IBM Discloses SEC Investigation, Plunges to Worst Level since 2010, Even Share Buybacks Don’t Work Anymore

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/27/ibm-plunges-to-lowest-level-since-2010-on-sec-investigation-even-share-buybacks-arent-helping-anymore/

Financial Engineering bites back.

LONG EXPOSE ON HOW HIGH TECH DABBLED IN HIGH FINANCE AND TOOK A LOW BLOW...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/will-adverse-selection-force-obamacare-into-a-death-spiral.html


This post, with its somewhat alarmist headline — I mean, let’s hope it’s alarmist(1) — was prompted by alert reader Jason, who mailed us flagging some important information on Blue Cross/Blue Shield in his home state of North Carolina...But before we get to Jason’s mail, let’s define the term “adverse selection.” Adverse selection is a form of information asymmetry, where sellers and buyers don’t have the same information; for example, a health insurance buyer who knows they need health care, and a health insurance seller who does not know which sellers need health care and which do not. Economics professor Robert Frank explains how an unregulated health insurance market with such asymmetries would play out in the New York Times (2013):



In other words, a death spiral. ObamaCare’s mandate was supposed to keep enough healthy people in the pool so that the adverse selection problem did not arise(2). (According to the articles cited in the notes to this Wikipedia article on adverse selection, the evidence for adverse selection in the health insurance market is mixed at best(3); ironically, therefore, ObamaCare might end up providing that evidence!) So how’s that working out? Let’s now turn to Jason’s mail (lightly edited):



Jason’s interest was piqued by a link that showed Blue Cross/Blue Shield (BCBS) in Illlinois eliminating its most popular individual plan. He goes on:



And Blue Cross themselves explain:



(Notice right here how ObamaCare is random with respect to jurisdiction. If you live in the Charlotte and Triangle areas, you go to Pain City; otherwise, you go to Happyville. Yay!) Jason explains how BCBS affects him:



(NC readers will remember a post from Dromaius in 2013 on how insurance companies design narrow networks to make sure “consumers” needing specialists don’t sign up for their policies.) Jason’s solution:



(Wait, I thought Obama said “we were able to deliver on universal health care”? To be fair, if you parse the words, he did just that. To take delivery, you need only leave your home and move somewhere else. Such a deal.) North Carolina’s BCBS has a blog, where they explain their thought process for re-inserting their sucking mandibles “revising” their “individual product offerings:



And it’s not just BCBS in North Carolina:



Jason translates how BCBS is “adjusting” its “rate filing”:


(Again, does this sound like Obama’s “universal health care” to you?)


BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! IT'S THE GIFT THAT NEVER STOPS GIVING! SEE LINK

NOTES:

1) Because I’m not a “worse is better” kind of guy.

2) Obama’s demogoguery on the mandate in 2008 was too much even for Krugman. Clinton supported the mandate; and Obama ran Harry and Louise-style ads (the background) against Clinton, opposing it. Naturally, when in office, Obama supported it.

3) “Asymmetric Information in Health Insurance: Evidence from the National Medical Expenditure Survey,” The RAND Journal of Economics, 2001. “A robust prediction of adverse-selection models is that riskier types by more coverage and, on average, end up using more care. We test for unobservables linking health insurance status and health care consumption. We find no evidence of informational asymmetries.”

4) If you squeeze the profit balloon on the policy side, by insisting that those with pre-existing conditions be covered, as ObamaCare does, then the profit balloon expands on the crapification side, and you get narrow networks without specialists and/or limited by geography, high co-pays and deductibles, narrow formularies, and other forms of obfuscation (or, to put it less politely, fraud). We should be seeking to pop the profit balloon in health care, not squeeze it.

[5) Or — anything’s possible — the Tea Party, et al., might actually grow some stones and start doing serious tax resistance, now that the screws are beginning to tighten; interestingly, the ObamaCare statute forbids the IRS from garnishing your wages or putting a lien on you if you don’t pay the tax penalty for not fulfilling the mandate, which sure looks like a set-up to me. (Yes, the IRS can take your refund, but surely that can be gamed.) Another reason 2016 might be more interesting even than the usual Presidential year.

(also running out of easily accessible material...down to the gleaning old emails again)