January 2012
185 posts
2012
Resolutions:
405 lb deadlift
Work less
Write more
Predictions:
S&P up ~4%
Q1 GDP is negative; all other quarters positive, avoiding a technical recession
Interest rates above 0 by year end
Romney wins GOP nomination
Obama wins 2012 election
Unemployment @ 8%
World does not end
Another Mayan prediction indicating world’s end in 2014
Sentiments:
Happy birthday, good...
December 2011
93 posts
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Keynes Was Right →
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy...
Shameless Siri Rip-Off Hits Android Market →
parislemon:
But it doesn’t contain a middle finger, so it’s fine.
We know that plenty of folks have mixed feelings about software patents. The first reaction in the ongoing mobile intellectual property wars is to recoil. It seems weirdly nit-picky when some massive lawsuit removes a whole phone - a whole phone! - from the market because it copies incredibly specific functionality. Can a whole...
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Southern Christians Question Their Xenophobia
What Alabama Christians say, do, and think about race is changing.
NPR’s tumblr shared a fascinating tale from the LA Times about the difficulties an Alabama church congregation has had reconciling its faith with its politics. The schism between contemporary Conservative politics and the teachings of Christ is a favorite topic of blogs like Squashed and AZ Spot. When the dual mission to...
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Willard "Mitt" Romney
We don’t feel strongly about Romney as a candidate for a variety of reasons. Nearly all of the reasons, in fact. But we have noticed a disturbing trend in left-wing media lately: referring to the erstwhile candidate as “Willard” Romney. It reminds us very much of right-wing columnists who habitually refer to our President as Barack “Hussein” Obama.
Stop it.
Such...
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Jobless Claims Rise →
Well, phooey.
Claims for unemployment insurance rose 15,000 jobs to 381,000 this morning. We were hoping to see continued downward momentum and accelerating reductions heading into the New Year. The recovery continue its frustrating box step - step forward, to the side, step back, to the side. Smile and jazz hands, everybody!
Fortunately we are still below the 400,000 barrier for new job...
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Drone On
Jeff Miller has an excellent post answering a question about drone strikes that we felt deserved some rebuttal. There is something wrong with the math portion of the test. Something about the below quote makes us feel a bit strange.
As I mentioned yesterday, drones change the calculus of war. Presidents used to have to weigh the potential loss of American soldiers’ lives against the benefits of...
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“Retailers are trying to fight the convenience, price comparison benefits and tax...”
– Not-So-Invisible Hand: Retailers Fighting Smart Phone Price Comparison Apps
Industry groups pooling funds to lobby Washington in a bid to protect them from progress and competition are a great example of why anti-organization labor policies are tremendously hypocritical. The message from retailers...
Quick Kindle Fire Review
Not even close.
We had about four hours with a Kindle Fire, so we can only post initial impressions. First, like: 7 inch tablets are A Thing. They are much less imposing than the iPad, which can feel overly large by comparison. Apple ought to consider smaller form factors. The Fire’s hardware is also attractive and sleek.
Everything else sucks. Performance is slow (it skipped / missed...
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Are We Lurching Toward An Asian Euro? →
It looks like Japan and China are flirting.
The two behemoths of Asia appear to be inching toward a far more open currency and trading arrangement, which could open the door for an intertwining of monetary futures. It should be noted that Japan’s Yen has a lot of devaluation potential, and despite large public debts the island nation has had difficulty expanding exports with European and...
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Home Prices Continue to Collapse →
One ongoing negative in the quest to revitalize the American economy is the ongoing doldrums in the housing market. Absent a few historic spikes (followed by historic mean-reverting collapses) house prices appreciate at about the rate of inflation. There is still a tremendous oversupply of houses, both in normal inventory and “shadow” inventory of pending or off-market foreclosures....
We Believe Inequality Is Problematic
Inequality is real and crippling.
We also believe that we cannot utilize pop culture to justify our theories about why American society is riven by classism. Esquire’s December 13 article is a perfect example of evidence-free debating. TheCallus.com policy is to never take serious political articles prominently featuring Don Draper seriously.
From our perspective, the problem is mostly...
“Even among liberals, the new trend toward behavioral economics demonstrates how...”
– Esquire, who spends four grafs demonstrating “the new classism” with examples from television shows and one sentence alluding to behavioral studies.
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Consider a New Resolution - Get Hard, Not Thin
Every January hundreds of Americans will swear that this is the year, finally, that they will get “in shape”. Getting in shape to most Americans means “going to the gym and walking at moderate to low speed until the calorie counter is very high”. It also means attempting to starve oneself.
Most of us think we know what we need to know in order to be successful with our...
“The American habit of viewing public schools as the great equalizer of our...”
– A Nation of Little Lebowski Urban Achievers (via azspot)
Agreed. However, perhaps part of the fun is the way we have used schools as a method for “proving” various social prejudices. We know that the disadvantaged in inner cities are less likely to perform on tests for reasons that have...
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Consequences of Failure
Today is Mao Zedong’s birthday. We will note in passing that failure has consequences. It had consequences in the Soviet Union as depicted in The Gulag Archipelago, when poor economic performance was blamed on subversive elements that were ritually given 10-year sentences in labor camps. Failure was also a consequence when Kim Jong Il presided over a North Korea that ate grass for...
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Maintaining the Balance of Freedom and Power
When individuals are given the right to do whatever they wish without the threat of retaliation, there is a possibility of troubling results. We believe in the good in humanity, but we also cannot deny the wickedness. America’s checkered past of slavery and internment show that “market-based solutions” are not always adequate correctives for our base behaviors. Similarly, we...
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Let's Have a Debate
Our post earlier on Libertarians and race seems to have aroused certain passions. That’s good - pressing buttons is sort of the point. The central disagreement seems surrounding the idea that removing statist institutions that are intended to engender equality is a racist act.
It is the view of this house that removing statist institutions that protect racial equality is racist. To advocate...
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jakke asked: The Italian government is now formally guaranteeing its big banks' debts. Is this a good idea, in terms of getting out of the current funding situation?
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Progressive Socratic Proofs
Dismantling social institutions that guarantee rights for minorities = racist. Who is in favor of dismantling social institutions that guarantee rights for minorities? Libertarians.
A = B. B = C. A = C.
If your magazine is nicknamed Reason, we hope that you can agree with the critical usage of logic.
Many will recognize the above construct as the relatively basic critique that progressives...
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Recommended Albums, 2011
Here are albums from the past year that we liked.
10. Liturgy - Aesthetica
You have to listen to it. You may or may not like it - Aesthetica is mostly tuneless screaming - but from our perspective it was the album that best captured the national mood.
9. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
This album is about October in Dubai - cold, weird, wreathed in intriguing smoke. Without a distinctive single...
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Rules of Engagement for Libertarian Ideology
We feel that the trouble with libertarianism is similar to the trouble with laissez-faire economic policies or Reconstruction-era non-interventionist race policies in the Northeast. No libertarian can successfully argue to us that we are all born with an equal chance or that market economics linearly reward merit. Therefore, doing nothing and hoping that social systems scale directly to the...
How Did We Get Here? Or, Why Do 20 Year Old... →
kohenari:
Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Steve Horwitz has a long and thoughful piece that every libertarian ought to read and pass along to five friends.
After a good deal of history on Ron Paul and his unsavory associates and associations, Horwitz gets to the heart of the matter:
So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what...
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Bloomberg Releases Fed Borrowing Data for Banks →
A conspiracy-theorist’s dream spreadsheet.
Bloomberg is handing out 3 megabytes of Fed-bank borrowing history in the depths of the financial crisis this morning. The data is the result of several FoIA requests targeting the central bank’s lending policies. You can expect more on this later after we finish volunteering for the day.
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Political Reasons to Be Bullish, 2012
Here’s to optimism.
1. The payroll tax cut.
John Boehner’s not feeling optimistic about this development, but we think traders should. After all, S&P specifically cited the politically sclerotic landscape on Capitol Hill as a key factor in its August decision to downgrade American credit. The eroding power of Tea Party obstructionists is a boon for markets, which need effective...
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Leave GoDaddy Today →
Don’t give SOPA-backing companies your support.
TheCallus.com is hosted by Namecheap, which is offering discounts to users switching from noted terrible company GoDaddy. Why switch? Because SOPA and PROTECT-IP are acts emblematic of a Congress owned by special interests, serving no citizen save the psuedo-citizens we can create with a regulatory filing.
Try discount code SOPASUCKS over at...
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Shell Announces Worse Oil Spill In A Decade →
Surprised you haven’t heard?
40,000 barrels - a gigantic accident. But it happened in Nigeria, a thrall nation for big oil that is absolutely filthy with oil accidents. The Niger delta is ruined after decades of pollution have ruined living conditions and the environment. 1.89 million barrels are estimated to have spilled there from 1976-1996. Shell’s stock is up this week, because no...
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Pour One Out For John Boehner
You know you’re a bad Republican speaker when you can’t pass a tax cut.
That says it all, doesn’t it? Not only were Boehner’s politics bad - raising the payroll tax is not a move we favor - but his Politics were bad. He managed to completely screw up a hard-won Senate deal by letting the Tea Party get too loud, then went public with a confusing ramble about how tax cuts...
“House Republican leaders have decided to accept a short-term extension of the...”
– House Republicans Cave on Payroll Tax Cuts Extension (via ryking)
This is likely to end John Boehner’s career as an influential member of the House. That’s twice now he’s been unable to reign in his unruly caucus. Admittedly, he had a hard job with the band of extremists from the...
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Why Iowa Doesn't Matter This Year (Or Ever)
Keep it simple: they don’t make Republicans or GOP primaries like they used to.
Iowa has had something like four gigantic frontrunners by now. Except the last nominee didn’t win it, and it doesn’t necessarily represent a hugely important caucus in years when we don’t have the usual monolithic Republican Avatar / shoo-in candidate. The thing about Iowa is that it used to...
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A Callus 2012 Wild Stab
We’re going bullish in 2012. Q4 2011 / Q1 2012 probably bottoms us out on Europe, provided we don’t get a bunch more surprises. My perspective is that 2012 will be a lot like 2009 - no one rings a bell for you when the market’s going to turn. And it WILL turn.
In about August everything went nuts and didn’t let up. Next year the big story will be political...
Feeling Sentimental: Consumers Beat →
The holidays are looking better than ever for post-recession consumers.
Consumer sentiment came in at 69.9 on expectations of 68. It seems as though sentiment and spending are converging after a significant parting of ways earlier in the year. For the longest time, survey statistics about sentiment weren’t pairing the spending growth properly. Now the good news is that sentiment is up;...
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Economic Smorgasbord Today
Q3 GDP : revised down to 1.8% from 2%.
This is above my personal estimates / guesses, which had us in technical recession by now. The American economy shrugged off Europe AND a slowdown in the recovery to stay in the technical black. Good work, everyone.
Jobless claims: 364,000, well above the 400,000 line of demarcation for true job growth. It’ll get revised into the 370’s,...
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NAR Overstates Housing Data By 14%; Water Wet →
We still have a conflict of interest, trust us.
Oops! The National Association of Realtors - an industry group for housing salespersons - overstated existing home sales throughout the Great Recession by “accident”. They double-counted data in some circumstances and flat-out flubbed calculation methodology in general, significantly overstating the performance of the housing market....
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GM Hires Consulting Firm To Evaluate Job Cuts →
Merry Christmas! You’re probably getting fired in the New Year.
General Motors, whose stock has collapsed almost 50% since its IPO on November 18, 2010, has hired Hackett to evaluate job cuts. This is a disappointing sign for GM and a concern for the Treasury Department’s ongoing investment in the troubled automaker. One of the key reasons for GM’s latest bailout in its...
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The Sun Bottoms - A Perspective
Some thoughts about cycles of day, night, and markets.
Very little in life can be predicted - we lost around 5% in the markets this year, for example. Tonight’s solstice is a pleasant reminder not only that things do get brighter, but also that there are factually currents to life that you can set your watch to. Markets should be so lucky to know when to believe that tomorrow will not get...
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Is It Reasonable To Expect Tax Increases?
The payroll tax cut is certain to benefit the economy in the short run. But is it time to think about all of the bills coming due?
More money in consumer pockets is, doubtless, a temporary boon to consumer spending. Remember, payroll taxes are regressive; enacting cuts provides a disproportionate benefit to members of the population that are very likely to spend money now. Income tax cuts and...
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