Woke up bleary-eyed on Sunday morning to find this all over the front page of the New York Times: The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person....
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An effort to raise the state gas tax as a way to pay for the badly underfunded road budget in Iowa was seriously studied but came nowhere close to passing last year. Opponents criticized the measure as a way to strangle the economy. Via The Economist comes a nice little bit of infoporn on...
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Oh joy! I haven’t had much to say about peak oil in some time what with the economy falling off a cliff and taking energy demand with it. But it’s been there, lurking in the wings, waiting to have its say in any economic takeoff. So, today the well-respected Chief Economist at the International...
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Even if you aren’t really into Science Fiction, if you want your mind to be totally blown, try Accelerando, by Charles Stross. It is a collection of nine interconnected short stories telling the tale of three generations of a disfunctional family before during and after a technological singularity. Acelerando won the Locus award and...
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From The Economist, a very well done and easily understood graphic on the history of the American economy and the fundamental instability of our consumer-oriented growth from the 1980′s to 2007. Rebalancing The Economy
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EYTYK = Everything You Think You Know. The relentless drumbeat from the music and movie industries for the last ten years can be summarized thusly: “Help! Illegal downloads are killing us. We need Big Brother to squash our customers for us!” Wrong!! There are two things killing (at least) the music industry. The first...
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and vice versa. Those were the words of General Motors’ then-President Charles Wilson in 1953 at his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Defense. A couple of weeks ago, I made the argument — knowing perfectly well that it would never happen — that the best thing for the nation and for the US...
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On Wednesday the 20th, I attended the Chamber of Commerce, Biz After 5, at Ashford University’s call center out on the bypass. The food and drink spread was very nice. Before anything else, let me just say that the facility is great, Ashford made a great decision (albeit with some considerable arm-twisting) to locate...
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Iowans — sometimes especially Clintonians — often have a glass half-empty attitude about our state. Cheer up, we are definitely in the first world and are way better off than lots of the US. Below is a map of US states and how they rank according to the UN Human Development Index. Values: +.950...
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You: You heartless bastard! What about the jobs? Me: Chrysler employs 60,000 people. That’s a rounding error in the total number of jobs lost since the current downturn started. GM employs 240,000 globally, approximately 98,000 U.S. Again, compared to the 2.5 million lost jobs since October, 2008 those aren’t particularly meaningful figures from a...
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