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TED Comes to Television and Goes to School
Andrew J. Coulson
The great popularity of TED talks is one of the most encouraging signs that, despite our fossilized school systems, humanity still wants to learn. No one is assigned to watch TED talks. We watch them because they often present a compelling learning experience that excites and entertains. While such experiences sometimes occur in “the dominant education culture” of modern schooling, they occur “in spite of that culture, and not because of it.”
Those quotes are from the final segment of a series of TED talks on education that aired this week on PBS thanks to the New York member station, WNET. The speaker was Ken Robinson, and if you’ve never seen one of his lectures, you’re missing out.
Some highlights of the show:
Management consultant, turned teacher, turned research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth on the prime importance of Grit in academic and life success. Duckworth explains that Grit is in fact a stronger predictor of such success than IQ—which is interesting because it echoes some very old and it seems mostly forgotten research by Edward Webb, a doctoral student of the intelligence measurement pioneer Charles Spearman. Spearman coined the term “g factor” for the strong intercorrelation that each individual shows across a diverse range of mental tests. It is this g that IQ tests attempt to measure. To make a long story short, Webb went looking for a bunch of personality traits that were also correlated with g. He failed. Instead, he found a completely separate set of intercorrelated traits, which he called w (for “Will”), that basically amount to what Duckworth refers to as Grit. Four of the those w traits were: perseverance, kindness on principle, trustworthiness, and conscientiousness. [For more on this, see Arthur Jensen’s “The g Factor”.] Duckworth’s segment begins at 13:30.
Geoffrey Canada is eloquent about the need to simultaneously encourage innovation and abandon failed approaches; and Ken Robinson is equally so on the failure of the dominant approach to schooling to promote a diversity of methods and curricula, or to stimulate curiosity and creativity, due to its excessive reliance on centralized command-and-control. Of course both of the preceding observations are consistent with the fact that markets are better than monopolies in providing products and services, in education as in other fields, but it’s not clear that either speaker would put the matter in those terms.
And for the artistically inclined, there’s a quite good young poet, 19-year-old Malcolm London, at the 35 minute mark, and a lovely rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” by the host, singer John Legend, at 41:58.
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International News • Cyprus goes from bad to worse by the day; so does Portugal
Cyprus goes from bad to worse by the day; so does Portugal
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/am … -portugal/
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics Last updated: April 12th, 2013
412 Comments Comment on this article
Merkel has told the Bundestag not to increase the Cyprus rescue package
On cue, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat base in the Bundestag has warned that there can be no increase in the EU-IMF rescue package for Cyprus.
The Cypriot people alone must carry the extra cost of up to €5.5bn beyond what was already agreed in the €17.5bn deal in March.
"Should that not be possible, the assent of the German Bundestag next week is out of the question," said Christian von Stetten, a key member of the finance committee.
"The escalating gap in funding is huge and confirms my doubts in the finance framework prepared by the Troika and the Republic of Cyprus. It is going the way of Greece. Ever more funding gaps keep coming to light," he said.
So we have a stand-off yet again. Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades says the country needs "extra assistance", and indeed it does since the extra demands on Cyprus are a further 28pc of GDP.
If the eurozone refuses to offer any further help, there must surely be a greater temptation to withdraw from the euro and default on sovereign debt in a classic restructuring deal with the IMF.
That is what the IMF is there to do. Such restructurings have been done countless times across the world over the last 50 years. It is traumatic, but countries usually recover after a couple of years.
The crucial point for the Cypriot people is that the cost-benefit calculus is moving in that direction. Whether they have understood this is another matter. They may in due course as the ghastly reality of Troika policy hits them.
And just to clarify, the reason why the rescue costs are shooting up is because the Troika has finally recognised that its treatment of Cyprus is pushing the economy over a cliff. The depressionary spiral itself is causing the numbers to spike.
So Cyprus is very far from being solved, and so is Portugal. A fresh Troika leak, this time to the Pink Sheet, has confirmed what anybody following Portugal already suspected. The country is stuck in a debt-compound trap. The economic slump is proving much deeper than forecast. The deficit has been rising not falling, in spite of austerity cuts.
Specifically, it will need to need to borrow €14.1 billion in 2014, and €15bn in 2015. This is 30pc more than required when the crisis blew up in 2011. The average interest rate will be higher than it was then.
The leaked report said: "Portugal has the challenge of needing to finance more than pre-crisis albeit with a sub-investment grade rating. There is substantial funding risk for Portugal given that it is still subject to substantial vulnerabilities at the end of the programme."
"The task of issuing medium and long-term debt above what is already held by market participants might be very demanding without an improvement in Portugal’s sub-investment grade rating and the build-up of a stable investor base."
In other words Portugal is in a deeper hole after its €78bn bail-out than it was before. Public debt will reach 124pc of GDP this year. The "financing burden" will keep rising until 2017.
Which raises the question, what will Germany and the northern creditor states do if/ when it becomes undeniable that Portugal need a second rescue?
They have given a solemn pledge (another one) that there will be no repeat of the `PSI’ private haircut on sovereign debt that is deemed to have been a disaster in Greece. So they have three choices:
a) They violate their pledge and impose a Greek-style debt restructuring, destroying bond market confidence and risking contagion to Spain and Italy.
b) They take the money from Portuguese bank accounts, regardless of whether the banks have done anything wrong.
c) They pay for it themselves and acknowledge to their parliaments at long last that it costs real taxpayer money to hold EMU together.
I suppose there are other possibilities. They could try to bully the ECB into buying debt, but there are obvious limits to this. Germany’s Jorg Asmussen has to agree.
There is of course great sympathy in Berlin, The Hague, and Helsinki for the free-market team of premier Pedro Passos Coelho. His drive for austerity has been nothing less than heroic.
However, there is less sympathy for him at home. The austerity consensus in the Assembleia has collapsed.
Ex-premier and elder statesman Mario Soares said this morning that all opposition parties on the Left – socialists, Bloco, communists – should get together to "bring down" the government.
"In its eagerness to do the bidding of Senhora Merkel, they have sold everything and ruined this country. In two years this government has destroyed Portugal. We absolutely have to end this austerity," he said.
He also said to Antena 1 that Portugal will "never be able to pay its debts however much it impoverishes itself. If you can’t pay, the only solution is not to pay."
"When Argentina was in crisis it didn’t pay. Did anything happen? No, nothing happened he said."
Raoul Ruparel from Open Europe said Portugal has now exhausted its "internal devaluation" policy. "Portugal’s austerity programme is coming up against huge political and constitutional limits. The previous political consensus in parliament has evaporated. Fundamentally, as so often in this crisis, the eurozone is now coming up against the full force of national democracy. "
The top court ruled a week ago that pay and pension cuts for public workers in Mr Passos Coelho’s budget are illegal, driving a coach and horses through the government’s whole strategy.
Exports are doing well, but the country’s trade gearing is too low (30pc of GDP) to offset the violent contraction in internal demand. External debt is 300pc of GDP. The International Investment Position is 105pc of GDP in the red.
And let me close with this chart that Raoul has put together. It shows that the gap in unit labour costs with Germany is no longer closing. It is widening again.
Click to enlarge
As predicted by so many, the attempt to drive down wages in modern democracy is not only brutal but often impossible. What you gain from wage compression you lose from lagging productivity as investment collapses.
Did nobody ever explain this to them?
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun Apr 14, 2013 10:55 am
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Gold and Silver • Gold price suppression: the game goes on
Gold price suppression: the game goes on
by Alasdair Macleod – Finance And Economics.org
Published : April 08th, 2013
http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gol … cleod&mk=1
The slide in precious metal prices has done much to undermine investor confidence, yet the indications are that demand for the physical metals remains strong. This leads many observers to comment that paper gold and silver and not bullion are driving prices. The current sell off is a combination of long paper positions capitulating, new short positions being opened by trend-chasers, and importantly, bullion banks squaring their books.
A better way to differentiate between futures and forward markets and physical demand is to regard the former two as used by speculating investors and the latter by buyers seeking financial protection from systemic risk. In the middle there are those who buy futures to take delivery, but they are a minority. This divergence of motive explains why paper markets seem to be playing a different tune from the physical market.
While speculating investors are losing their nerve, they are ignoring three recent bits of information worth considering. In a radio interview given by former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts to Goldseek Radio over Easter he concludes that the Fed is suppressing the gold price so that markets do not lose confidence in the dollar and drive up interest rates. His reasoning is clear, logical, and importantly, well-informed. The Treasury Secretary, who was his immediate boss, has a duty of oversight of the Exchange Stabilisation Fund, which was set up in 1934 to “deal in gold and foreign exchange and such other instruments of credit and securities as he may deem necessary….” Roberts therefore knows what he is talking about.
The second bit of information was research into US imports and exports of gold, conducted by Eric Sprott and Shree Kargutkar which analysed US trade statistics since 1991 to conclude that at least 4,500 tonnes of gold over and above US gold production and recycling had been exported, and possibly as much as 11,200 tonnes when private sector demand in the US is included. This gold can only have come from official sources, which confirms deductive analysis over the years by our own James Turk and Frank Veneroso, that substantial amounts of gold have been supplied into the markets by Western governments and their central banks.
The third bit of information was my paper written for GoldMoney a month ago that concluded that the Bank of England’s custody of monetary gold cannot be more than 3,320 tonnes, the balance of a minimum of 2,220 tonnes being non-monetary gold held mostly for governments and perhaps sovereign wealth funds. So contrary to appearances, at a maximum, only 60% of the gold in the Bank’s custody is actually monetary gold.
Furthermore, when news such as the Cyprus banking debacle hits the headlines gold and silver get sold down aggressively. This contrary action is consistent with intervention designed to bolster confidence in paper money. The evidence that central banks and their agencies have been suppressing the price of gold is therefore overwhelming, and Paul Roberts’ analysis confirms why this is happening. When Western central banks rig markets, punting against them is a mug’s game. But for those that recognise that central banks have dug themselves into a hole from which there is no escape for the banking system, governments and ultimately paper currencies, there is an irrefutable logic in possessing physical gold and silver.
Instead of worrying about prices going down, we should count our lucky stars for the gifts of artificially cheap gold and silver, courtesy of our central banks.
Thanks to Alasdair Macleod from www.goldmoney.com
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Mon Apr 08, 2013 12:18 pm
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Gold and Silver • Dumb money goes short silver, smart money unloads its shorts
Gold and Silver Disaggregated COT Report (DCOT) for April 5
Dumb money goes short silver, smart money unloads its shorts, GGR says
http://www.gotgoldreport.com/2013/04/go … ril-5.html
This week shows an important and dramatic change in the silver futures positioning.
HOUSTON — This week’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) disaggregated commitments of traders (DCOT) report was released at 15:30 ET Friday. Our recap of the changes in weekly positioning by the disaggregated trader classes, as compiled by the CFTC, is just below.
Update 1: Adds charts for gold and silver short positioning by Managed Money traders.
This week shows an important and dramatic change in the silver futures positioning.
Note: Spec Funds (Managed Money) have become net short silver futures as of this report. Note also the extremely low net short positioning of the Producer/Merchants for gold. The Producer Merchants, the category which includes bullion banks, have not had so few bets that gold would fall in price since the 2008 panic. That is the same thing as saying that the large commercial traders are currently the least fearful that gold prices will fall further since December 9, 2008, when they then held just 80,669 contracts net short with gold then near $776 the ounce.
20130405 DCOT
(DCOT Table for April 5, for data as of the close on Tuesday, April 2. Source CFTC for COT data, Cash Market for gold and silver.) (More…)
In the DCOT table above a net short position shows as a negative figure in red. A net long position shows in black. In the Change column, a negative number indicates either an increase to an existing net short position or a reduction of a net long position. A black figure in the Change column indicates an increase to an existing long position or a reduction of an existing net short position. The way to think of it is that black figures in the Change column are traders getting “longer” and red figures are traders getting less long or shorter.
All of the trader’s positions are calculated net of spreading contracts as of the Tuesday disaggregated COT report.
Spec Funds Record High Short Position for Silver
If there is one particular chart of the many we review each week that we might want to call attention to, it would have to be the chart below – the gross short positioning of traders classed by the CFTC as Managed Money, aka the Spec Funds.
20130405 MM Silver Shorts
Managed Money Net Short Silver Futures for First Time in over Five Years
Because of that extremely high Managed Money silver short position, collectively the Spec Funds showed their largest ever net short, repeat net short position for silver futures since the inception of the CFTC disaggregated commitments of traders reports (data begins in 2006). As of April 2, with silver then showing a last trade of $27.26, Managed Money traders reported a net short position of 2,497 lots as shown in the chart below.
20130405 MM Silver Net
Managed Money traders have been net short silver futures before, for one reporting week on September 4, 2007, when they reported being 92 contracts net short with silver then changing hands at $12.09 an ounce. Two months later, silver had tested $15. Six months later, in March of 2008 silver had cleared $20 – just before the 2008 panic took control of the markets.
Managed Money Near Record High Short Gold Futures
Perhaps as a "runner up" we might point to the chart below as important and noteworthy – the gross short positioning of Managed Money traders in gold futures as of Tuesday.
20130405 MM Gold Shorts
The Managed Money short positioning charts for gold and silver have something very much in common, in terms of what they represent.
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun Apr 07, 2013 2:24 pm
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California taxpayers played for chumps? Most of new tax increase goes to govt employee pensions
California is so beautiful. There was a time when people dreamed of moving there. Now people are trying to get out. At least many of the people in private industry. The Golden State is golden no longer.
The state recently passed a voter approved tax increase of $50 billion over 5 years. It was a huge increase and passed as the “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education” initiative.
But what the initiative is mostly funding are the pensions of California’s army of public employees.
The state made promises it could not keep and now the bill is coming due. And you thought the money was going to the kids. Sucker.
(From Bloomberg.com)
What if a corporation raised $500 million in a securities offering on the premise that the proceeds would go for operating expenses, then disclosed a few months later that $300 million of this amount would instead be used to service a debt that wasn’t disclosed in the offering document?
This would be false advertising, subject to sanction by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Unfortunately, the SEC doesn’t have jurisdiction over state politicians engaging in the same behavior, and, in the case of California, involving sums that are 100 times bigger.
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Bill Maher goes all “Tea Party” and weirds out Howard Dean
The source is completely partisan. I try to avoid using such sources generally, but this video is great. Howard Dean is like, “Dude, where are you going with this? I thought you were our boy.” And Maher is for the most part. But he is given to moments of honesty. This is one of them.
I’m mad it took me a month to find this video.
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Mr. Paul Goes to Washington
Julian Sanchez
As Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged early on in his epic 13-hour speech Wednesday (highlights here), his decision to mount an old-fashioned, talk-till-you-drop filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director didn’t really have much to do with Brennan personally. But neither was it really, at a fundamental level, about the narrow question of whether the president can “drop a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” as you sit sipping a latte on American soil. If any citizens were realistically worried about that prospect, Attorney General Eric Holder has (somewhat belatedly) answered that question in the negative, prompting Paul to declare victory on that front.
But as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observes, the spectre of Predators over Starbucks actually served to spotlight the “extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year ‘war on terrorism’ ”—and to frame a much broader and more wide-ranging critique of that “perpetual war,” in which Paul charged that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities to an unaccountable executive branch. In Paul’s view, “we shouldn’t be asking [the president] for drone memos”—documents laying out the legal basis for the CIA’s targeted killing program, which the administration has finally, grudgingly deigned to provide to Congress, though not the American public—”we should be giving him drone memos.” As if to highlight the erosion of statutory checks on the president’s counterterror authority, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared that, after all, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed after 9/11 made no exception for actions “in the United States”—even though Congress had specifically rejected a request to include that phrase in the authorization.
The broadly positive reaction to Paul’s filibuster suggests, to me at least, that many Americans now fall outside the bipartisan Washington consensus that there’s little need for serious congressional scrutiny or debate when it comes to the War on Terror, and are relieved to hear that dissatisfaction echoed on the Senate floor. No longer as terrorized or shell-shocked as we were a decade ago, perhaps we’re becoming less willing to accept assertions that the public has no business knowing how and when the president may authorize secret killings in countries where we are not formally at war. If we want to get really radical, we may eventually begin to suggest there are proper constraints—if not constitutional, then at least moral—even on the killing of human beings who had the poor taste to be born in another country. We might question whether Americans are being well served when Congress spends less time debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act or the FISA Amendments Act than Senator Paul did (literally) standing on principle Wednesday night.
Is it absurd to fear, as some of Paul’s colleagues charged, that the president will begin launching drone strikes on American soil? Probably. But the point is precisely that we live under an administration so unwilling to acknowledge meaningful limits on what they may do in the name of national security that it was an exercise in tooth-pulling just to get a public disavowal of an absurd scenario that the government’s anemic targeted killing “standards,” taken to their logical extreme, would not appear to foreclose. The crucial message we should take from Paul’s marathon oration, then, may be this: If it’s absurd to pose the question that inspired his filibuster, surely it’s far more absurd that we’ve arrived, after a decade of complacency about government secrecy and unfettered executive discretion in the sphere of counterterrorism, at a point where the question would need to be posed.
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Gold and Silver • ALERT: CFTC Goes After CME(CRIMEX)!
ALERT: CFTC Goes After CME(CRIMEX)!
Here’s an interesting bit of news out of the CFTC…
CFTC Charges CME Group’s New York Mercantile Exchange and Two Former Employees with Disclosing Material Nonpublic Information about Customer Trades
http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr6519-13
Washington, DC – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today filed an enforcement action charging the New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc. (CME NYMEX), which is owned and operated by the CME Group, and two former CME NYMEX employees, William Byrnes and Christopher Curtin, with violating the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Regulations through the repeated disclosures of material nonpublic customer information over of period of two and one-half years to an outside commodity broker who was not authorized to receive the information.
We’ll see how this plays out but it looks like "business as usual" at the COMEX is Ending! This bodes well for the criminals at the CME to be brought down with JP Morgan in the silver scandal.
Again, this topic was touched upon in this week’s Road Trip…
Friday Road Trip 2/22/2013 (Members)
http://www.roadtoroota.com/members/1113.cfm
More on this next week.
Bix Weir
www.RoadtoRoota.com
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Thu Feb 21, 2013 5:59 pm
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Other • When the Power Goes Out: “It’s Like a Bunch of Savages”
When the Power Goes Out: “It’s Like a Bunch of Savages”
Mac Slavo
February 15th, 2013
What happens when the power goes out?
Simple.
Mass panic, chaos and intolerable conditions.
The most recent breakdown of a Carnival Cruise liner gives us a prime example of what it looks like when it hits the fan. And for the 3000 passengers on that boat, that’s exactly what happened.
It hit the fan, the walls, hallways and everything else.
“He said that the conditions have gotten so bad that they’re asking them to use the restroom in bags, and they were eating onion sandwiches,” McKerreghan said.
The call was the last she has heard from them.
Much of the ship’s electrical power went down in the fire, causing widespread malfunctions, including taking out sanitary systems.
Passengers have reported sewage sloshing around in hallways, flooded rooms and trouble getting enough to eat.
“It’s disgusting. It’s the worst thing ever,” passenger Ann Barlow said.
“From what I understand, they’re walking around in a lot of urine and fecal matter, and the sewers are backing up,” McKerreghan said. Her doctor gave her antibiotics to give her daughter as soon as she gets on land.
Via Click Orlando
…
The sanitation situation was gross and “the stench was awful,” according to a 50-year-old from Dallas woman who spent her birthday on the ship.
“A lot of people were crying and freaking out.”
Via Jezebel
…
Ttrapped aboard a “floating petri dish” without power, air conditioning, or fresh water…
Via NY Daily News
…
Soon after, she said some passengers panicked.
‘People were hoarding food — boxes and boxes of cereal, grabbing cake with both hands,’ she said.
Toilets stopped working and the 3,143 passengers and 1,086 crew had to urinate in sinks, she said, and eventually red plastic bags. She saw sewage dripping down walls. Sometimes people slipped on it, she said. Soon, the ship began to smell.
Via KRCU
…
And people have stopped being polite.
“It’s like a bunch of savages on there,” said Brent Nutt, whose wife, Bethany, is onboard. ”If you get on the blogs, they’re saying that people are fighting over food and stuff.”
…
Some quotes from passengers:
“All I can do is cry.”
“My mother is a diabetic, and they would not even come to the room because she cannot walk the stairs to help her with insulin. She hasn’t had insulin in three days.”
“Just imagine the filth… People were doing crazy things and going to the bathroom in sinks and showers.”
“Cesspool.”
“It was horrible. Horrible.”
“It was inhuman.”
“It’s degrading. Demoralizing, and then they want to insult us by giving us $500?
This Carnival cruise was just a closed microcosm of what conditions will look like should it happen on a regional or national scale. Lucky for them help arrived, and passengers have disembarked and many are now headed home.
But, consider what it would be like should the power go out in your city – for an extended period of time – and there is no ‘going home’.
Though unlikely, it can and has happened. In fact, in recent history we have examples of conditions deteriorating so severely that thousands of people have died as a result.
Hurricane Katrina is one well known incident where tens of thousands of people were left without power, food or even clean water. They were packed into a makeshift FEMA shelter and promised help, which didn’t arrive for nearly a week. Those who didn’t make it to the FEMA Dome were left to fend for themselves in contaminated flood waters and without a law enforcement presence.
After the Haitian earthquake, large groups of people were left with no basic essentials, which resulted in the rapid spread of disease – not just for a few days, but weeks and months. When Hurricane Sandy struck the northeast and took down the power grid and transportation infrastructure, people were rummaging through the trash to find anything of sustenance. Within 72 hours they were begging their government for a bottle of clean water.
It took days before help arrived, and even that wasn’t enough.
Powerful earthquakes, once in a lifetime weather events, nuclear power station meltdowns, Tsunamis, region-wide power outages and rogue attacks – all are unlikely events.
All have happened in the last fifteen years.
Plan on the schumer hitting the fan, because one of these days it just might, and probably will.
The first things to go will be food, clean water, sanitation and human decency.
Do you want to be the one fighting for a piece of stale cake and walking in your own sewage?
As disgusting and horrific an image as that is, this is what awaits the non prepared.
http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-prepa … s_02152013
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Feb 16, 2013 9:37 am
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This Month’s Nostradamus Award Goes To: David Stockman “We Will Suffer One Crisis After Another.”
We posted this video last fall when it originally aired, but the video is even better now. Stockman calls it dead on. We won’t resolve anything until bond yields move up. As long as lawmakers think they can borrow for nothing, that debt has no cost, they will continue to kick the can of reckoning (to the degree they can) down the road.
He explains that we will see a long stretch where this country lurches from one “crisis” to the next, never resolving anything but creating overall uncertainty on a general decline down.
How right he was. Everyone in Washington is already posturing for the next showdown in March.
The post This Month’s Nostradamus Award Goes To: David Stockman “We Will Suffer One Crisis After Another.” appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
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