...one expensive hole on Chicago's lakefront, the one dug for the construction of the Chicago Spire. Because of the economic downturn and the developer's secrecy about a date for the resumption of major work on the building, some have wondered if the hole will remain unfilled, in which case, count another one in a growing list of cancelled prestige projects.
Tennessee Claflin was a newspaper favorite, a reliable source of ribald jokes and outrageous quotes. Born in a traveling medicine show, and having sold her body from the Midwest to Vanderbilt's mansion, Claflin was shockingly unapologetic. She was also pretty, smart, and nigh on a force of nature. She refused to be ashamed of her past, and refused to back down when confronted. Her frankness captured the imagination of New York. Over the space of several years, Tennessee Claflin became a vocal advocate for women's rights. She spoke out passionately for the equality of the sexes in all things, including service in the military. She ran for Congress on the "Free Love" ticket, rejecting the subordinate position that American law assigned to married women and arguing that all forms of sex and love should be free from the regulation of either the state or the church.
If all that makes "Tennie C" sound fairly radical for the Reconstruction era, she was, but her older sister matched her note for note. Forced into a marriage with an older man at 14, Victoria soon married again without bothering to discard the first husband. In her private broadsheet Victoria wrote praises to sex for sex' sake, with no intention to conceive children, that drew condemnation (and interest) from across the country. In 1871, Victoria appeared before Congress to demand the vote for women. She even one-up'ed Tennie's Congress run by announcing herself as a candidate for president in 1872, and engineered a kind of instantaneous convention in an attempt to get Susan B. Anthony to support her bid.
Amy Wolf is in love with a fairground ride called 1001 Nacht, for which she writes poetry. Based on appearances, she seems like an out-and-proud lesbian, but has no interest in humans. She also loves a church banister, a banister in her home, and the Empire State building. Having connected through an OS people forum on the internet, Erika goes to visit Amy. (Both women are said to have Asperger's and share a history of abuse.) They go to the fairground to see 1001 Nacht. In the clip above, Amy is left alone to have an intimate moment with the ride, while Erika goes for a walk. She happens upon a picket fence and feels an immediate attraction.
Erika La Tour Eiffel married the Eiffel Tower and then took its name. But she doesn't like referring to the structure as "it" because "calling something an 'it' instantly means it's inanimate." She gets "a sense" of an object's gender. According to her, the Eiffel Tower is female.
After suffering abuse as a child, and bouncing between foster homes, she joined the US Air Force but during her training, was sexually assaulted, and defended herself with a Japanese sword, which was her lover at the time. She refused to part with the sword, and was discharged from the military for psychological reasons. She then fell in love with an archery bow — she became a US medal champion in archery — but her feelings for the bow waned after time and she moved on to bigger things, literally, as in: tourist attractions. On their one-year anniversary, Erika goes back to visit the Eiffel Tower to consummate their marriage. She lifts up her skirt, and straddles one of the beams with "no barrier" between them.
...it shouldn't surprise us that most of the estimates on multipliers come from the old style, many equation, structural macroeconometric models, the traditional approach described above. These models were built at a time when questions about fiscal policy were in the forefront, so answers to fiscal policy questions come out of this framework easily. For this reason, because the models were built with this question in mind, there is an abundance of evidence about fiscal policy multipliers, particularly government spending multipliers, from research conducted during this time period. The next approaches to macro modeling and estimation, the micro-founded models and the VAR models, came into being as the fiscal policy question was falling by the wayside (most VAR models do not even include government spending and taxes). Thus, as you may have noticed, there isn't much in the way of evidence from these models that we can reply upon (and that's not even considering the fact that we have very little data from recessionary episodes to inform us on these issues). The models will be built - I guarantee you they are being built presently - but for now we have what we have.
There is a general rule in business life: market share is won or lost during transitions. These periods can be times of technological or economic change, or when buying habits or other norms shift suddenly with a new generation. For example, the movement to digital from film cameras abruptly moved market share to Sony from Kodak. When Americans switched to fuel-efficient cars from SUVs, Toyota won customers from Detroit.
We should expect to see similar changes in market share as companies respond differently to the financial crisis. The analyst community will be lauding major cutbacks in spending and head counts, and moderating production capacity to align with demand makes sense. But companies that cut back on research and new product development do so at their peril. In the high-tech marketplace, for instance, companies that cut deep into R&D will probably fall behind competitors who continue to invest. In autos, aerospace, consumer electronics and many other industries, the same imperative holds true: you cannot save your way out of a recession, you can only invest your way out.
-Craig Barrett, Recently retired chief executive officer of Intel
Corporate leaders somehow need to judge how long the global slowdown will last. If the slump turns out to be severe but only short-term, companies that reduce inventory and cut back staff too aggressively will suddenly have to restock and rehire just as aggressively. But for most CEOs, especially those running public companies that risk falling stock prices, it seems easier to cut and take the risk. The equity markets are likely to remain unforgiving of companies that are too optimistic and don't cut costs.
-Jim O'Neill, Head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs
Since the discovery that a small portion of people who are exposed to HIV do not get infected, scientists have been working to discover the secret to those people's resistance and how to make others resistant as well.
It turns out that most people have a gene called CCR5, which makes them vulnerable to HIV infections. The naturally resistant people have mutant CCR5 genes that inhibit HIV.
Previously, scientists found that by cutting the CCR5 gene out of white blood cells involved in the immune response known as T-cells, they could protect a tube full of human cells from the virus. The gene editing technique relies on proteins called zinc finger nucleases that can delete any gene from a living cell.
In theory, zinc finger nucleases could give that immunity to anyone.
The procedure is simple: Take some healthy T-cells out of an HIV patient, clip out their CCR5 genes, grow more of these clipped T-cells in a dish, and then put them back in the patient.
If all of that can be worked out, this would become a hugely important medical technique in coming decades. I look forward to watching this story develop.
ONE GOOD WAY TO UNDERSTAND the current growth slowdown is to think of the debt-fueled consumer-spending spree of the past 20 years as a symbol of an even larger problem. As a country we have been spending too much on the present and not enough on the future. We have been consuming rather than investing. We’re suffering from investment-deficit disorder.
You can find examples of this disorder in just about any realm of American life. Walk into a doctor’s office and you will be asked to fill out a long form with the most basic kinds of information that you have provided dozens of times before. Walk into a doctor’s office in many other rich countries and that information — as well as your medical history — will be stored in computers. These electronic records not only reduce hassle; they also reduce medical errors. Americans cannot avail themselves of this innovation despite the fact that the United States spends far more on health care, per person, than any other country. We are spending our money to consume medical treatments, many of which have only marginal health benefits, rather than to invest it in ways that would eventually have far broader benefits.
Along similar lines, Americans are indefatigable buyers of consumer electronics, yet a smaller share of households in the United States has broadband Internet service than in Canada, Japan, Britain, South Korea and about a dozen other countries. Then there’s education: this country once led the world in educational attainment by a wide margin. It no longer does. And transportation: a trip from Boston to Washington, on the fastest train in this country, takes six-and-a-half hours. A trip from Paris to Marseilles, roughly the same distance, takes three hours — a result of the French government’s commitment to infrastructure.
These are only a few examples. Tucked away in the many statistical tables at the Commerce Department are numbers on how much the government and the private sector spend on investment and research — on highways, software, medical research and other things likely to yield future benefits. Spending by the private sector hasn’t changed much over time. It was equal to 17 percent of G.D.P. 50 years ago, and it is about 17 percent now. But spending by the government — federal, state and local — has changed. It has dropped from about 7 percent of G.D.P. in the 1950s to about 4 percent now.”
What will happen once the paddles have been applied and the economy’s heart starts beating again? How should the new American economy be remade? Above all, how fast will it grow?
That last question may sound abstract, even technical, compared with the current crisis. Yet the consequences of a country’s growth rate are not abstract at all. Slow growth makes almost all problems worse. Fast growth helps solve them. As Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford University, has said, the choices that determine a country’s growth rate “dwarf all other economic-policy concerns.”
Growth is the only way for a government to pay off its debts in a relatively quick and painless fashion, allowing tax revenues to increase without tax rates having to rise. That is essentially what happened in the years after World War II. When the war ended, the federal government’s debt equaled 120 percent of the gross domestic product (more than twice as high as its likely level by the end of next year). The rapid economic growth of the 1950s and ’60s — more than 4 percent a year, compared with 2.5 percent in this decade — quickly whittled that debt away. Over the coming 25 years, if growth could be lifted by just one-tenth of a percentage point a year, the extra tax revenue would completely pay for an $800 billion stimulus package.
Yet there are real concerns that the United States’ economy won’t grow enough to pay off its debts easily and ensure rising living standards, as happened in the postwar decades. The fraternity of growth experts in the economics profession predicts that the economy, on its current path, will grow more slowly in the next couple of decades than over the past couple. They are concerned in part because two of the economy’s most powerful recent engines have been exposed as a mirage: the explosion in consumer debt and spending, which lifted short-term growth at the expense of future growth, and the great Wall Street boom, which depended partly on activities that had very little real value.
Schweitzer: What they did 25 years ago is they demagogued "environmentalists" and people who were pro-environment as people that are going to take away your logging job and your mining job. Well, as it turned out it wasn’t environmentalists who took your job away. It was mechanization and trade policy. My gosh, in Butte we’re mining as much ore with 380 as we did with 30,000 people in 1920. It’s mechanization. The timber industry—it’s mechanization and it’s cheap B.C. wood.... But, the Republicans managed to message it that it was environmentalists who took away your job, and it was always a question of the environment or your job, and people had to choose. And people chose, in big numbers, their jobs, and blamed it all on Democrats and on environmentalists.
All right. I don’t use those terms. [I say] "You’re going to be in a position where you can hand Montana off along to your grandkids in as good or better shape as when we found it." Now that doesn’t sound like a guy whose going to take away your job. And I’m not. In fact, with our restoration economy in Montana, heck, we’re creating jobs like crazy, cleaning up the messes from the past. Making the rivers cleaner, making the fisheries better. Improving the roads that we have in the forests so they don’t increase siltation and kill bull trout. All those are jobs. Heck, there’s as many or more jobs doing that than there was digging the holes or cutting down the trees in the first place.... So it turns out it was all a lie—jobs or the environment. To a large extent, what’s driving Montana’s economy today is people moving here to live in close proximity to those wildlands.
David Gross mounted a 72-hour effort to find an optimistic CEO, and was asked whether his name was inscribed in the Book of Life from Revelation, found the Davos attendees to be kind of rude, and caught the Kahneman/Ferguson/Taleb off-the-record/on-the record Q&A.
Arianna Huffington schmoozed, while noting the newly sober attitude of many of the attendees. More at HuffPo's Davos News Page.
