Month: January 2011

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Reference: Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011(fed gov’s best-selling reference book)

04 Education, 11 Society, Civil Society, Fact Sheets, Geospatial, Government, References, Research resources
go directly to the publication

Did you know that Raleigh, N.C. had the highest rate of population growth in the last decade of any large metropolitan area?

Metropolitan population growth is just one of more than a thousand topics addressed in the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011. The Abstract is perennially the federal government's best-selling reference book. When it was first published in 1878, the nation had only 38 states, people usually got around using a horse and buggy, Miami and Las Vegas did not yet exist, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had yet to be born. The Abstract has been published nearly every year since then.

Contained in the 130th edition are 1,407 tables of social, political and economic facts that collectively describe the state of our nation and the world. Included this year are 65 new tables, covering topics such as insufficient rest or sleep, nursing home occupancy, homeschooling, earthquakes, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, organic farmland, honey bee colonies, crashes involving distracted drivers and cities with the highest transit savings.

The statistics come not only from the Census Bureau but also from other governmental agencies and private organizations. The data generally represent the most recent year or period available by summer 2010. Most are national-level data, but some tables present state- and even city- and metropolitan-level data as well.

Source:  U.S. Census Bureau

+ Thanks to those posting to the ResourceShelf Twitter feed

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Event (web): 11 Jan – Google, CERN (Euro nuclear research org), LEGO, Nat Geographic & Sci American Holding a Global, Web-Based Science Fair

04 Education, Academia, Civil Society, Commerce
event sign-up

On January 11 at 9 a.m. EST, Google will host a live event on its brand new Science Fair YouTube Channel. More details about the fair will be announced then; we’re assuming the site will be fleshed out at that time, as well.

The global science competition is being hosted in partnership with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American. The goal is “to create a new kind of online science competition that is more global, open and inclusive than ever before.”

Teachers who want to receive classroom materials, including posters, stickers and bookmarks, as well as get registration information, can start signing up now.

Thanks to those posting to Mashable's Twitter feed (source article).

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More Bank Equity Is Needed and Not Socially Costly

03 Economy, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy

Much More Bank Equity Is Needed
and Is Not Socially Costly

Text of Letter Published in Financial Times

November 9, 2010

The Basel III bank-regulation proposals that G20 leaders will discuss fail to eliminate key structural flaws in the current system. Banks’ high leverage, and the resulting fragility and systemic risk, contributed to the near collapse of the financial system. Basel III is far from sufficient to protect the system from recurring crises. If a much larger fraction, at least 15%, of banks’ total, non-risk-weighted, assets were funded by equity, the social benefits would be substantial. And the social costs would be minimal, if any.

Some claim that requiring more equity lowers the banks’ return on equity and increases their overall funding costs. This claim reflects a basic fallacy. Using more equity changes how risk and reward are divided between equity holders and debt holders, but does not by itself affect funding costs.

Tax codes that provide advantages to debt financing over equity encourage banks to borrow too much. It is paradoxical to subsidize debt that generates systemic risk and then regulate to try to limit debt. Debt and equity should at least compete on even terms.

Proposals to impose a bank tax to pay for guarantees are problematic. High leverage encourages excessive risk taking and any guarantees exacerbate this problem. If banks use significantly more equity funding, there will be less risk taking at the expense of creditors or governments.

Debt that converts to equity, so-called “contingent capital,” is complex to design and tricky to implement. Increasing equity requirements is simpler and more effective.

Continue reading “More Bank Equity Is Needed and Not Socially Costly”

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US$2 Trillion debt crisis threatens 100 US cities

01 Poverty, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Waste (materials, food, etc)
article

Phi Beta Iota: The existence of double sets of books is now coming to light.  As best we can tell from various public discussions, the operating budgets are deliberately in the red and used to borrow money, at the same time that out-sourced services and “asset rents” are in the black.  We honestly do not know what the true situation is, but we do know that the amount of falsehood and fraud in the “system” is deep.

– – – – – – –

Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble

Elena Moya, guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 December 2010

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Continue reading “US$2 Trillion debt crisis threatens 100 US cities”

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Secrecy News Extract: CIA Open Source on Pakistan

Corruption, Government, Methods & Process

CIA “OPEN SOURCE WORKS” ON PAKISTANI LEADERSHIP

“A review of the Pakistani media during October 2010 indicates that there is less talk of imminent political change.”  That is the rather pedestrian conclusion of a brief report (pdf) that was prepared last November by “Open Source Works,” a previously unknown initiative of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence.

Open Source Works “was charged by the Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights on intelligence issues.  Open Source Works' products, based only on open source information, do not represent the coordinated views of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The recent report on Pakistan seems to be the first Open Source Works document to have reached public hands, though it is more of a digest of recent news and opinion than what would properly be termed an intelligence product.  A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Pakistan Leadership Watch: October 2010,” CIA Directorate of Intelligence, November 8, 2010.

Phi Beta Iota: In light of Chuck Spinney's many posts on Pakistan and Afghanistan (using only English-language sources), and the reality that Pakistan is about to explode, the abyssmal limitations of this report merit gloomy note.  It's been 18 years since Joe Markowitz first got a DCID on OSINT–and this is what we have to show for it?

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Journal: Banks Own Obama, His Mind, His Time

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

The author is a former chief economist of the IMF and is now a professor at MIT.  Chuck

The Bill Daley Problem

By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers (out in paperback on Monday)

Baseline Scenario, 9 January 2011

Highlighted extracts:

The Bill Daley Problem is completely bipartisan – it shows us the White House fails to understand that, at the heart of our economy, we have a huge time bomb.

…largest U.S. banks – have far too little equity and far too much debt relative to that thin level of equity…

Today’s most dangerous government sponsored enterprises are the largest six bank holding companies: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.

No one can show significant social benefits from the increase in bank size, leverage, and overall riskiness over the past 15 years.  The social costs of these banks – and their complete capture of the regulatory apparatus – are apparent in the worst recession and slowest recovery since the 1930s.

Paul Volcker gets it; no wonder he has resigned.  Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, gets it.  Tom Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed, gets it.  Elizabeth Warren, the tireless champion of consumer rights, gets it.   Gene Fama, father of the efficient financial markets view, gets it better than anyone.

This is not a left-right issue – again, look at the list of people who co-signed Professor Admati’s recent letter to the Financial Times.  This is a question of technical competence.  Do the people running the country – including both the executive branch and the legislature – understand economics and finance or not?

Top bankers, including Bill Daley, have pulled off a complete snow job – including since the crisis broke in fall 2008.  They have put forward their special interests while claiming to represent the general interest.

Bill Daley now controls how information is presented to and decisions are made by the president. Daley’s former boss, Jamie Dimon, is the most dangerous banker in America – presumably he now gets even greater access to the Oval Office.  Daley is on the record as opposing strong consumer protection for financial products;… [Emphasis added.]

Read the full posting….

Phi Beta Iota: Our generous and well-intentioned philanthropists appear to be unaware that the Federal Reserve, Morgan Chase, and Citi-Bank have pulled a Bernie Maddoff on them–they think they are being “taken care of” at the very moment when everything they have worked so hard for is most vulnerable to a massive melt-down.  The control of the President's mind and time is the ultimate victory for anyone seeking to control the White House.  It is “checkmate” against We the People.  None of the bureaucracies in the Executive–and certainly not the so-called “intelligence community”– are capable of rescuing the President–he is a happy captive.

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Reference: Digital Lost & Found

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence
Click Image to Enlarge
Seth Godin Home

Lost in a digital world

Allison Miller, aged 14, sends and receives 27,000 text messages a month. Hey, that's only about sixty an hour, every hour she's awake.  Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this never ending non-stop distraction, addles the brain and prevents us from being productive. Not quite.

The danger is not distraction, the danger is the ability to hide.  Constant inputs and unlimited potential distractions allow us to avoid the lizard, they give the resistance a perfect tool. Everywhere to run, everywhere to hide. The advantage of being cornered with nowhere to turn is that it leaves you face to face with the lizard brain, unable to stall or avoid the real work.

I've become a big fan of tools like Freedom, which effortlessly permit you to turn off the noise. An hour after you haven't kept up with the world, you may or may not have work product to show as a result. If you don't, you've just called your bluff, haven't you? And if you do, then you've discovered how powerful confronting the fear (by turning off the noise) can be.

Ten years ago, no one was lost in this world. You had to play dungeons and dragons in a storm pipe to do that. Now there are millions and millions of us busy polishing our connections, reaching out, reacting, responding and hiding. What happens to your productivity (and your fear) when you turn it off for a while?

Jon Lebkowsky Bio

2010 Social Media Infographic

Mindjumpers created this graphic showing various social media happenings last year – interesting choices. You can go to their site to let ‘em know what they left out.

Phi Beta Iota: Click on the image to give it it's own page, then click again to enlarge to full viewing size.  They left out GroupOn, among others, but seeing this list, in combination with Seth's Godin's blog, reminds us that digital crack is alive and well and consuming our youngsters.

This is the 21st Century digital equivalent of 24-hour cable television as discussed by Bill McKibben in Missing Information.

This is the OPPOSITE of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.