Posts Tagged ‘stock market’
Wednesday Morning
* The wisdom of markets: hacked @AP Twitter account sends Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling 150 points in a few seconds.
* Handy charts reveal why you’ve never heard of most female SF authors.
* Florida approves online-only public university education.
* Graduate school and the peak-end heuristic. It’s a thing!
* First lawsuits files in the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion.
* Reports trickling out about police interviews with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
* And the ricin case gets weirder and weirder.
* Bad news, Game of Thrones fans: You are mispronouncing Daenerys’s honorific, Khaleesi.
Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from the University of California–San Diego and founded the Language Creation Society, spent twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day, for two months working on the proposal that landed him the Thrones job. When he was finished, he had more than 300 pages of vocabulary and notes detailing how the Dothraki language would sound and function. “The application process favored those of us who were unemployed at the time, which I was,” Peterson laughed.
* Cooper Union Trustees Vote to Impose $19,000 Tuition.
* Chicago Sun-Times begs students not to participate in standardized-testing boycott.
* A Conversation with a Single Mom Living on $40,000 a Year.
* School Principal Discouraged Teen Girl from Reporting Sexual Assault Because It Would Ruin Attacker’s Basketball Career. I mean really.
* And a little something for the whatthefuckaricans out there: Marc Maron…IN SPACE.
Tuesday Links
* David Graeber teaches my superheroes module in one long go at the New Inquiry.
* Affirmative action and the fantasy of “merit” comes to the Supreme Court. Buckle up.
* The wisdom of markets: Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week.
* The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy — not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.
* Annals of Canadian crime: Canada cheese-smuggling ring busted – policeman charged. Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec.
* Obama makes a strong pitch for my particular demographic.
* Are drones illegal? Well, we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, so…
* Let six-year-olds vote: Afghan war enters twelfth year. And onward! And onward!
* The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21… You know what? Let me stop you right there.
* “Man who defaced Tate Modern’s Rothko canvas says he’s added value.” And he’s probably right!
* Community not coming back on schedule is/is not a catastrophe. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they need more time to bring Dan Harmon back.
* Why do Venezulans keep reelecting Hugo Chávez?
To understand why Chávez’s electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chávez administration gained control over the nation’s oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.
At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programs cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70%—and that’s before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.
Oh.
* The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King.
* Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.
* Campus officer kills naked freshman at University of South Alabama.
* The Ohio Statue University marching band pays tribute to video games.
* Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown. / Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. / Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. / Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home. On “The Promise.”
* digby imagines what would happen if we tried to ban lead today.
* Like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi, Ridley Scott ends his career a hero.
* Behind the Scenes of the Planet of the Apes.
* And get ready for competing Moby Dick projects! Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?
Tuesday Night
* kimstanleyrobinson.info has your 2312 interviews and reviews. I’ll have a review of this in the Los Angeles Review of Books next month.
* John Scalzi and Jonathan Coulton talk “Still Alive.”
* Lindsey Thomas rounds up the season’s bleak articles on the state of graduate education in the humanities with a focus on the issue that nearly everyone overlooks: “Graduate students, especially in the humanities, are not just students, endlessly toiling away in our foxholes/ivory towers (depending on which side of the “debate” you’re on) in our lurching quests for new knowledge. No; we are also instructors, and along with the ever-growing numbers of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty, we constitute over 70% of the postsecondary instructional workforce nationwide.”
* Erik Loomis reviews If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.
* And Facebook may have botched its IPO in much more dramatic fashion than originally thought.
Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Immediately
Following a damning resignation letter from Goldman whistleblower Greg Smith, Goldman’s stock plummeted 3.4 percent in trading yesterday. The company saw “$2.15 billion of its market value wiped out.”
Tuesday Links
* After he had obtained the signature page from his committee, Plaintiff inserted an additional, two-page section into his thesis without the knowledge or consent of his committee members. That section, entitled “Disacknowledgements,” began: “I would like to offer special Fuck You’s to the following degenerates for of being an ever-present hindrance during my graduate career….” It then identified the Dean and staff of the UCSB graduate school, the managers of Davidson Library, former California Governor Wilson, the Regents of the University of California, and “Science” as having been particularly obstructive to Plaintiff’s progress toward his graduate degree. Plaintiff later explained that he had not revealed the section to the members of his committee because he feared that they would not approve it. Today in Landmark First Amendment Cases.
* At right, your chart of the day.
* Alan Moore v. Before Watchmen: “If DC want to soil themselves in public and kill the reputations of a number of otherwise possibly halfway-decent writers and artists, then I’m certainly not going to stop them. And I shall take my fun and my pleasure however it comes.”
* Great moments in spin: Any credit for today’s stock market gains should go to the Republican President we may or may not elect several months from now.
* Fast Food Nation, ten years later.
* I don’t even need to click a link labeled “Is this a picture of UFOs shooting laser beams at an airplane?” to know that yes, that’s absolutely what it is.
* A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney stuffed his foot in his mouth after proving to the common folk at a NASCAR race that he was a fan of the sport because he has “some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” This week, he somehow crammed the other foot in there by repeating almost literally the exact same thing about the NFL.
* After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will cease production of its iconic multi-volume book sets.
The Stockbrokers Behaved as though Their Neighbor Had the Same Car, ‘And They Took After It With a Baseball Bat So They Could Look Better Themselves’
“Naturally one can’t characterize the traders as deranged,” Noll told SPIEGEL. “But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”
The headline reads: “Share Traders More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows.”
Wednesday Night Links
* Dibs on the film rights: “Scientists say Earth once had a 2nd Moon.”
* HR 2028 and S.1102 aim to make private student loans again dischargeable in bankruptcy.
* Unbelievably, we’re still playing “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?” Today’s entrant is Dawn Johnsen with The Simple Case for the Affordable Care Act’s Constitutionality.
* Was the Tea Party bluffing? Steve Benen reports. As has been stated here frequently both in the main posts and the comments, these conversations inevitably run aground on the assumption that Obama was playing against the Tea Party. Of course he was, to an extent—but he was primarily using them as political cover to enact cuts he genuinely wanted to enact. To say Obama “left something on the table” in the negotiations fundamentally misunderstands his goals.
* The markets still aren’t happy. And onward to the next hostage crisis: the GOP has partially shut down the FAA.
* Life in Hell: ‘Man heard his eyeballs rotate, heart beat.’
* Cartoon of the day: The 24 Types of Libertarian.
* Tumblr of the day: Mad Development, mashing up quotes from Arrested Development with images from Mad Men. (Her?)
* And your sublime panorama of the day: the northern and southern night skies, in a single image.
Failing Upwards
‘Advisers told Summers, others not to put so much cash in market.’ I’m astoundingly undereducated about investing and I could have told them that.
