if you want to see what Al Gore could be like as a US Presidential candidate, then look at this camera phone video. He is passionate, and calls Bush on the blunders before 911. It’s an utter transformation – the cumulation of the change that we partially saw in An Inconvenient Truth. Has the Nobel …
Category Archives: Global Macro Trends
Capital One stumbles
Capital One has long had a reputation for employing smart people, and for being the best at segmenting the credit card market – targeting the right products at the right people. Well – not such good news, via the Washington Post: Capital One Financial of McLean posted its first quarterly loss ever, from the expense …
News Corp to go carbon neutral by 2010
Rupert Murdoch, via Samefacts Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction… Today, I am announcing our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010… Our strategy everywhere is the same: first, reduce our use of energy as …
Advertising: Have we gone too far?
Via Celsias – a very cool protest about the over indulgence in advertising. Now I’m not at all for banning advertising a la Sao Paulo, but we all have to remember that public spaces, pages in newspapers and minutes of TV or radio time are public goods. It may make financial sense to add just …
The cost of US Free Trade – no iPods
Via No Right Turn, I perused a US document that lists NZ policies thast it consiers are trade barriers. Read the full commentary on this amazing document from Joe Hendren. It was astonishing to see the US music industry’s thoughts about NZ copyright law & policy in print: The U.S. music industry opposes a proposed …
Carbon credits
a simple new category on Trade Me., but some pretty serious efforts have gone on behind the scenes to make credits accessible to everyone. Well done Trade Me, Meridian and M-Co. Now the question is whether trade Me dares sell to overseas buyers, where the market is huge….
A big well done to the folk at RBNZ
The economists and traders at the Reserve Bank of NZ must be feeling pretty smug right now. They intervened in the currency market on June 11 – selling a huge amount of NZD at between 76.2 and 75 US cents. The RBNZ has access to at least $7bn to make market interventions, and can intervene …
negative equity
Front page of today’s Wall Street Journal: One Family’s Journey into a Subprime Trap FULLERTON, Calif. — Nearly two years ago, Mario and Leticia Montes found a home they loved, a gray stucco bungalow with a hot tub in the backyard in a middle-class neighborhood of Orange County. …With a December “reset” on their loan …
Record production year… for Heroin
I guess that the Afghanistan occupation isn’t doing do well. That lowest year ever in 2001 was due to the Taliban, not the US invasion post 9/11.
Local coverage from afar: Outsourcing journalists
From Rodney Van Meter via Dave Farber’s IP list, here is news that could make local news reporters nervous: “The website Pasadena Now, a local online news source, has created a stir by hiring a couple of reporters to report on Pasadena City Council meetings. Why the stir? Well, the reporters live in Mumbai and …
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The end of newsprint is nigh..
..well it isn’t nigh, but the first signs of the end of newspaper are out there. Yesterday saw the announcement by LG.Philips of the first A4 colour e-paper. The ePaper is a flexible panel that is as thin as paper and is best used to display reading material. It only uses power when the page …
Housing roller coaster ready to plunge
This is amazing – some wag has plotted Robert Shiller’s series of US housing prices on a roller coaster. Do check it out – it is an amazing way to see a data series. Follow along and marvel as you go up and down and up and down. However, be afraid as the final long …
The death of magazines? InfoWorld goes online only
US magazine Infoworld is delivering it’s last print copies and publishing online only. They are ahead of the curve, and it is smart thing to do as the technology magazines are increasingly irrelevant in this age of MacRumors, Engadget and DPReview . I can’t recall the last time I purchased a computer magazine, and why …
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where are the intellectuals?in NZ?
Also in the IFR, Chris Trotter reviews a book by Laurence Simmons belaboring the dearth of NZ intellectualism. Without reading the book I’d suggest that Professor Simmons starts reading in the new frontier of intellectualism. He may not see the turgidness of ancient times, but the new wave of influencer’s are now online and blogging. …
Gapminder – awesome stats viewer
While some articles concentrated on the inventors not getting the benefits, to me the best part about Google’s purchase of Gapminder’s Trendalyzer is that we all get to benefit. Just check it out – Track life expectancy versus GDP per capita over time by pressing the play button… Scoopit!
Lance Wiggs 