"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
Supreme Court to hear case of Franky the K-9
Topic: Politics and Law
1:06 pm EST, Jan 7, 2012
MIAMI — In a case closely watched by law enforcement nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether a Florida police dog's sniff outside the front door of a house with a marijuana growing operation is an illegal search.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi wants the justices to reverse a state Supreme Court decision that the K-9's sniff runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure. Eighteen states and the territory of Guam have filed a brief in support of Bondi's position, concerned that other state courts might start issuing similar decisions.
Franz Herrmann, head of the German Association of Savers (BDS), has spent half a century trying to be a good investor. As a child, he filled piggy banks and, as an adolescent, he put money away in his savings account. Later came a building loan contract, in addition to 12 life insurance policies. "Money attracts money," his father liked to tell him, quoting a German saying. "I was hardwired for saving money," Hermann explains.
At 52, he says he figured out "what's going on." He'd earned money through his business selling beer steins and jewelry in Munich's city center. But he became convinced that he'd actually lost money through his savings efforts and cancelled his insurance policies, while the small interest earnings from his remaining savings accounts were "eaten up by inflation," he says. To fight back, Herrmann formed the BDS. Now he makes appearances around the country, warning of "money-destroying instruments." He's certain that saving is "state-sanctioned robbery."
For 2012, in the face of a delevering zero-bound interest rate world, investors must lower return expectations. 2–5% for stocks, bonds and commodities are expected long term returns for global financial markets that have been pushed to the zero bound, a world where substantial real price appreciation is getting close to mathematically improbable. Adjust your expectations, prepare for bimodal outcomes. It is different this time and will continue to be for a number of years. The New Normal is “Sub,” “Ab,” “Para” and then some. The financial markets and global economies are at great risk.
Fed Once-Secret Loan Crisis Data Compiled by Bloomberg Released to Public
Topic: Economics
6:18 pm EST, Dec 24, 2011
Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form.
$7.77 trillion -- The amount the Fed pledged to rescue the financial industry, according to Bloomberg research that examined announced, implied or actual upper limits on lending and guarantees.
To download a zip file of the spreadsheets, Click on the link. For an explanation of the files, see the one labeled “1a Fed Data Roadmap.”
RjDj’s New App Dimensions Turns Music Discovery Into ‘Sonic Adventure Game’
Topic: Music
12:39 pm EST, Dec 10, 2011
Interactive music app creators RjDj have put together a “sonic adventure game” for iOS called Dimensions: Adventures in the Multiverse, which invites you to explore an audio landscape to collect artifacts.
Taking cues from the Inception app, which the company released almost exactly a year ago, the app pulls in data from your surroundings — including movement, time of day and microphone input — to create soundscapes that you need to traverse.
There are five “dimensions” that you can inhabit. Kinetic is activated when you’re walking, and gives you a beat that gets more complex the faster you’re walking. Flux comes up in loud environments, and Tranquil in quiet ones, and the Ghost dimension is only activated between midnight and 1 a.m.
We propose a new law: Let's call it The Millionaire Subsidy Elimination Act. It would prohibit anyone with an annual income over $1 million from receiving any government benefits. There's a big advantage to cutting benefits to millionaires rather than raising their tax rates to 40% or 50%. Slashing expenditures would help grow the economy, while raising tax rates would hurt U.S. competitiveness and job creation.
Let us be clear on one point: We do not mean to demean the wealthy. The gratuitous bashing of rich people by the president and so many others in Washington is downright offensive. The United States is an affluent society because Americans reap rewards when they employ their talents, their innovative ideas, their entrepreneurial drive, and their sweat equity in ways that make products or provide services we all enjoy.
Senator Coburn's report: http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=bb1c90bc-660c-477e-91e6-91c970fbee1f
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Republican leaders in the House are delaying efforts to bring to a vote legislation seeking to hike limits on insider trading, but they said Congress will still move forward with a bill in the wake of media reports about congressional insider trading.
Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.
