Word from CNN that Canon of Japan has struck upon a novel idea that is actually more insightful than they may know. In a country where 12-hour workdays are common, the electronics giant has taken to letting its employees leave early twice a week for a rather unusual reason: to encourage them to have more […]
Back when Dave Barry still wrote a weekly column, Sandra and I had a Sunday morning tradition where I’d read the column out loud to her while she was getting ready for church. The highlight of each year was Dave’s annual recounting of the events of that year, in his own style. Well, he stopped […]
For those of you who missed it, in this downward spiral we are now enduring, the amount of leverage (read, debt) is directly related to how fast your bank is going to go under. Now from a blog named Infectious Greed, comes this chart extracted from a Bank of Canada report: So according to the […]
My co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has spent two years now warning about the stupidities of our domestic (US) economy, based in large part on his nation-wide gathering and analysis of real-estate data on a daily basis. Unfortunately for all of us, he turned out to be pretty much dead on, and we’ve got a major recession […]
Oh to be a fly on the wall! News reports say today is the day that President-elect Barry Obama gets his first real intelligence briefing as the Bush administration beings the transfer of national command authority. Up until now, our newly minted President-elect was a rookie Senator, and did not get the full details of […]
Courtesy of contemplate.us: I think that Machiavelli may have said this. ..bruce w..
As I write this, the markets in Japan are down nearly 10%. Several of the markets in Asia are closed in hope of shuttering themselves against the raging storm that they helped create. The Yen carry trade is at long last unwinding like the tightly wound spring it was. There is not enough money in […]
[UPDATED 2134 MDT: Uh, corrected David Zucker’s last name. Thanks, Kevin!] [UPDATED 1604 MDT: Got an Ace-o-lanche going on, with other links coming in — welcome all! Also made a few minor edits.] The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. — Sir Thomas More I went into “An American Carol” with guarded […]
When I first saw this graph in the sidebar of an article over at CNN Money, I kept looking for the United States and couldn’t find it. Then I looked a few inches above the rest of the countries. Ouch. Here’s what the article has to say: The dangers of leverage in a market where […]
Wisdom from the past
I have recently been re-reading The Ancient State by Hugh Nibley and just this morning finished reading “The Hierocentric State” (originally published back in 1951 in Western Political Quarterly 4/2). The article itself suggests that key aspects of the vast nomadic cultures of Central Asia (e.g., the Mongols) were idealized and emulated by more sedentary […]
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