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Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional
Bloomberg reports Swiss Voters Approve Limits on ‘Fat Cat’ Executive Pay Swiss voters approved some of the world’s toughest limits on executives’ pay in a referendum, a move critics say could make Switzerland less attractive to multinational corporations. The initiative against “fat cats,” proposed by Thomas Minder, head of a herbal toothpaste company, was backed by 67.9 percent of the voters today, the government said on its website today. The proposal gives shareholders an annual ballot on managers’ pay
European bulls lauding the message “the worst is behind” received another dose of reality today. Data shows German car sales plunge as Europe’s auto crisis deepens . New car sales in Germany fell by more than 10 percent year-on-year in February, signaling the crisis for Europe’s auto makers is deepening as recession-hit consumers curb spending.
News recently announced that China plans to enact a carbon tax , along with its longstanding commitment to never match US per-capita emission rates, and India’s greater commitment to never match OECD rates , all suggest a need to look at emissions a different way. What matters is total emissions over the modern time period from the recent past until several generations (at least) into the future
Via Email, Michael Pettis author of " The Great Rebalancing " (see "Great Rebalancing" Book Review: Two Thumbs Up ) dispels the myth that Spain and peripheral Europe are on a sustainable rebalancing path relative to Germany. Pettis writes …
March 4, 2013 (LD) – Resorting to name-calling, the United Kingdom’s legitimacy slumped further still as it stubbornly maintained its support for terrorists attempting to overthrow the Syrian government, now unsuccessfully for over 2 years. Unlike in Libya where NATO was able to militarily intervene directly and overthrow the Libyan government before the public realized the so-called “rebels” were in fact the US State Department , United Nations , and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf) -listed Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the West’s assault on Syria has dragged on much longer. Image : (left to right) Foreign Secretary William Hague, US Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Al Qaeda-coddling Moaz al-Khatib, are all, by US criminal code, providing material support to terrorist organizations, more specifically, Al Qaeda
Haruhiko Kuroda (Abe’s nominee to head Japan’s central bank) pledges to do Whatever Needed to Combat Japan Deflation .
There appears to be a lot of Bayesian thumb sucking going on, maybe the first was Eli’s duo with Socrates , and, of course the bunnies know that James has been going on about uniform priors , and there is always Andrew Gelman . Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think that the recent election also gave a strong push to priors and p values and such. Nate Silver of the NYTimes blog five thirty eight has a book out which is reviewed in Science by Sam Wang and Ben Campbell, who also are in the election prognostication business. Silver, of course, is another guy with a Bayesian hammer looking for statistical nails and finding them all about. Eli thought a couple of paragraphs towards the end capture what the Rabett has been trying to beat into bunnies heads. Our biggest criticism of the book is that although statistics and Bayesian inference are powerful ideas, they are not a cure all. In his enthusiasm for the good Reverend, Silver has stuffed a fair bit into the same Procrustean bed. Silver uses the old fox-hedgehog analogy, saying that foxes (including himself) use many ideas, whereas hedgehogs focus on one subject only. But here he is a hedgehog with one big idea:statistics.
Traffic Slump at Olive Garden, Red Lobster, LongHorn; Smaller Plates, Cheaper Items at Olive Garden; Saturation Everywhere High gasoline prices coupled with 2% payroll tax hikes is going to take a bite out of restaurant sales this year. For some chains the slump has already started.
California cap-trade passes second test better than first California’s cap-and-trade passed, barely, its first test last fall with an auction price that just barely exceeded the $10/ton minimum price. The second auction of carbon allowances last week went better, with all carbon allowances selling at $13.62/ton , right in the middle of the expected range of $11-15/ton. The amount of carbon allowances released for auction isn’t so big that regulated buyers figured they only needed to pay the minimal amount because it would only take minimal effort to comply with or buy allowances later, nor was it so little that buyers were forced to pay top dollar and would then come screaming that the political system is demanding more change than is economically feasible. Coming in at another $3/ton also means more money available to fund the other important parts of California’s climate mitigation plan. Finally, half the 2016 allowances were sold, which is fine – the market has another way to satisfy the same demand by selling them as futures . So far, the California system seems to be doing a lot better than Europe’s. Probably not a huge surprise – we got to see what didn’t work.