Budgeting, Australian Style
Even if you don’t get all the political and business references, I suspect you’ll appreciate this video. Hat tip readers hum and Hubert:
Read more...Category Archives: Curiousities
How Banks Influence People in High Places
This e-mail to Congressional staffers speaks for itself. I am probably being far too nice by omitting the RSVP details. However, I must note the ethics rules for Congress are more lax than those of some private sector companies. I had one client, a Fortune 25 company, that forbade all employees from taking gifts or entertainment of any kind from vendors, down to a cup of coffee. And that’s not as nuts as it sounds. Research by social psychologist Robert Cialdini verifies that a gift as small as a can of soda predisposes the recipient to a sales pitch.
From: The Financial Services Roundtable
Read more...Hans Rosling’s 200 Years of Global Health in Four Minutes
I’m of the school that PowerPoint has served as the breeding ground for many misguided efforts to gussy up simple messages with unproductive or even worse, confusing and misleading graphics. This is an example of the opposite, a very good use of visualization of a large and complex data set by Hans Rosling, who has made a near art form of this sort of thing. Notice how the tradeoff between wealth and life expectancy flattens once a reasonable level of wealth has been achieved.
Read more...Reader Nominations for Best and Worst Predictions for 2011
It’s the time of year where pundits and professional forecasters pull out their crystal balls and offer their prognostications for the new year. I’ve never been keen about forecasting. Even though we offer views of what might happen, it usually falls in the realm of applying well established patterns to new fact sets (as in […]
Read more...Google Rates Website Wonkiness
This post’s headline misrepresents the apparent intent of a new Google filter in its advanced search function. Per the SearchEngineLand report, “Google Lets You Dumb Down Your Search Results With “Reading Level” Filter,” the aim is apparently to allow web surfers to steer clear of pages that might be too taxing.
Read more...“So You Want to Be a Journalist”
Some comic relief, hat tip reader Scott:
Read more...The 1677 Statute of Frauds: History We Neglect at Our Peril
Have you ever signed a document disposing of something valuable, like a house or your estate? Did you find you needed to get it witnessed, and that the witnesses couldn’t be family members, and had to put their addresses on the document too? Then it may surprise you to learn that you are following legal precepts established by a long dead Welshman; this one, in fact:
[caption id="attachment_14376" align="alignnone" width="631" caption="Sir Leoline Jenkins (hat tip Wikipedia)"]
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whose tomb is at Jesus College, Oxford; oddly, no more than ten minutes’ amble from where I am sitting, carving out this post. I like the way his “Llewellyn” has been semi-Englished to “Leoline”. Right now, he is probably spinning, at a fair clip, for he is the originator of the Statute of Frauds.
Read more...Seeking Reader Help with Evil Site Scrapers
In classic the cobbler’s children go unshod fashion, I do a horrible job of monetizing the site (but I have made some progress on that front) and have even fallen behind on the sort of thing I normally do religiously, submitting for expense reimbursements (still haven’t sent receipts off to my publisher for what they’d […]
Read more...How Virtual is Your Holiday Season?
I’m clearly a hopeless old fart. In my youth, the hot joke gift was a Pet Rock. No kidding, it sold millions and made someone very rich. But then Pet Rock 2.0 was Tamagouchi, the electronic pet that responded to how much care you gave it. Distressingly like a real pet, it would die of […]
Read more...Econoparody: The Dollar and Its Diving
From the folks at Versus. Enjoy!
Read more...Guess about Mish
Various commenters have noticed that Mish’s blog has vanished. My guess – a spurious “terms of service violation”. Google’s robot spam monitors sometimes screw up by giving false positives – something like this happened to Yves (see para 3) back when NC was on Blogger. I can’t imagine they’ll shut up Mish for long and […]
Read more...“The Blue Ocean in RED”
A short film by Howard Hall (hat tip reader Sundog) The Blue Ocean in RED from Howard Hall on Vimeo.
Read more...QE2: Bernanke Cuts Geithner Off at the Knees
The Fed’s announcement of $600 billion of intermediate and long Treasury purchase, informally dubbed QE2, teed off a peppy rally in stocks, and led to further weakening of the dollar. These trends were already well in motion thanks to the central bank’s winks and nods that it was going to embark on another round of […]
Read more...In Case You Had Any Doubts As To Who Is Really In Charge
From an alert reader: The United States of America in one short scene, from Politico: MILITARY OFFICERS TOUR JPMORGAN — JPMorgan Chase yesterday hosted about 30 active duty military officers (across all branches and agencies) from the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. The officers met with senior executives, toured the trading floor and […]
Read more...We are Number One on Technorati!
Well, at least we are number one as of yesterday, when Richard Smith noticed our rating, and today among business blogs. Don’t know how long this will last. But look how we beat blogs with a lot more people as dedicated contributors! And if you look at the Technorati ratings for business blogs + news […]
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