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  • Intellectual Flight from China

    Like hundreds of thousands of Chinese who leave each year, she was driven by an overriding sense that she could do better outside China. Despite China’s tremendous economic successes in recent years, she was lured by Australia’s healthier environment, robust social services and the freedom to start a family in a country that guarantees religious freedoms.

    “It’s very stressful in China — sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,” Ms. Chen said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. “And it will be easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.”

    via NYTimes.com.

    No story in the NYT about the intellectual flight from the U.S.

    Funny how that works.  Guess that’s not news worthy.

     

     

  • Dem Governors Force Ins. Premiums Higher

    Tens of thousands of homeowners who suffered wind and storm damage this week will get financial relief from rulings by several governors that insurers must treat Sandy as a tropical storm and not a hurricane.  …

    “Whether they call it a hurricane or something else, that translates into the percentage I have to pay to get my apartment redone,” she said before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that homeowners would not have to pay hurricane deductibles. “I had no idea. It’s crazy, and it’s going to cost so much money.”Homeowners’ insurance policies in coastal areas almost always include a provision that the deductible will be higher when damage is caused by a hurricane than a lesser windstorm. The difference can be steep — in the thousands of dollars — because the regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, while the hurricane deductible is connected to the replacement value of the house.

    via NYTimes.com.

    Right about now dozens of actuaries at all the big insurance companies tossed a huge pile of paper in the air and started to bang their head against the wall.

    The title of this story at the NYT is “Governors Promote Lower Deductibles for Homeowners” which is one way of looking at it.  The other way is to say, “Governors pander for votes, interfere with the insurance system, annual premiums going to go up up up.”

    You don’t get to negotiate your insurance policy terms after the fact.  If you wanted a lower deductible then you could have purchased insurance with a lower deductible.  If you wanted hurricane replacement value insurance then you could have bought that as well.  But if you went cheap and bought the typical policy… then you got the typical policy.

    So when the insurance companies start running the numbers they will figure out how much more they’re going to pay out as a result of Gov. Cuomo’s unilateral action.  Then they divide that amount over all the policies in the area over 5 or 10 years.

    So take your joy now.  Because when you get your insurance bill next year something tells me the NYT will not be writing a story about how you can’t afford to pay it.

  • Rise of Titan the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

    After falling behind Asia and Europe in the great race, where success is measured in FLOPS floating-point operations per second, the US has struck back at the new high-tech Olympians with Titan: quite possibly the fastest supercomputer in the world.  …

    All of that might now change, as a new supercomputing giant hailing from the Smokey Mountains was unveiled by the US Department of Energy’s DOE on Monday.  More than 10 times faster and five times more energy efficient than its predecessor Jaguar, Titan is the brainchild of the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory ORNL, nestled in the Tennessee highlands.  Titan’s theoretical peak is 20 petaflops – 20 quadrillion calculations per second – with 299,008 CPUs central processing units and 18,688 graphics processing units GPUs spinning at breakneck speeds to make to make scientific breakthroughs in record times.

    Titan’s blistering computation speed will be the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second,” ORNL says.

    via RT.

    Hell Yeah!!

    You all realize this is the Super Bowl of computers right?

  • Watch The Hope & The Change for Free

    Simply click here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/409925

    Common people use common sense to come to their own conclusion.

  • Dem Voter Fraud Already Begining in Ohio

    Two volunteer poll workers at an Ohio voting station told Human Events that they observed van loads of Ohio residents born in Somalia — the state is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States — being driven to the voting station and guided by Democratic interpreters on the voting process. No Republican interpreters were present, according to these volunteers.  …

    A source, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a volunteer outside the Morse Road polling center. She has witnessed Somalis who cannot speak English come to the polling center. They are brought in groups, by van or bus. The Democrats hand them a slate card and say, “vote Brown all the way down.” Given that Sherrod Brown is the incumbent Democrat Senator in Ohio, one can assume that this is the reference.Non-English speaking voters may use an interpreter. The interpreters are permitted by law to interpret for the individual voting; however, they are forbidden from influencing their vote in any way. Another source who also wishes to remain anonymous has seen Democrat interpreters show the non-English speaking Somalis how to vote the Democrat slate that they were handed outside. According to this second source, there are not any Republican Somali interpreters available.  …

    According to the Somali Community Association of Ohio’s web site, over 45,000 Somalis live in Ohio. Only 40 percent have become citizens of the United States, and only 25 percent speak English well enough to get a job.The second source mentioned has seen voter intimidation at this same voting place. A Mitt Romney bus stopped near the voting center, approximately 30 Democrats who were outside handing out the slate cards rushed over to the bus. They yelled at the bus, and swarmed around its door when anyone attempted to exit the bus. This, from the “tolerant left.”

    via Human Events.

    No reason to wait until actual election day.  After all, Obama comes from Chicago where we’re all told to vote early and often.  No reason not to being stuffing the ballot box with illegal votes as soon as possible.

    Crazy… just crazy.

  • New Star Wars Film Coming In 2015

    Uh, Star Wars geeks enthusiasts? Brace yourselves for a double whammy.

    One: Disney has purchased Lucasfilm for a whopping $4.05 billion (yes, with a “b”). Which brings us to two: Stars Wars Episode VII is not only happening, but it has a release date for sometime in 2015.

    via E! Online.

    Excellent news.

     

  • Map of Chicago’s Shootings

    Over at the Chicago Sun-Times there is a very cool map of all the shootings and other mayhem in the city of Chicago.

    Go see for yourself.

  • More Dem on GOP Violence

    ALTA LOMA, CA — Someone keyed the word “Obama” into two cars and slashed seats in another outside a residence that had Mitt Romney campaign signs.

    via CBS Los Angeles.

    But wait, that’s not all you get:

    Racine, WI — Before the event could get under way, though, organizers say a truck affixed with “Obama” stickers drove through the parking lot and dumped quantities of nails.

    “We went outside and picked up what we could,” said Lou D’Abbraccio, holding a cup filled with nails. “But this was just wrong.”

    via Mount Pleasant.

     

     

  • British Terror Cell Wanted to Violate Sharia Law for AK-47s

    A British terror cell allegedly planned to buy five AK47 assault rifles by borrowing £100,000 in loans, a court heard.  …

    In one conversation recorded by the police the group are discussing how to obtain weapons.

    Naseer said that “out there in the market: “You can buy M16 you can buy AK.”

    He added: “You can get grenades, you know grenades? Fifteen hundred pounds for one grenade.”

    He said: “I’m trying to do that…take out loan.

    “Get about 100 grand then you get four five AK’s ready.”  …

    Naseer justified attacking non-believers because they have “sex like donkeys”, orgies and took drugs. He said: “They wanna you know have sex like donkeys on the street, they wanna club, act like animals and why shouldn’t we terrorise them, tell me that?”

    via Business Insider.

    Oh where to begin?

    For the record, I don’t believe anything about this story.  It’s just too over the top.  I’m a big believer that truth is stranger than fiction but rarely does it play out so perfectly; impossibly perfectly.  Anyway…

    It’s common knowledge that Sharia prohibits the fixed or floating payment or acceptance of specific interest or fees (known as riba, or usury) for loans of money.  So it makes me wonder how these Islamists were going to take a loan for the weapons.  Unless of course they are hypocrites.

    Next, what are they talking about buying these military grade weapons that are illegal in the UK, and in the US, and well just about everywhere?  How is this possible?  How can someone acquire something that is illegal?

    As for the donkeys, I’ll let you draw you’re own conclusions.

  • The Coming Bond Bubble (Is Going to be Huge)

    Europe is on the ropes as investors shun peripheral euro-area government debt. In the United States, interest rates are fixed at zero, and government bonds are arguably already quite far along in an epic 30-years-and-running bull market.

    Given the state of global debt markets and the apparent lack of value across the investment landscape, it’s easy to see why interest has turned to emerging economies.

    via Business Insider.

    So begins an article that’s no where near long enough to explain what’s really happening.  It’s just the facts; the analysis is missing.  I’m not economist but here’s how I see this:

    Gabriel Sterne, an economist at the frontier-market brokerage firm Exotix, told Business Insider, “You get some of these big funds – a lot of the funds in the States – just getting these inflows every month. What do they do with them? They tend to just double up and put them in [emerging markets].”

    Sterne went on, saying, “In the absence of any bad news, there is not enough supply out there, so yields just fall down.”

    UBS rates strategists Bhanu Baweja, Stephen Mo, and Nicholas Smithie were lamenting the lack of “distressed” investment opportunities around the world right now – given all of the recent interest in EM debt and assets – in a note to clients Wednesday.

    The strategists highlighted a major dilemma that investors in emerging markets now face:

    Consumer staples in EM trade at 20 times future earnings. Mexican stocks are 33% above pre crisis highs, South African equities are impervious even as the weakness in the labour markets become manifest. Implied currency volatility is at post crisis lows despite the trade cycle remaining very weak.

    10 year paper of some non investment grade sovereign names in Asia trades at a spread well below 100 bps. Ukraine debt has been amongst the top performers in recent months with little to show for it from within the country. Bolivia can issue 10y paper below 5 pc. We can honestly say that we would not have predicted 5 years back that this day would come.

    There are worse things in life than being an asset manager sitting on continued inflows, but given where assets trade, security selection can’t be that straight forward today. Are things getting silly, and if so, is that true across all asset classes? Is anything still distressed out there?

    In other words, it’s getting harder and harder for investment managers to find good value opportunities in emerging markets as money flows into those economies.

    I have an old friend who’s told many a story where the ending is, “If you have more than one girlfriend you really don’t have any.”  Not to make investing like relationships, but if you can’t find any distressed investments, then all investment options are distressed.  The bottom line is that everything is overpriced and nothing is safe.

    America’s boomers are nearing retirement and they are flooding the system with money.  Lots and lots of money.  Professional investors are looking for places to put all this money and they’ve driven up the prices of everything to the point of absurdity.  Bolivian bonds under 5%.

    There is so much money out there that it’s essentially free.  So we’re stretching the rubber-band putting more and more and more money into the system and simply doesn’t know what to do with more money.  Sooner or later something is going to have to give.  What’s happening is that the system is getting less and less stable; more people are taking greater risks simply because there is no other alternative.

    I don’t believe it’s possible to predict (with any accuracy) exactly when a bubble will burst.  But we’re going to see a world-wide financial melt-down like nothing the world has ever seen before.  We’re going to see it soon.