Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 21:16 - Category: Credit crisis ;
Today was what I think could be counted as a pretty good confirmation of the existence of PPT (plunge protection team) and they way it works.
This would be the rumor that Ambac might be bailed out that sent a plunging stock market soaring at just the right moment today.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 19:18 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Russia;
Factions within the siloviki thugocracy that runs Russia, having exhausted the possibilities of looting outsiders, are turning on themselves and using the courts as weapons to jail each other. This from Robert Amsterdam, international defense counsel for jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky writing in the Inernational Harald Tribune.
Russia is far more volatile than anyone now wants to believe. We do ourselves no favor by generously pretending that Russia is going to hold some type of “flawed” vote, when the real election will be determined by the scorecard of the clan wars.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 16:16 - Category: Renewable energy, Solar power ;
This innovative method will produce hydrogen from solar during the day then power fuel cells at night with the hydrogen to produce power.
Energy doesn’t get much cleaner than that! And it also provides an excellent way to store power from solar to be used at night.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 13:26 - Category: Credit crisis ;
A $50 million dollar assistance plan for first-time homeowners in CT who have resetting subprime mortgages has been a dismal failure, with only 25 homeowners getting help to date.
A spokesperson for comatose CT Gov. Jodi Rell said “she is open to tweaking the program and finding more ways to reach more people” as long as such undue mental strain doesn’t cause her head to explode. This is the same governor who recently trumpeted a plan to stimulate the Connecticut economy by putting a speed trap on a portion of one freeway and giving business owners a $250 rebate. Like I said, “comatose.”
Why has the mortgage assistance program failed? Among the reasons, it takes months to get approved and the homeowner must show they can pay most of their bills.
[The plan] may in effect be tailored for people who don’t need help.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 12:21 - Category: Election 2008 Tags: Clinton;
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 10:23 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: Black-Scholes;
The Black-Sholes option pricing model and the theory of portfolio insurance that emerged from it has been widely used on Wall Street as a way to do riskless investing because one would always be hedged by shorting the S&P.
Good theory. The glitch was discovered only after the fact: When a market is crashing and no one is willing to buy, it’s impossible to sell short. If too many investors are trying to unload stocks as a market falls, they create the very disaster they are seeking to avoid.
The theory doesn’t allow for massive price shifts or for the inability to find buyers. So, when it needs to work the most reliably is precisely when it doesn’t.
The very theory underlying all insurance against financial panic falls apart in the face of an actual panic.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 07:07 - Category: Renewable energy Tags: anerobic digestion, biogas;
From Greenpeace UK EfficienCity, a short, silent, informative video on how biogas works.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 05:14 - Category: Unfiled ;
And it’s a huge one. Princeton researchers show how they can easily grab the encryption key from most any Windows, Mac, or Linux box with disk encryption.
They do it be reading the RAM, then grabbing the key. It only takes a few minutes. This can work even if the computer has been been turned off. Yikes.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 03:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
I’m using Twitter more and more now.Yeah, you really can get news and info there faster and more real-time than anywhere else.
My handle on Twitter is polizeros.
Bob Morris @ Feb 22nd 2008 00:17 - Category: Climate change, Energy conservation, Renewable energy ;
Private sector pumping hundreds of billions into cleantech
Key quote, referring to a UN report
“Increasingly, combating climate change is being perceived as an opportunity rather than a burden and a path to a new kind of prosperity as opposed to a brake on profits and employment,” said the report, which credits the emerging “green” economy with “driving invention and innovation on a scale not seen since perhaps the industrial revolution.”
Yes! The fear and the resistance to change is becoming a thing of the past. The companies that get it will invest big time in cleantech and some will become the next ExxonMobil. (It’s a given that the reactionary dinosaur that is ExxonMobil will not be the next ExxonMobil. But rather that some upstart cleantech company will dethrone them. Heck, it might even be the spawn of Google.org that does it…)
Equally important is that business now sees global warming and cleantech this as opportunity, and indeed, an entire new economic structure for the planet may result because of this. Locally-produced decentralized power will be a large part of the solution, and as that happens, political structures will become decentralized too.
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