ON GLOBAL FINANCIAL IMBALANCES
Milken: A number of countries around the world — the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway, Taiwan — have built up tremendous reserves relative to the size of their country. Most of them have not made the mistake of Japan, where deploying that surplus within the country through, for example superfluous road or bridge construction, caused massive increases in prices in the 1980s.
All in all, there is at least $25 trillion worth of surpluses in the world today that is invested short-term. It is pretty hard to find anything to put a trillion dollars into except U.S. government and private bonds or mortgage-backed securities.
Where do you see this capital being deployed? Do you see it just compounding away, or do you see them following the mode maybe of Singapore where the government is creating its own industrial companies?
BurkaBlog
Living in the “Metroplex” years ago, I enjoyed (and still do) reading Texas Monthly. Senior Executive Editor (where do the titles come from?) now has a useful blog that is worth checking out and subscribing to [RSS].
Back to the Future: The Suez Crisis
The Economist publishes a timely look back at the Suez Crisis:
The Suez crisis, as the events of the following months came to be called, marked the humiliating end of imperial influence for two European countries, Britain and France. It cost the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, his job and, by showing up the shortcomings of the Fourth Republic in France, hastened the arrival of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle. It made unambiguous, even to the most nostalgic blimps, America’s supremacy over its Western allies. It thereby strengthened the resolve of many Europeans to create what is now the European Union. It promoted pan-Arab nationalism and completed the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute into an Israeli-Arab one. And it provided a distraction that encouraged the Soviet Union to put down an uprising in Hungary in the same year.
Fixed Gear Bikes Illegal in Portland
An Oregon judge has ruled that fixed-gear bicycles — which use the rider’s leg-power to brake them — are illegal, and must be outfitted with traditional lever/caliper brakes. The cyclist who was ticketed for the offense fought it in traffic court, and was represented by a pretty sharp attorney, judging from the partial transcript here. It seems obvious that “fixies” should be lawful, since they can satisfy the statutory requirement that bikes be “equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level, clean pavement. strong enough to skid tire.” Nevertheless, the judge ruled against the cyclist — I hope she appeals.
Gopher
Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only, hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you’ve got a recent version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at http://gopher.well.com:70/.
I remember using Gopher (and being quite impressed by it) in the early 1990’s via a UW supplied dialup internet account.
This was before the growth of local ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). The UW told non faculty/students/staff to move on once the internet started to take off (1994?).
The Hard Disk That Changed the World
The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue’s San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you’d pay about $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving “heads” that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That’s not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Yet those who beheld the RAMAC were astonished. “It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running,” recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-’50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM. “It really turned the tide [in the Information Age],” he says. “It was the first to offer random access, whereas before you would have to wind a tape from one end to the other to access data.”
UW Football PR heats up
Interesting: Both the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal ran features today on new UW Football coach Bret Bielema.
I recently saw well tanned UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez and Bret (also well tanned) riding around in Barry’s two seat convertible on a gorgeous Madison evening. Would have been a great photograph – had I been carrying a camera….
Imagining the Day When the WSJ Print Edition Folds
Wow, they’re going to do it. Or at least they’re going to think about doing it. That’s the first thing that came into my mind on a recent Friday morning when The New York Times reported that the parent company of The Wall Street Journal had created a committee “to reassess the ways it delivers news across all its print and online properties.”
Kevin York’s Motorsports Blog
New Madison resident Kevin York has a motorsports blog.
What Does $7 Billion in Telco Subsidies Buy?
The “universal service” regime ostensibly extends local phone service to consumers who could not otherwise afford it. To achieve this goal, some $7 billion annually is raised – up from less than $4 billion in 1998 – by taxing telecommunications users. Yet, benefits are largely distributed to shareholders of rural telephone companies, not consumers, and fail – on net – to extend network access. Rather, the incentives created by these subsidies encourage widespread inefficiency and block adoption of advanced technologies – such as wireless, satellite, and Internet-based services – that could provide superior voice and data links at a fraction of the cost of traditional fixed-line networks. Ironically, subsidy payments are rising even as fixed-line phone subscribership falls, and as the emergence of competitive wireless and broadband networks make traditional universal service concepts obsolete. Unless policies are reformed to reflect current market realities, tax increases will continue to undermine the very goals “universal service” is said to advance.
Guess how much would it cost a farmer to get telephone service in a small rural county far from a major city? Let’s say $800 for satellite service.
Now guess how much the government subsidizes rural phone carriers to provide this service. The answer? As much as $13,000 per line per year.