According to a military report on the potential “terrorist” uses of technology,
Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences.
Apparently, terrorists aren’t the only enemies of the state. Vegetarians, beware!
via Breitbart and Manuel Lora at Google Libertarian Forum
In Reader Mail # 67, FSK cites my post about Who Owns General Motors.
David Z did a calculation that indicated that GM might be worth more to its employees than its shareholders. David Z got the calculation wrong. Adding up salary and benefits, unionized autoworkers make closer to $50-$70/hr, instead of $13/hr..
What I said was:
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and assume that FTEs at General Motors earn more than $13/hour in gross compensation.
What I should’ve said was, I’m sure the average FTE at GM earns far more than $13/hour in gross compensation, but let’s play with the $13 figure just for grins. Using the $50-70 range which may even be on the low end, GM’s employees could purchase the company with 2 or 3 months worth of savings.
Right now, GM stock is trading at around $6/share. Employees could purchase the company outright in a month, if they were so inclined.
Again, I’m really not going anywhere with this train of thought, I just thought it was interesting for some reason.
+++
I’ve been receiving a small amount of traffic from About.com, thanks to Laura Sternberg’s October 3 piece on medical marijuana in michigan. Laura actually used my post on medical marijuana in Michigan as one of her sources. Thanks, Laura!
+++
modern finance in a nutshell. Interesting.
+++
Mike Gogulski left a comment on Blue Screen:
ssuming that you’re not pressed to recycle the bunked machine right now, there are tools — I am just pressed to find them. I’ve been perhaps uncharacteristically lucky in dodging from internal to external hard drive for so many years that it’s never hit me this way.
+++
Tony asked a question in response to an ongoing discussion, under my post Gold is NOT a fiat currency:
I accept that there are objective criteria for choosing a medium of exchange. Those criteria (supply is fixed) make gold objectively better than other items. But the supply of oil, copper, etc is also fixed. Why gold over those?
Without reinventing the wheel on this one, gold’s limited supply is only one of the criteria which must be met in order for a commodity to be monetized. Oil is a poor choice because it is consumed. Gold is not consumed or otherwise destroyed (AFAIK) in any of its uses. Moreover, oil as a raw material is of varying quality. Like any other element in nature, a unit of gold is exactly the same as any other unit; now and forever. It is relatively easy to divide or recombine units of gold. Gold also has a high value/weight ratio compared to just about anything else in the known world.
A while back, Tony inquired about my general hostility towards fractional reserve banking. His inquiry has not been ignored, I just haven’t had time to respond adequately.
From time to time, I come across something on teh interwebs that really doesn’t require any comment. Here’s the latest, as Arnold Kling describes contemporary macroeconomics:
I have always thought that the issue of the relationship between financial markets and the “real economy” was really deep. I thought that it was a critical part of macroeconomic theory that was poorly developed. But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men’s urge for mathematical masturbation.
Economists ought to admit that we do not know much about what is going on today. Neither do the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary. Of course, the market demand is for “strong” leaders and for “strong” economists, who can fool the public into believing that they have great knowledge.
I’ve long understood modern macroeconomics to be a joke, of course I’m not a professional economist, so many people will dismiss my opinion, outright. I’m barely an “academic” economist, having studied Econ extensively in Grad School a few years hence.
IMO, the problem with most contemporary macroeconomic theory, is that it’s nearly completely divorced from microeconomics. If you can’t understand what individuals will do in a given economic circumstance, you can never understand a macroeconomy.
