Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Like Catching Water in a Net at the Bluest Mountains

The energising Badger and Boronia company of YMMP ...
‘Outback’ denotes the remote and sparsely settled inland districts of Australia but does not indicate such extreme remoteness as implied in a similar expression, the ‘Never-Never’.


Via yellow deli of Katoomba fame: Facebook is quietly buying information from data brokers about its users’ offline lives Business Insider

    Because in the movies nothing is ever true.”

Ladies who found their fella attractive had more intense orgasms, while a man’s broad shoulders were also found to be related to sexual satisfaction --- RICH confident and with attractive broad shoulders : Science says these are the men who will make you orgasm.  WHO could have guessed?





“The story goes that Napoleon had his troops riding through the Champagne [region of auntie Zofia fame ], and the adoring public handed them bottles of wine," says sommelier Belinda Chang, a partner at Maple & Ash in the Gold Coast. The soldiers didn’t want to stop and twist off the corks, "so they whipped out their swords, and the art of sabrage was started. It’s a great party trick." How to open a Champagne bottle with a steak knife

According to Yammer, x is a smart man who's been educated in our finest universities to a high level in things which are simply not true, indeed false ...



Erasing the News: Should some stories be forgotten? By Terry Carter – this is an extensive and well researched article. I have snipped a small portion to invite you to read it in its entirety online. Note – This article originally appeared in the January 2017 issue of the ABA Journal with this headline: “Erasing the News: The media and lawyers wrestle with the question: Should some stories be forgotten?”

“…Anecdotal evidence indicates that requests to unpublish have picked up in the United States since the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014 created the so-called right to be forgotten. It is law for citizens in the 28-member countries that comprise the European
Union….As news organizations and Google began to wrestle with demands to make information disappear, new forces came into play, including reputation management companies and the use of search engine optimization to change results. Businesses, such 
as ReputationDefender, charge thousands of dollars to push negative results downward in Google searches by seeding the web with positive links that rise to the top.”     


Lars Knudsen Limited Edition print Framed 'Pied Oystercatchers' · Lars Knudsen Limited Edition pr…

WSJ.com, Sara Randazzo: “Major U.S. law firms have become more vigilant in recent years about the risks of cyberattacks, but revelations this week of a major hack on two New York firms are a reminder that the industry remains vulnerable. The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office unsealed a criminal indictment Tuesday against three Chinese men accused of using stolen law-firm employee credentials to access troves of internal emails at two law firms. The men, according to prosecutors, used details they obtained in law-firm partner emails about pending deals to make more than $4 million in illegal stock trades. While the indictment didn’t name the firms, The Wall Street Journal previously reported that prosecutors were investigating a hack at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP and Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP. Details in Tuesday’s indictment indicate those two were the firms in question ...



     When someone leaves

            Your life, you’re left with a story

            You’ll fetch from your minds library 



            When sleep eludes you and you sit

            In the quiet of the kitchen, surrounded

            By the dark and empty rooms of self.


            I’m not interested in last words,

            But in final thoughts. Do you love

            The most the one you think of last?




            Blue jays flew in and out of the pines.

            I delighted at their squawking—thought of tenement 

            women

            Airing laundry on fire escapes. 

            I wanted to climb the branches for the same reason.







For New Year’s, Enjoy Some Horror Stories Of Onstage Mishaps And Screw-Ups


What profit is there from my death,
from my descent into the pit?
Can the dust praise you?
Can it declare your truth? (v. 10)






“A stage is a dangerous and threatening environment, one in which chaos and calamity are never more than a protruding nail or a malfunctioning revolver away.” Actor Michael Simkins shares some of his favorite (if that’s the word) calamities





After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.
It was very fulfilling to be able to share my thoughts on the events unfolding around us, and to receive feedback from readers across the country — even if it was impossible to answer them all.
Being old-fashioned, I liked to know what the facts were before writing. That required not only a lot of research, it also required keeping up with what was being said in the media.
During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful. With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful.
This made me decide to spend less time following politics and more time on my photography, adding more pictures to my website (www.tsowell.com)
Marginal Revolution University grew tremendously in 2016 and I’m thrilled with our Principles of Macroeconomics course and excited about all the new videos that we will release in 2017–including videos from India where I will be working on sabbatical. It was a good year for me personally and professionally. But 2016 was a very bad year for the world and this was reflected by the posts on Marginal Revolution.

The number one post of the year said it all: What the hell is going on? As Tyler put it in that post, “Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria.”
Looking back now, it is clear that Tyler foresaw where the world was going and he starting working hard to understand the trend long before others were forced to retrospect. All of the following posts were in the top 20:
The second highest viewed post was actually my post, Economist Removed From Plane for Algebra, which was rather clickbaity although at least it wasn’t a hoax. I had two other top-ten posts, both of which were substantive. First was India’s Demonetization–What is Next? which pointed to all the right issues on this still evolving monetary shock. A number of Indian bloggers and writers picked up on this post. Also in the top ten was the surprising, Homicide Data by Weapon.
My posts on housing, Collective Property in Palo Alto, Laissez-faire in Tokyo Land Use, and the Japanese Zoning System were all widely read. As was Economics on Buying versus Renting a House which led to Tyler and me debating the issue for Econ Duel.
Other widely read posts of mine were:
I have saved, however, the best to last. Coming in at number 50 was a strange, shocking, only Tyler could have written, post. At the time not enough people took it seriously but it bears repeated and careful reading:
Yes, 2016 was that kind of year.