Tuesday, December 12, 2017

When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: in the laughter of the fools wisdom is found

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

--Claire Messud, talking about anger, the books she loves, and oh, yeah, her latest, The Woman Upstairs
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It is hard to discern the oak in the acorn, or a temple like St. Paul's in the first stone which is laid . . .”




“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
Marilyn Monroe







Bitcoin on track to topple global economy in five months Macrobusiness. Useful aggregation. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”


IN 2008, when she was in her mid-20s and sitting on a $500m inheritance, Liesel Pritzker Simmons asked her bankers about “impact investing”. They fobbed her off. “They didn’t understand what I meant and offered to screen out tobacco,” recalls the Hyatt Hotels descendant, philanthropist and former child film star. So she fired her bankers and advisers and set up her own family office, Blue Haven Initiative. It seeks investments that both offer market-rate returns and have a positive impact on society and the environment. “Financially it’s sensible risk mitigation,” she says. “Our philanthropy becomes far more efficient if we don’t need to undo damage done in our investment management.”
Sustainable Investment


In Bashman news from Australia: Josh Blackman may no longer be in Australia, but in his wake some Bashman news has arisen.
Taylah Strano of 97.3 Coast FM in Mandurah, Western Australia reports that "Fake Police bash man near Pinjarra."
Posted at 10:06 PM by Howard Bashman




Is Email Broken? November 30, 2017 – “Ways to communicate now with clients and collegues have grown tremendously since the days of just using the telephone, faxing a letter and even Emailing. If Email no longer gets the job done, what are our alternatives? Our Panelists Dennis Kennedy (DK), Steve Embry (SE), William Goren (WG), Brooke Moore (BM), and Robert Young (RY).” 

How to Deal With Colleagues Who Deny Reality | Psychology Today

On Jerusalem: Denying Reality & The Absence Of 'Palestine'



Law on the Market? Abnormal Stock Returns and Supreme Court Decision-Making. Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Tyler Soellinger, James Ming Chen. Illinois Institute of Technology – Chicago Kent College of Law, CodeX – The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Michigan State University College of Law. May 16, 2017.
“What happens when the Supreme Court of the United States decides a case impacting one or more publicly-traded firms? While many have observed anecdotal evidence linking decisions or oral arguments to abnormal stock returns, few have rigorously or systematically investigated the behavior of equities around Supreme Court actions. In this research, we present the first comprehensive, longitudinal study on the topic, spanning over 15 years and hundreds of cases and firms. Using both intra- and interday data around decisions and oral arguments, we evaluate the frequency and magnitude of statistically-significant abnormal return events after Supreme Court action. On a per-term basis, we find 5.3 cases and 7.8 stocks that exhibit abnormal returns after decision. In total, across the cases we examined, we find 79 out of the 211 cases (37%) exhibit an average abnormal return of 4.4% over a two-session window with an average |t|-statistic of 2.9. Finally, we observe that abnormal returns following Supreme Court decisions materialize over the span of hours and days, not minutes, yielding strong implications for market efficiency in this context. While we cannot causally separate substantive legal impact from mere revision of beliefs, we do find strong evidence that there is indeed a “law on the market” effect as measured by the frequency of abnormal return events, and that these abnormal returns are not immediately incorporated into prices.”



Trump’s campaign: Big Macs, screaming fits and constant rivalries.
“Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place"



The ‘Psychedelic Dream Homes’ Of El Alto, Bolivia


A Times 360 video tour of the exuberant architecture of Freddy Mamani Silvestre, a Bolivian architect whose house designs for the world's highest city (El Alto, at 14,000 feet, sits on a plateau above La Paz) incorporate visual motifs and colors from the indigenous Aymara culture. … [Read More]


Soul of a Woman