Wednesday Ideas

Failure

• Table of MF Global sovereign debt holdings. Notice the footnote, "risk of loss would be due to default of issuer." Uh, duh. They seemed to think it was impossible for a European sovereign to default. Really bizarre. It looks like they were all-in on a bailout bet. This reminds me of summer 2007 when the most brutally stupid and highly levered mortgage investors failed first.
• Wallboard: "Currently, there is significant excess wallboard production capacity industry-wide in the United States. Industry capacity in the United States was approximately 32.9 billion square feet. We estimate that the industry capacity utilization rate was approximately 52% during the first nine months of 2011 compared to 51% during the first nine months of 2010."
• Chart showing transfer payments as a percentage of GDP. Amazing that they are probably going to grow, both because of the aging population and possibly also declining GDP! The author asks, "should we be spending our national wealth on programs that will provide for the betterment of society in the future or should we use it to allow individuals to retire while they are still productive / to extend the life of a sick elder by another six months?"

Promise

• The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) has the potential to make electric power cheaper than from coal.
• I argue that low interest rates fight crime waves. Why? Because low interest rates tell us that tomorrow is worth waiting for.
• Low-pass filters exist in many different forms, including electronic circuits (such as a hiss filter used in audio), anti-aliasing filters for conditioning signals prior to analog-to-digital conversion, digital filters for smoothing sets of data, acoustic barriers, blurring of images, and so on. The moving average operation used in fields such as finance is a particular kind of low-pass filter, and can be analyzed with the same signal processing techniques as are used for other low-pass filters.

Thinking

• Self-regulation depletion or ego-depletion is the scientific study of willpower and how using willpower for one purpose can drain one's ability to exercise willpower for other reasons.
• B vitamin supplementation seemed to slow the brain atrophy compared to the control group. The treatment response was related to baseline homocysteine levels - the rate of atrophy in patients with a homocysteine level at baseline of >13 micromol/L was 53% lower in the active treatment group than in placebo.