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Another great day when we don’t expend many electrons with items about the Washington DC creeps that our fellow citizens have decided would be really really good at running the government.
MSN – Money has a piece saying the Dow could hit 26,000 by 2016. Seems silly, but some readers will be interested. The argument is the federal government will keep the bubble going.
Market observer Harry Dent claims that the Dow Jones industrials will rally to 17,000 within the next few weeks — before it disastrously plummets to around 6,000 by 2016. Dent makes his case in a new book, “The Demographic Cliff.”
Sounds like fun times for investors — but it sounds like book shilling to many of the rest of us.
Let’s address several important points that explain why Dent is so terribly wrong. The U.S. government, the Fed, Wall Street and the big Banks are “all-in” on the stock market right now. They can’t and won’t allow a serious collapse in the markets.
Ask yourself this question: All those billions of dollars the Fed printed since 2009 . . . where did that money go? It didn’t go to consumers. It funneled to interest-free loans to Wall Street firms, banks and corporations — so that in the end that money wound up in the stock market.
How else can you explain a market that has risen in value despite billions of dollars in net outflows by retail investors from 2009 to 2013? …
Popular Mechanics suggests how cruise ships can become safer.
For the past three decades cruising has been the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. Eleven new ships were christened last year, and almost 21 million people went on a cruise. Statistically, cruising is relatively safe, but recent failures in seamanship, emergency response, and engineering should sound an alarm. Introduce bad weather or remote surroundings into the equation and an incident like the Costa Concordia shipwreck, which made international headlines two years ago, could result in hundreds of deaths.
Compared with other areas where technology and human behavior impact passenger safety—notably, aviation—the cruise industry is poorly regulated. It has no clear equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a broad mandate to ensure air safety. The U.S. Coast Guard conducts prescheduled, biannual inspections of ships that embark passengers at U.S. ports, but most cruise ships are registered, or flagged, overseas, and critics charge that regulations are poorly enforced. Cruise lines have started instituting reforms, but more needs to be done.
The January 2012 grounding of the Carnival-owned megaship Costa Concordia left 32 dead, 157 injured, and a hulking, disintegrating eyesore beached like a whale off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. It started with ego: Capt. Francesco Schettino swung the ship and its 4229 passengers and crew close to shore on an unsanctioned “salute” to the island of Giglio. The vessel hit submerged rocks, which ripped a nearly 200-foot gash in the hull.
The crew never contacted rescue authorities, who found out about the accident from relatives of panicked passengers. And the abandon-ship order didn’t come until 10:54 pm, more than an hour after the collision. The captain himself had already escaped the foundering vessel. “You’ve abandoned ship!? Get the [expletive] on board!” Italian coast guard captain Gregorio De Falco bellowed when he finally reached Schettino by phone.
The crew didn’t perform much better: The industry standard for the evacuation of a vessel is 30 minutes, but hours into the incident there were still dozens of passengers on board. …
… International law calls for passengers to receive a safety briefing within 24 hours of a ship leaving port, but that can be too late. About 700 of the Costa Concordia’s 3206 passengers had boarded just a couple of hours before the accident; their safety briefing was scheduled for the next day. When things went bad, passengers had no idea where to go or what to do. But the timing of drills isn’t the only issue that needs to be addressed. Mike Inman, the vice president of safety for HollandAmerica, another large cruise line owned by Carnival, says that passenger attendance at muster drills hasn’t always been enforced. “HollandAmerica was one of the first lines to make it mandatory, and we have disembarked people who did not attend,” he says. (Even before the Concordia wreck, HollandAmerica held drills before its ships left port.)Since February 2012 all CLIA cruise lines have pledged to conduct passenger muster drills before leaving port. Technology can help too. In October 2013 Danish safety-equipment company Viking announced the creation of a self-propelled, inflatable raft that holds 200 people and has a chute-like system to ease boarding for children, the elderly, and the injured. The LifeCraft could be on ships within two years; such advances could save lives. “How you get the person in the life raft is the most important part,” Nadolny says. “Lifeboat injuries are probably the biggest killer of crew out there. It’s a fairly complicated arrangement for lifting and lowering the boat, and if it’s not done just right, well, the boat drops and everybody in the boat gets killed.” That’s what happened last year in Spain’s Canary Islands during a drill on a cruise ship called the Thomson Majesty. Cables snapped, killing five crew members and injuring three more. …
The blessings of fracking are extolled in an article from the Hoover Institution. Secure property rights are one of the reasons fracking took off in our country.
Americans should celebrate fracking. By unleashing production of unconventional hydrocarbons, fracking has catapulted the U.S. from being a has-been producer of oil to the world’s largest total supplier in 2013 when we include natural gas liquids, biofuels, and crude oil. The U.S. produced around an average of 12.1 million barrels a day of these liquids, 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the previous leaders.
This increase in U.S. output has not been matched since 1940 when the country was blessed with flush new primary production from oil fields in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Shale-gas production from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota, the Eagle Ford Formation in Texas, and the Marcellus Formation that crosses parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York now accounts for 44% of total U.S. natural gas output, and eventually could account for nearly 70%. …
… New fracking and horizontal drilling technologies are dominantly developed and implemented in the U.S. Why is that? The answer is secure private property rights to subsurface minerals. These are the major reason why the American oil and natural gas industry has been so dynamic and innovative. Except for western Canada, throughout the world, subsurface mineral rights are held by governments, and indeed, the U.S. government also holds the rights to hydrocarbon deposits on federal lands. The incentives for and transaction costs of investing in and using new fracking, pumping, and drilling technologies are dramatically different between private and public ownership.
When private parties own the mineral rights (often surface land owners), they capture any expected benefits from new discoveries and associated production. In North Dakota, land owners above the Bakken Formation are part of a new generation of oil millionaires in a relatively remote and semi-arid region that previously had seen population declines and economic stagnation. These owners also bear many of the costs, including any environmental ones, such as potential ground water contamination or depletion, because these costs generally are localized in the vicinity of fracking wells. Where they are not, rights holders or the companies they contract with may be held accountable for damages inflicted on others.
Bonding requirements to cover environmental damages also can be used both for mitigation and for indentifying the opportunity costs to rights holders and drilling companies of any harm they inflict on others. Bonding requirements and potential litigation instill incentives for careful production practices. …
WSJ’s Walt Mossberg replacement, Geoffrey Fowler, writes on the ubiquitous computer mouse.
I said goodbye to my mouse last month. It was time to advance, I thought, to a higher plane of input, a trackpad that works like a tablet’s screen. Instead of point and click, I’d swipe and flick.
A few weeks in, I was missing my mouse. Moving a folder across a 27-inch iMac screen with the trackpad was like lugging a grand piano across the Sahara—I had to keep taking breaks along the way, as I ran out of pad.
This can’t be progress. Determined, I rustled up a dozen of the latest input devices, regular mice and trackpads, but also vertical mice, pen- and knob-shaped mice, a touch-screen stylus, even a controller that lets you wave your hands around without touching anything, a la “Minority Report.”
What I discovered: Thirty years after the Macintosh took the mouse mainstream, I couldn’t find anything more precise or comfortable for operating a computer. More important, I found the mouse has managed to reinvent itself over the years—it’s like the Madonna of PC peripherals.
One reinvention stood out during my testing, a mouse whose unconventional look belied its natural grip: the Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse by Microsoft. Other standouts I tested were Apple‘s Magic Mouse, the Penclic Mouse and Logitech‘s Ultrathin Touch Mouse. …
This cold and snow-filled winter we’ve had lots of fun with globalony alarmists. However, there are parts of the northern hemisphere with mild winters. Parts as close as Alaska were warmth and lack of snow have created havoc for the iconic Iditarod Race. The Wire has the story. Check out the picture of a dog sled team mushing through a forest on bare ground.
Along the Farewell Burn, returning racer Scott Janssen, known as the Mushin’ Mortician because of his day job, had to drop out of the race after numerous catastrophes. Janssen slammed into rocks and crashed his sled. He hit his head and was knocked unconscious for at least an hour.
He then continued on until one of his dogs got loose. As Janssen walked across a frozen creek to retrieve the dog, he slipped and fell, breaking his ankle. He laid there for another 45 minuted until another competitor, Newton Marshall, caught up to him and offered assistance (Marshall is from Jamaica, by the way).
As of Thursday morning, 12 of the 69 Iditarod competitors have scratched. Jeff King currently holds a 39-minute lead, although none of the top five competitors have taken their mandatory eight-hour or 24-hour rests. Buser, however, is in sixth and has already gotten his 24-hour layover out of the way. …
This is what Pickings could look like if we didn’t have a predatory government.