Will DeLuca › Comments

"Flickr lost my trust over this issue. They failed to stand up for a user who chose to display his work on Flickr over competitors. They should have had the courage to do the right thing. This is exactly the type of speech that our constitution is supposed to protect. This is not a stolen image. It’s a powerful political expression." - Will DeLuca

Ann Trason, Scott Jurek, Matt Carpenter. These are the megastars of ultra-distance running, athletes who pound out not just marathons, but dozens of them back-to-back, over Rocky Mountain passes and across the scorching floor of Death Valley. If their names are unfamiliar, it’s probably because this type of extreme running is almost universally seen as a fringe sport, the habit of the superhumanly fit, the masochistic, the slightly deranged. But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past. Our toes, for instance, are - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

We’ve known for a while that Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of the Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit, would comprise two movies, due in December 2011 and 2012. But the make-up of those two movies has been up for debate… until now. “We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro. “We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.” - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

weird but ok?! - Susan Beebe

Headline needs more lemon peal MG. :P - Will DeLuca

nb. cowbell:lemonpeal as MG Seigler:Bruce Dickinson - Will DeLuca

Imagine the huge smiles on the faces of executives and scientists at Dendreon Corp as their stock soared more than 130% yesterday! What’s all the excitement about? In a unique approach that may have far reaching applications for fighting multiple types of cancers and diseases, the company announced success with a treatment that enlists the body’s own immune system as an army to seek out and destroy deadly prostate cancer cells. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

The study raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter. "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," Immordino- Yang said. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

What do these charts tell us? In essence, that there is a high likelihood of substantial market dislocations based on previous comparable situations. More on this in a second. Why quant funds? Or rather, what is so special about quant funds? The proper way to approach the question is to think of the market as an ecosystem of liquidity providers, who, based on the frequency of their trades, generate a cushioning to the open market trading mechanism. It is a fact that the vast majority of transactions in the market are not customer driven buy/sell orders, but are in fact high frequency, small block trades that constantly cross between a select few of these same quant funds and program traders. So when will all this occur? The quant trader I spoke to would not commit himself to any specific time frame but noted that a date as early as next Monday could be a veritable D-day. His advice on a list of possible harbingers: continued deleveraging in quant funds as per the charts noted above, significant pre-market vo - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

From a budget-busting perspective, last year where the US government had a $73 billion Social Security surplus to spend, this year it will be a paltry $16 billion and next year it will be a number indistinguishable from zero. It is hard to overstate the importance of this shift. This means several things. Instead of $703 billion coming in over the next 10 years, the current (overly optimistic) projection calls for only $83 billion. This means at least another $620 billion in fresh borrowing will have to occur. More importantly, this means that the United States eventual date with bankruptcy has been moved forward by about 8 years or so. It also means that instead of being some future problem, a few administrations down the road, it is a near certainty that the current administration will have to confront some very difficult funding decisions that will be forced by the inability to borrow enough to pay for everything. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

What’s most surprising about this consistently surprising movie is how forcefully those beats resonate, even though you know how the story ends from the start. (Take another look at the coyly, cleverly enigmatic title, borrowed from the famous headline in The Harvard Crimson.) One reason for the excitement is the game, of course, which remains a nail-biter despite the visual quality of the footage, which is so unadorned and so humble — and almost entirely in long shot — it looks like a dispatch from a foreign land. And in some ways it was: Football fans still wore raccoon coats to games and the women in the stands cheering for Yale could not attend the college. The same month, Yale announced it was (finally) opening that door. This history helps explain why there are no women here, at least in close-up. “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is very much about men, triumphant, regretful, defiant, sentimental, touchingly vulnerable men who are made all the more poignant with each image of them as young players. For some - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

How do we pick the moment at which we finally decide to settle down? When it comes to romantic decision-making, neuroscientists say the rational part of our brain gets dumped. In other words, our rational sides are simply not equipped to make complex and far-reaching decisions like when to get married. “The rational brain can only take in seven pieces of information at one time,” Lehrer says. “When it gets more than that, it’s like an old computer trying to run Vista.” - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

DYLAN: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage — cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

To ask at what point on the 1930s timeline the United States is right now, Harold L. Cole, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said with some exasperation, “really shows a misunderstanding of the severity of what went on there and the depths of the crisis.” Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing n - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

This is where things get interesting. It's so simple, really, it's genius. You see, normally, when banks give someone a loan, they have to sit around and wait for the money to trickle in one month at a time. What I'm thinking is, that's really no way to do it. You could grow old waiting for a bet like that to finally pay off. But what if—what if—the banks made a whole lot of loans really quickly, put a bunch of them together in a big package, or bundle, and then sold them to investors for some quick cash? They'd be turning a profit right away, so they wouldn't have to worry so much about whether people could pay back what they borrowed. And they could give loans to anybody—homeless people, kids, immigrants...it wouldn't matter! You can't lose with this! I'm telling you, it's the thing that's gonna work. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in Washington are a bunch of tight-asses who are overly concerned with sustainable growth this, and long-term economic health that. Hey, Mr. Bureaucrat, if you'd get your - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

The film, written and directed by Greg Mottola (“The Daytrippers,” “Superbad”), plants its flag in thoroughly explored territory, but that familiarity turns out to be integral to its loose and scruffy appeal. Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence “Adventureland” displays. Over all, though, the smart, slightly depressive vibe feels just right — for James’s era and for our own as well. The path to adulthood is lined with disappointment, but for a young man with an open heart and a measure of self-confidence, to say nothing of a degree in comp lit, things will most likely be O.K. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

As with the phony reinsurance contracts that AIG and other insurers wrote for decades, when AIG wrote hundreds of billions of dollars in CDS contracts, neither AIG nor the counterparties believed that the CDS would ever be paid. Indeed, one source with personal knowledge of the matter suggests that there may be emails and actual side letters between AIG and its counterparties that could prove conclusively that AIG never intended to pay out on any of its CDS contracts. The significance of this for the US bailout of AIG is profound. If our surmise is correct, the position of Feb Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that the AIG credit default contracts are "valid legal contracts" is ridiculous and reveals a level of ignorance by the Fed and Treasury about the true goings on inside AIG and the reinsurance industry that is truly staggering. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

Paradise Lost ~ - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis." - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

Dan Hannan's demolition of Gordon Brown speech is the single most watched video on YouTube today. And all without a single mention of it in the mainstream media. Think about that. And when someone tells you that the internet has little influence on politics, cite it as an example. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

WASHINGTON -- It is high time Americans heard an argument that might turn a vague national uneasiness into a vivid awareness of something going very wrong. The argument is that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) is unconstitutional. By enacting it, Congress did not in any meaningful sense make a law. Rather, it made executive branch officials into legislators. Congress said to the executive branch, in effect: "Here is $700 billion. You say you will use some of it to buy up banks' 'troubled assets.' But if you prefer to do anything else with the money -- even, say, subsidize automobile companies -- well, whatever." FreedomWorks, a Washington-based libertarian advocacy organization, argues that EESA violates "the nondelegation doctrine." Although the text does not spell it out, the Constitution's logic and structure -- particularly the separation of powers -- imply limits on the size and kind of discretion that Congress may confer on the executive branch. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

The narcissists did it. Some commentators are fingering them as the culprits of the financial meltdown. A Bloomberg columnist blamed the conceited for our financial troubles in a piece titled "Harvard Narcissists With MBAs Killed Wall Street." A Wall Street Journal op-ed on California's economy suggested that Gov. Schwarzenegger's desire for voter's love ("It's classic narcissism") helped cause the state's budget debacle. A forthcoming book, The Narcissism Epidemic, says we went on a national binge of I-deserve-it consumption that's now resulting in our economic purging. This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards ("Wow! Your Birthday's Really Close to Mine!"). - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

The Bank of North Dakota is the only state-owned bank in America—what Republicans might call an idiosyncratic bastion of socialism. It also earned a record profit last year even as its private-sector corollaries lost billions. To be sure, it owes some of its unusual success to North Dakota’s well-insulated economy, which is heavy on agricultural staples and light on housing speculation. But that hasn’t stopped out-of-state politicos from beating a path to chilly Bismarck in search of advice. Could opening state-owned banks across America get us out of the financial crisis? It certainly might help, says Ellen Brown, author of the book, Web of Debt, who writes that the Bank of North Dakota, with its $4 billion under management, has avoided the credit freeze by “creating its own credit, leading the nation in establishing state economic sovereignty.” Mother Jones spoke with the Bank of North Dakota’s president, Eric Hardmeyer. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

In the study, Berns' team hooked 24 college students to brain scanners as they contemplated swapping a guaranteed payment for a chance at a higher lottery payout. Sometimes the students made the decision on their own. At other times they received written advice from Charles Noussair, an Emory University economist who advises the U.S. Federal Reserve. The findings, based on a small number of college students in a controlled setting, are necessarily preliminary, but their implications are common-sense. Berns recommended that investors do their own research, be careful, and remember that fancy credentials and financial pedigrees are no guarantee of economic wisdom. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

In 2009 you might be unemployed, like those moguls at the top of the financial food chain, so it’s necessary to look busy, preferably at some advanced and exotic activity. Don’t give in to shamefaced cringing and glum, hand-wringing humility. You’ll be getting plenty of humiliation from crazed market forces, which behave in ways that make no sense to anyone. So why not be out there, zanily extravagant? Are you losing anything the whole world hasn’t lost already? Ask yourself, “What would Maurizio Cattelan do?” - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

Dilbert, 2 days in a row: - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

perfect - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

"The peak profit net income of Fannie Mae was about 7 billion dollars – and it was typically in the 4-6 billion range. The peak net income of Freddie Mac was about 10 billion but it was typically in the 3-4 billion range. In almost every year the combined profit was under 10 billion. And for that they took credit risk on over 5 trillion of mortgages. They earned – at best – 20bps post tax on all risks they took. The pre-tax fee for taking credit losses was typically about 20bps." But it is not clear that consumers really benefited in the end from hyper low mortgage rates. They just seemed to get capitalized into the value of houses – and that was part of the creation of our current predicament. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

In 1933, representatives of all the leading nations met in London to find a coordinated way out of the Great Depression engulfing the world economy. H.G. Wells' description of the ill-fated conference, especially of Roosevelt and his entourage makes for remarkable reading in light of some of the parallels: - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

One European Union official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the comments reflected that, unlike other Eastern European countries like Hungary, the Czech economy has proved relatively resilient. “He is sitting in the Czech Republic,” the official said “where growth is holding up relatively well and a fiscal stimulus makes no sense.” “He has never been in favor of a big fiscal stimulus — though he did not argue against it at the E.U. summit.” - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet

When Lichtenstein created the third BMW Art Car, he said he used "painted lines as a road, pointing the way for the car. The design also shows the scenery as it passes by. Even the sky and sunlight are to been seen....you could list all the things a car experiences - the only difference is that this car mirrors all these things even before it takes to the road. - Will DeLuca from Bookmarklet