Any time you have an in-group/out-group dynamic, you have to be careful that it doesn't turn into one of the many times in human history when that becomes a source of unspeakable pain and suffering. Snubbing the contributions of other nations in the control room paid for by American taxpayers by employees whose paychecks are paid by American taxpayers is not really comparable to, say, African colonization or the First World War. Maybe you can hope that humans stop seeing some people as part of their group and other as not part of that group, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Since that way of viewing the world seems to be hard wired into humanity, I think it is great when it gets channeled into increasing human knowledge, or even scoring more goals than the guys in the red jerseys, rather than "let's slaughter them because they talk funny."

I'm not sure I understand how "surge pricing" will increase drunk driving fatalities. I guess you are thinking that someone gets out of a bar to go home, and because surge pricing is too expensive, they drive home themselves instead of calling a cab/Uber (or instead of someone else setting one up for them). But the limitation on the availability of cabs is because there are more people looking for cabs than there are cabs on the street. Surge pricing brings more cabs out on the street, since supply curves slope upwards. With more cabs on the street, there are more drunk people getting rides home. You can't have a scenario where surge pricing is in effect because there is a lot of demand for cabs, and at the same time, having less people using cabs.

I'm not sure that is what is happening here. It seems reasonable that a rocket owner will refuse to take liability for the stuff on the rocket, since a rocket blowing up is not uncommon. So they basically say, "you can send stuff on our rocket at your own risk." Maybe the satellite owner should go out and buy insurance, but if it was up to the rocket owner to buy the insurance they would just pass that exact cost on to the payload owner (making the payload owner pay for the insurance indirectly).

So the question is, if a Boeing (or whatever) satellite was destroyed on a NASA rocket that blew up, did NASA reimburse Boeing for the damages, or was it the same as here? And then, if it is always the payload owner who bears the risk, should the US government buy insurance? I think the answer to that is no, since the cost of insurance will have to be greater than the expected cost of actual losses in the long run, and the government can afford to self-insure in this case.

I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but you can't compare the United States today to China today. China is undergoing one of the world's largest mass migrations in the history of the world, as it has gone from about 30% urban to 50% urban in just about 10 years. The US has been about 3/4 urbanized for the last 40 years. So China needs new buildings because people are moving to new places. In the US, cities just aren't growing as fast.

For example, everybody has heard of how difficult it is to find a place to live in San Francisco (or how expensive it is) because of the lack of new building and the large influx of new people. But San Francisco is only growing about 10,000 people per year. In China, many cities are growing at 10 or 50 *times* that amount. Without building lots of excess capacity (that is quickly used up) they could never keep pace.

Sure those sites will be offline, but just as you can get to the next floor on a stopped escalator, you can communicate with anybody in the world on an internet without facebook and twitter. You just have to put forth a little more effort than just standing there.

Speaking of Die Hard and "key sites" like facebook, one of my favorite scenes in any movie is in the first Die Hard when the terrorists shut down the building, there are a bunch of cut scenes to big locks engaging and the building going into lockdown. However, one of those scenes is a very dramatic shot of the escalators stopping. Because of course that would prevent anybody from getting to the next level of the building. Similarly, if Facebook and Twitter were shut down, only the totally clueless would be hindered in any meaningful way.

Facebook and Twitter - the escalators of the internet.

The whole "Chinese ghost city" bubble tends to be misunderstood. Sure there are boondoggles in Mongolia but a lot of those ghost cities are basically extensions of boomtowns. And it is tough for people to understand just how big a boomtown in China is; Shenzen is adding almost 300,000 people every year, Tianjin almost 600,000. So the general area of Shenzen needs to build a city the size of Pittsbugh, and Tianjin needs to build a city the size of Boston *every year*. Most of those empty cities were built in anticipation of people relocating from elsewhere and have filled up quickly. And for those that haven't, with building on that massive a scale, if they build residences for an extra 100,000 people in the wrong place here and there it's hardly a sign of foolhardy building that isn't necessary *somewhere*.

You are confusing money, value, creation, and notional. Not everything that has value is money. And the notional of derivative contracts is not the same as its value. If we make a bet on a coin toss for $100, we have created $100 of notional, not of value, and we have certainly not created $100 of money.

The real Greek position, which no one will say in public because there is too much national pride at stake, is that the bankers (i.e. Germany) *should* give handouts to Greece on a moral basis. Germany doesn't have any particular obligation to, say, New Zealand, and so the idea of German taxpayers shoveling a bunch of Euros to the Kiwis each month is kind of ridiculous. But for completely non-economic reasons, the "European Core" such as Germany and France *want* Greece and other poorer, less productive countries (like Portugal) to be part of the "European Project." Greece does not have the resources, such as a highly productive, skilled, and educated populace that Germany and France do, so Greece does not naturally fit with Germany and France and that is the source of the disagreement.

Germany then says, "If you cut your pensions, reduce corruption, and collect taxes you will be more like Germany and then we will all fit together."

But Greece says, "That may help in the long run but 1, if you want us in your project so badly then you must give us financial support (handouts) in the form of fiscal transfers, and 2, we are Greece and don't want to be Germany."

So they all kind of want to stay together, but Greece wants a monetary and fiscal policy that enables them to maintain a high standard of living, while Germany wants every country to be rich so that changes to monetary and fiscal policy are unnecessary.

In all fairness, the reason why this is such a mess is because the Greeks can't file bankruptcy. The only reason we in America can "file bankruptcy" is because there is a law (with sections like "Chapter 11" and "Chapter 13" which is where those terms come from) that we can take advantage of that forces creditors to accept certain kinds of debt restructurings, where creditors generally will incur some loss and the debtor will generally have to fulfill some kinds of restrictive conditions. Because these laws are already on the books, when someone (or a company) gets into trouble, there is an established legal process that tells the borrower what to do so that they can "move on."

But there is no "International Bankruptcy Court." Let's say Greece tries to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York City and a court there says, "according to our laws, Greece has to do x, y, and z, and give the proceeds to your creditors. And creditors, in exchange, you no longer have a claim against the government or people of Greece," but there is no reason why the European institutions that are owed money would have to listen to the U.S. court. So instead, they are trying to make up a bankruptcy process as they go along, which is going to seem ad hoc (because it is) and potentially arbitrary and unfair (because no one agreed to this process ahead of time).

Very very wrong. The Fed's balance sheet is presented in this report and the $1.7 trillion of "Mortgage backed securities" on page 4 (page 12 of the pdf) is referring to so-called "conforming" mortgages backed by the US Government agencies (e.g. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). These are not the "toxic" mortgages issued between 2005-2007 to "sanitation engineers" in Riverside, California who claimed to make $150,000 and got mortgages of $500,000 on a run down shack, but rather, loans of about $230,000 to borrowers who can fully document income.

If you are referring to the true bailout programs such as Maiden Lane note that those were much smaller and have almost entirely wound down at this point.

I have been following a bunch of the links but can't actually find what consideration Verizon got in the contract. But I did see that the contract is called a "franchise agreement" so I'm assuming that the city offered to use its power to prevent anyone else from competing with Verizon in exchange for Verizon agreeing to, among other things, provide service to the entire city. And now the city is shocked, shocked that a company that is too lazy to want to compete is also too lazy to actually provide the service. Frog, meet scorpion...

Maybe next time the city will not offer any franchises and instead point out to Google what a great place NYC is to lay fiber. If Verizon still doesn't do a good job then they won't get the customers, Google will.

Good point - you are exactly the kind of person that I am thinking about. Rather than merely restricting my comment to "technical training" I really meant "institutional backing" in a broad sense which would include training, support, and generally advocating for programming technologies other than Excel.

I can't really blame IT for their stance, though, because if anything did ever go wrong it would be their problem and they would catch the blame. So the push has to come from management, who recognize that telling analysts that they can't use, say, R, is just making them do whatever they are trying to do in an operationally risky, non-auditable excel spreadsheet.

I forgot who said it, but there is a quote that goes something like "In every sufficiently large Excel spreadsheet, there is a half-assed implementation of a Lisp interpreter." So I agree that the problem isn't semi-skilled people doing programming (loosely defined), but rather, people semi-skilled in the wrong tool.

Many of those large spreadsheets would be much better off as a database and a little bit of scripting language like Python. But most of these business analysts have only ever had exposure to Excel and VBA, and they would have been much better served with some technical training in the right tool for the job.