Old and still drinking water and eating dry white toast.
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Can you UPS two to San Diego?
If you sell more than $600 dollar to any one person (or business) during the year than you are required to create a 1099 or you will be required to charge and collect a 30 percent transaction tax and send it to the IRS
I do not mine taking one for the team......I've been sitting around for a year getting paid for doing nothing.
It's the least I can do for the taxpayers.
Harvest the tomatoes and decide to go with a sunbather
You may be soon be adding Italy to the list...when I accept my new job assignment.
The Hindenburg Omen is a combination of technical factors that attempt to measure the health of the NYSE, and by extension, the stock market as a whole. The goal of the indicator is to signal increased probability of a stock market crash.
The rationale is that under "normal conditions" either a substantial number of stocks may set new annual highs or annual lows, but not both at the same time. As a healthy market possesses a degree of uniformity, whether up or down, the simultaneous presence of many new highs and lows may signal trouble.
Wikipedia: Hindenburg Omen:
..."Warning: Do not go short the farm! We now have to factor in that the Fed is pumping liquidity to prevent crashes once these signals occur. And now that they have hidden M-3, we cannot even monitor how much liquidity they are supplying to the Plunge Protection Team. So you do not want to go short the farm...."
from Savehaven "The April 2006 Hindenburg Omen Has Now Been Confirmed"
Rest of story from safehaven
It would solve the social security problem
Projected OASDI Trust Fund Balance as a Share of Cost
Social Security Reform:
The Nature of the Problem
Based on my projection I should be able to withdraw $1.5 Million and my wife 1/2 million dollars out of the social security fund....based on both of us living to 92 years.
"Islam is not a new religion, but the same truth that God revealed through all His prophets to every people. For a fifth of the world's population, Islam is both a religion and a complete way of life....."
Understanding Islam and Muslims
...and the other muslin for keeping halitosis under control
Federal Reserve TERROR babies
Link: Federal Reserve Balance Sheet
Taleb Says Government Bonds to Collapse, Avoid Stocks
Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who warned that unforeseen events can roil markets in "The Black Swan," said he is "betting on the collapse of government bonds" and that investors should avoid stocks.
“I’m very pessimistic,” he said at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg today. “By staying in cash or hedging against inflation, you won’t regret it in two years.”
Treasuries have rallied amid speculation the global economic recovery is faltering, driving yields on two-year notes to a record low of 0.4892 percent today. The Federal Reserve yesterday reversed plans to exit from monetary stimulus and decided to keep its bond holdings level to support an economic recovery it described as weaker than anticipated. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index retreated 16 percent between April 23 and July 2, the biggest slump during the bull market.
The financial system is riskier than it was before the 2008 crisis that led the U.S. economy to the worst contraction since the Great Depression, Taleb said.
Prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008, Taleb warned that bankers were relying too much on probability models and were disregarding the potential for unexpected catastrophes. His book labeled these events black swans, referring to the widely held belief that only white swans existed until black ones were discovered in Australia in 1697, and said that they were becoming more severe.
Taleb helped pioneer the concept of hedging against these tail-risk events while trading options in the 1980s for banks such as First Boston Inc., now part of Credit Suisse Group AG. Now a professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, Taleb set up the tail-risk hedge fund Empirica LLC in 1999 and ran it for six years.
In February, he told a conference in Moscow that “every single human being” should bet Treasury bonds will decline. It’s a “no-brainer” to sell short the debt, he added. Since then, 2- and 10-year notes have rallied.
Wall Street: Eyes on the Fed
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- As the euphoria of corporate earnings season fades, the stock market could drift in a narrow range this week as investors come to grips with the prospect of a sluggish economic recovery.
The main event will be Tuesday's policy statement from the Federal Reserve. While the central bank is widely expected to maintain its long-held policy of near zero interest rates, there is speculation the Fed may hint at additional plans to support the economy.
"Investors will be looking to see what the Fed is prepared to do," said Alec Young, equity strategist at Standard & Poor's, adding that a drop in Treasury yields last week suggests the bond market expects the Fed to resume its purchases of U.S. debt.
But the stock market will be range bound next week, Young said, as investors focus on the pace of the economic recovery, which is turning out to be less robust than many analysts had expected.
"There's so much sensitivity about how strong or weak the recovery is," he said. "It's going to be difficult for the rally to gain any traction as long as the macro economic indicators continue to be disappointing," he added.
The Fed's great something-flation debate
Stocks ended last week on a sour note after a report from the Labor Department showed Friday that the tepid pace of hiring in the private sector failed to offset the loss of thousands of public sector jobs in July. But stocks still managed to post weekly gains.
After stocks surged 7% in July on better-than-expected quarterly earnings from major U.S. companies, investors have been more cautious in August as the corporate reporting period winds down and economic concerns come to the fore.
Investors have been particularly nervous about the outlook for the job market, since consumer spending, the main driver of U.S. economic activity, is closely tied to unemployment.
"In this recovery it appears as if the consumer has been taken out of the equation," said Quincy Krosby, financial market strategist with Prudential Financial.
The great tax debate
Despite a growing consensus that the recovery will be underwhelming, most analysts do not expect the economy to slip back into recession.
"It will be a very modest recovery, nonetheless the trajectory is positive," said Krosby.
Meanwhile, automaker General Motors is expected to file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission some time this week to officially register its initial public offering.
In the bond market, the U.S. is scheduled to auction $74 billion worth of 3-, 10- and 30-year debt this week.
Monday: There are no economic reports on the agenda.
Tuesday: The Federal Reserve will issue a policy statement in the afternoon. The central bank is widely expected to leave its benchmark federal funds rate in a range of 0 to 0.25%, where it has been since December 2008.
A report on wholesale inventories is due shortly after the market opens.
After the closing bell, Walt Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) is among the companies slated to report quarterly results.
Wednesday: The government reports on the U.S. trade deficit before the opening bell.
Economists surveyed by Briefing.com expect the trade gap widened slightly to $42.5 billion in July from $42.3 billion the month before.
In the afternoon, the Treasury Department is slated to release its July budget numbers. Economists expect a deficit of $169 billion in the month after $180.7 billion shortfall in June.
Cisco Systems (CSCO, Fortune 500) reports quarterly results after the market closes.
Thursday: The Department of Labor releases weekly jobless claims figures in the morning. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment last week is expected to have dropped slightly to 465,000. Continuing claims, a measure of Americans who have been receiving benefits for a week or more, is expected to rise to 4.55 million.
Reports on July export and import prices also come out before the opening bell.
Friday: Investors will take in top-tier reports on inflation, retail sales and consumer sentiment in the morning.
The Consumer Price Index, the government's main inflation gauge, is expected to show an increase of 0.2% in July after prices fell 0.1% the month before. Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, is forecast to be up 0.1% after a gain of 0.2% in June.
At the same time, a report from the Commerce Department is expected to show that retail sales rose 0.5% in July after falling the same amount the month before. Retail sales outside of the auto sector are forecast to be up 0.2%.
After the market opens, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index for early August is expected to edge up to 70 from 67.80.
In addition, a report on June business inventories is due later in the morning.
Tuna meltdown: is there an alternative?
Numbers of bluefin tuna are so low that the species is heading for extinction. But there is hope for this magnificent red-fleshed, warm-blooded fish. Salvation may come in the form of Kona Kampachi, which is abundant and has the sushi bite of bluefin. Isn't it time we changed the menu and got tuna off the hook?
Whale carpaccio – 130 kroners." Thus read the lead starter on the menu in an upscale Norwegian restaurant where I was dining on a winter evening not long ago. Eight slices of whale arranged raw on a plate for the reasonable price of about £13. I have to admit that the prospect of ordering it was intriguing. A near global commercial whaling moratorium has been in effect since 1986, with only Norway, Iceland and Japan refusing to stop. I had never been to a country that still practised whaling, and I had certainly never seen whale on a menu. What would whale taste like, I wondered. Would it be fatty and chewy like beef, or would it have the loose, flaky texture of fish that don't need dense muscles to resist the pull of gravity? Would it be served like prosciutto, with a thin slice of Parmesan cheese? Or, since carpaccio is an Italian dish, would it be more appropriate merely to drizzle olive oil over the whale's buttery sheen?
These were the thoughts that made my mouth water as the waitress approached my table. But when she asked me in blunt Nordic style if I'd like to "try the whale", all at once my 21st-century foodie curiosity wilted. "No," I said, "I'll have the mussels."
I would like to be able to say that I did not "try the whale" because of some superior moral quality I possessed. But which animals we think of as food and which we think of as living creatures is highly contextual. My conception that a whale was somehow too good to eat comes from a historical process that predates me by nearly two centuries, a process that has yet to happen with fish.
A couple of years afterwards the New York Times asked me to write an opinion essay on whether people should continue to eat fish. I considered this question for a long time and conferred with people on both sides of the issue. In the end I decided to try to track a middle course, saying that yes, we should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to spill our oil and dump our garbage. However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability.
I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: that one should favour fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on seabeds and underwater reefs. That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs. When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible. "Don't eat the big fish," I declared toward the end of the article. "Dining on a 500lb bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer."
But two weeks after making my high-minded pronouncements, I found myself at a family dinner party at an upscale restaurant. The first-course choice on the prix fixe menu was either a mini-sirloin steak or bluefin tuna carpaccio. It would seem the choice should have been simple. I had my principles, and I had expressed them quite publicly.
But unlike the earlier moment in Norway when I successfully kept myself from ordering whale carpaccio, this time, nearly without hesitation, I chose the bluefin. I quickly scarfed it down and nearly forgot about the delicious paper-thin slices after they had been washed away with a glass of pinot grigio. I turned to my 12-year-old daughter, who had ordered the sirloin steak, and asked her how her food was. She had just read my article in draft form. "Hypocrite," she said coolly.
In the modern world whales are simply not considered food, while bluefin tuna are judged an acceptable delicacy. But based on population numbers and the international regulatory structures in place for each kind of animal, whale carpaccio is the carpaccio of choice. The whale on my menu at that restaurant in Bergen, Norway was most probably a minke whale, an animal whose population in the wild, after the moratorium was put in place, has grown to more than a quarter of a million animals (estimates vary widely, with some putting the population at close to 1m). Norwegians continue to conduct "scientific whaling" for research purposes. Some of those research subjects end up in restaurants as whale carpaccio.
But judging Norway's dubious moral position on whales becomes increasingly problematic when those countries doing the judging are nations that fish bluefin tuna. The most pessimistic estimates indicate that the population of Atlantic bluefin may have already imploded beyond the point of recovery. Even before the British Petroleum oil spill fouled one of the world's only two Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists put the total number of ecologically critical 12-year-old-plus bluefin mega-spawners in the western stock at a mere 9,000 animals, or in food terms about 43m individual slices of sashimi.
And whereas only three countries still hunt whales commercially, every year dozens of fishing nations gear up to hunt bluefin when the eastern stock arrives from North America and passes through the Strait of Gibraltar in an increasingly fruitless quest to spawn in the Mediterranean. Fishermen are fond of claiming the Mediterranean bluefin fishery is "highly regulated", yet in 2007 every single member nation violated catch limits set by a kind of International Whaling Commission of tuna, called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). In 2008 catch quotas were set at double what biologists on ICCAT's scientific committee recommended.
Fishmongers examine tuna at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market earlier this year. One fish weighing 512lb was sold for $178,000. Photograph: Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images Bluefin, then, represent a very whale-like dilemma. They are big. As such, they are ecologically limited in their populations. Even before they were commercially fished, they were never anywhere near as plentiful as cod, salmon or sea bass. Like whales, whose migrations carry them sometimes from pole to pole, tuna are far-ranging and committed to no single nation. Their transience is intractable and indeed imperative to the continuation of their life cycles. They are in many respects an unmanageable fish.
Other, smaller tuna – the longfin albacore that make up the bulk of the tinned-tuna fishery and yellowfin – may be more manageable (they grow faster, spawn earlier, and have slightly less far-flung peregrinations). But if the bluefin go bust, the other species are next in line. They are sure to face increasing fishing pressure from a broader range of nations.
In the past two decades, conservationists have pushed multiple times to list the bluefin in Appendix One of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna, or Cites – a status achieved by tigers, rhinos and giant pandas, and a change that would end the international trade in bluefin, theoretically putting an end to their export to their primary market, Japan. But every time this option is put forth the bluefin-hunting countries prevail.
At the most recent Cites convention held this past spring in Doha, Qatar, both the European Union and the United States backed a Cites listing for Atlantic bluefin for the first time. Nevertheless the usual dynamic came to pass: one wealthy nation nominated the species for Cites inclusion (this time around it was Monaco). Afterward a host of poorer nations torpedoed the motion in collaboration with Japan. This despite the fact that a cessation of international trade in bluefin is probably the only thing that can halt the fish's decline – a whale-like scenario in which nobody would be able to profit from the animal, at least until the species has a few years to rebuild its numbers. Some tuna advocates are coming to the conclusion that a different tack has to be taken, one that would try to convert bluefin from a wild animal into a domesticated creature, one that would allow us to grow all the tuna we'd ever need.
BLUEFIN have been "farmed" on tuna "ranches" in the Mediterranean since the late 1990s – a practice which today removes more wild young fish from the sea than traditional capture fisheries. Some success has also been achieved in "closing the life cycle" of bluefin, and at least two companies are engaged in trying to fully domesticate the fish for the farm. But bluefin swim at a lightning pace and may require as much as 15lb of wild forage fish to produce a single pound of tuna. If tuna farming ever scales up to the size of salmon farming, then the wild oceans will surely pay the price.
In addition, there is little evidence to suggest that taming a species saves its wild forebear. Tiger farms in China have not halted tiger declines in the wild. The example of whales again rises. As the science historian D Graham Burnett points out in a forthcoming book on the Save the Whales movement, collaborations between American nuclear scientists and marine biologists were once proposed in the 1960s whereby tropical atolls, levelled by nuclear testing, could be used as giant corrals for the commercial farming of cetaceans. But fortunately for the whale – and I think for us, too – we have come to see the whale not as something we fish for, not as something we farm, but as something we appreciate and maybe empathise with. Instead of expanding our stomachs or our wallets, whales have expanded our consciousness, our very humanity.
So we have to ask ourselves: is bluefin tuna really so special that no substitute will do? Japanese defenders of the bluefin trade cite the long cultural tradition of tuna sushi in Japan. But when you look at it in a historical context, the Japanese have a very short tradition of eating bluefin. Before the American occupation of Japan, the Japanese preferred lean fish and meats and found the bluefin too fatty to stomach. It was only after the Second World War and the subsequent introduction of fatty beef into the Japanese diet that a taste for the fatty "otoro" belly of bluefin started to become fashionable. If the Japanese adapted to a higher-fat diet in less than half a century, can we not shift gears again and adapt to a sustainable diet in the same period of time?
It was in answer to these questions that I set out trying to discover a truly thick-fleshed farmed fish that could fulfil the steaky category most seafood diners now expect to see on a menu. A fish that had the "bite" of tuna but might have a footprint more akin to that of a barramundi or a sea bream.
And so I found myself in a dive boat three miles off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, motoring across the cerulean blue of the South Pacific with a tall, highly optimistic Australian named Neil Sims. Eventually we neared the site of Sims's farm – a huge underwater ziggurat that is the centre of his company Kona Blue.
It had been a long time since I'd scuba dived, and even when I'd first learned in college my skills had been rudimentary at best. We were now about to embark on what is called in scuba a "blue-water dive" – a plunge into the open ocean, hovering over a depth of nearly 300ft of water. Because such a dive does not take place above a coral reef, a seawall or any other structure, a blue-water dive is extremely scary. There are no perceivable reference points that allow the diver to determine depth. If the diver is, like me, inexperienced, he can freak out, lose his bearings, fail to establish neutral buoyancy with his buoyancy- compensator vest and find himself sinking unstoppably. If this happens, the diver will surely die. Either he will be crushed like a tin can at the bottom or, because he sank so low that he did not have adequate oxygen to surface slowly and decompress, oxygen will boil out of his blood and block his veins and arteries when he dashes to the surface. I was busy trying to keep cool and not betray the fact that I was scared shitless.
This all crumpled when Sims patted me on the back, looked me in the eye and said: "Got your wetsuit on backwards, mate."
Sims was flying in the face of convention when it came to his selection of fish. Up until very recently, most of the fish that we've chosen for our consumption and domestication have been accidents. We have taken those species because we knew them as wild game and then found that they fit well into our culinary and economic niches. We seldom considered their biological profiles or whether they gelled well with conditions that humankind could provide them.
Norway selected Atlantic salmon as its target farmed fish because the demise of wild temperate-zone rivers around the Northern Hemisphere was a common plight. Most Americans or Europeans had a distant memory of wild salmon, but practically no one had access to a reliable supply of it. Farmed salmon reclaimed that lost memory.
Israelis chose to pursue the domestication of the European sea bass because it was known in nearly all countries of the Mediterranean and because it was so overfished that it fetched a high price.
Cod became the first global fish commodity, mainly because it took well to preserving – dried cod lasts for years and could be shipped around the globe even on the slowest of ocean-going vessels. But when farmed, cod is expensive and slow-growing – disastrous as an aquaculture product.
But Sims came to aquaculture through environmental zeal, not with the intention of making a buck. And it was his direct personal experience with the limitations of fisheries management that convinced him that fish farming was a better choice than fish catching.
Sims began his career in the remote Cook Islands of the South Pacific. There he was responsible for managing a giant snail called a trochus that produces an attractive pearly shell, valuable to native jewellers. Over half a decade, he implemented numerous management strategies. Nothing worked – not even shortening the harvest season drastically. The day after one season ended, he came across a bare-chested Polynesian elder who had pulled his dugout canoe on to the beach. Sims looked inside the boat and saw it filled with trochus.
''I yelled at him,'' Sims remembers. ''Then he yelled at me. He started to cry. Then I started to cry, and then the old bugger finally says: 'Why? Why did you close the season? There are still some left!'''
This moment prompted him to look beyond fishing, to an entirely different approach.
A chain of events led him to Hawaii, where there were small government grants available for research into marine aquaculture. "People were trying out the Hawaiian fish called moi. It's a niche species, really. And they were also trying milkfish and mullet." None of these species, Sims felt, truly addressed the niche that needed to be filled by sustainability – the niche of thick-fleshed predators such as tuna.
It was at this point that Sims decided to turn the equation of aquaculture on its head. Instead of finding a fish that people knew, that was scarce and that had an established market, Sims wanted to find a fish that was right for aquaculture, whether or not it was known.
Eventually Sims came across a fish that previously had no market value whatsoever. Seriola rivoliana, known as the Almaco jack or the kahala in Hawaii, is a speedy, firm-fleshed bluewater species of the same family of fish as yellowtail and amberjack. Kahala are only distantly related to tuna and do not have their ruby-red colour, but they still have the thick, dense flesh of tuna and could easily pass for white albacore if prepared as sushi.
Another important factor about kahala is that they were never fished commercially and are hence quite abundant. In their wild form kahala can carry ciguatera poison – a toxin sometimes deadly to humans that kahala ingest when they feed around coral reefs. But when kahala are isolated away from reefs and fed a traditional aquaculture diet of soy and fishmeal, they are ciguatera-free. And because the wild population of kahala is large and healthy, they are unlikely to be severely damaged through interaction with farmed populations. Moreover, farmed kahala have a good feed-conversion ratio. Without any selective breeding whatsoever, the amount of fish required to produce a pound of kahala ranges from 1.6-to-1 to 2-to-1, which is 10 times better than the feed-conversion ratio for bluefin tuna. Feed trials beginning this summer will introduce pellets made from recycled fish discards that contain no directly harvested forage fish at all.
Even better, unlike bluefin, which require a tremendous investment in spawning technology, kahala are naturally fecund. When I asked Sims later if he uses industry-standard practices like hormone pellets or photo-period manipulation to get the fish to spawn, he responded cheekily. "No, we do not use any hormones or environmental manipulation. We tried soft music and candlelight and a little wine, and it worked just as well without. So we kept the wine for ourselves." Kahala breed constantly, sometimes weekly, throughout the year. They are, in short, the sushi fish we should have chosen from the start.
The problem is no one quite knows what they are. Neil Sims and a marketing team have decided to call the fish "Kona Kampachi" – Kona for its point of origin and kampachi based on a similar fish that is consumed in Japan. A sushi chef I later asked about the fish complained: "Well, you know, Kona Kampachi – that's an artificial name. Kampachi is kampachi, and it is from Japan." And like all aquaculturists, Sims does have dreams of grandeur beyond what might be biologically correct. He has proposed expanding his farm away from Hawaii to the shores of Mexico – a practice I don't support because of the obvious problem of introducing a non-native species to a new environment.
But expansion or not, the fish as an aquaculture animal has real benefits. Diving into the waters around Kailua-Kona, watching Sims up ahead of me, I felt the sensation of a whole different world emerging before me. I glided down, down, down, past the beautiful fish swimming in unison in their net pen. The site of these pens had been chosen carefully and was far enough from coastal areas to mitigate the impact on the seaside; regular monitoring has shown the seabed beneath the cages to be in better shape than seabeds beneath inshore salmon cages. Down and down I drifted. From below I looked up at the cage, seeing how little it looked in relation to the bigness of the ocean.
Suddenly I saw a human hand reach over in front of me and grab my diving vest. In the silent communication that happens underwater, I could read the grave concern in Sims's eyes. He looked at me wide-eyed and pointed down. I glanced below and saw the huge, gaping maw of the lifeless ocean beneath me. I had incorrectly set my buoyancy compensator, my human swim bladder, and if he hadn't grabbed me, I would have been well on my way to sinking into the 300ft trench below. Sims expertly inflated my vest. I began to float easily, and my breathing quieted.
Sims waved me over to the side of the net pen. I floated above him silently, close enough to see that the fish actually seemed to recognise him. In what he'd later describe to me as the "rock-star effect", the fish crowded to be close to him, expecting from him some kind of deliverance or gift or both. Sims spread his arms out wide and seemed to take in their adulation.
Kona Kampachi has a fat content more than 30% higher than most tuna. It retails for around £12-15 a pound in fillet form and to date has a tenuous foot in the market. Production reached more than a million pounds in 2008. After a hiatus during most of 2009 and the first part of 2010 while Sims reconfigured his cages, the product was reintroduced in July with even more capacity. The fish does not have the rich ruby colour of tuna (a colour often enhanced artificially by "gassing" tuna with carbon monoxide), but it is an extremely pleasant sushi experience – it satisfies the sashimi yen for the firm musculature of a fast-swimming pelagic fish.
And for those who would still favour tuna, Sims is quick to point out the essential imbalance between humans and those great fish. "Is tuna farming really going to be able to sate the panting palates all around the planet? We certainly cannot do it on the backs of wild bluefin or wild yellowfin any more than we could sustainably feed the world with wild woolly mammoths."
Kona Kampachi is slowly getting a reputation. But as the world tries to emerge from financial crisis, money for ventures such as Kona Blue may dry up. Can we embrace a whole new set of species that we don't know intimately? Can true sustainability rise above the noise of so many pretenders to that name? Can we come to an understanding of which fish work for us and which fish don't?
I would hope so. I'd hope that these traits, these characteristics, become the traits and characteristics we desire most. Our survival and the survival of the wild ocean may depend on it. I took one more look at Sims floating below me with arms outstretched, his kahala finning in the current, each one mutely appraising this conductor of an all-too-silent concert. The only sound was the whir of bubbles boiling by my ears up toward the silver mirror of the surface above.
The Atlantic Bluefin tuna are among the fastest, most powerful fish in the world. Even the most confirmed enemy of "intelligent design" theories can have a hard time imagining the forebears of these great fish inching slowly down an epochs-long evolutionary course to become modern tuna. They seem like deus ex machina incarnate, or rather machina ex deo – a machine from God.
How else could a fish develop a sextant-like ''pineal window'' in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40mph? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly cold-blooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?
Yes, bluefin tuna are warm-blooded.
Bluefin can be extremely large – in excess of 14ft and 1,500lb – but for those of us who have held them alive, their smooth hard-shell skins barely containing the surging muscle power within, they are something bigger than the space they occupy. All fish are a distinctly different colour when alive than when dead on ice in a seafood market. But with tuna the shift from alive to dead seems more profound. Sometimes fresh out of the water with their backs pulsing neon blue and their bellies gleaming pink-silver iridescence, they seem like the very ocean itself.
And in a way they are. If salmon led us out of our Neolithic caves in the highlands down to the mouths of rivers, if sea bass and other coastal fish led us from the safety of shore to the reefs and rocks that surround the coasts, and if cod led us beyond the sight of land to the edges of the continental shelves, tuna have taken us over the precipice of the continental shelves into the abyss of the open sea – the final frontier of fishing, and the place where the wildest things in the world are making the last argument for the importance of an untamed ocean.
We now face a battle between the altruism toward other species that we know we can muster and the primitive greed that lies beneath our relationship with the creatures of the sea. And yet it is a battle that has been fought and won before, against high odds. Looking back over the history of the ocean, we can see that there is one order of sea creatures bigger than tuna that has earned our empathy and, more important, our protective resolve, rising up from the background of marine life to become a superstar of conservation, on a par with the tiger and the elephant. Perhaps we will never come to feel about tuna the way we have come to feel about whales, but it is to this example we must look if we are to fix our tuna problem once and for all.
Four Fish: A Journey from the Ocean to Your Plate (Allen Lane, £14.99) by Paul Greenberg is out now
Major earthquakes in Mexicali Valley, Mexico and fluid exraction at Cerro Prieto Geothermal Field
Statistical evaluation of anthropogenic influence on seismicity in the Mexicali Valley.
In an area of active tectonics like Mexicali Valley, situated in the southern part of San Andreas system, the presence of human-induced seismicity is not always obvious. In this work we analyze 30 years of regional seismicity in comparison with fluid extraction and injection volumes in the Cerro Prieto Geothermal Field. . Using spectral analysis of seismicity and data cross-correlation, we find that strong seismicity increases occurr about one year after the extraction increases and that local seismicity is correlated with injection with 3-7 months delay. Since the delay can be explained by the process of seismicity diffusion, we can conclude that, at least partially, the seismicity in the Mexicali valley is of anthropogenic origin.
Interesting work by E. Glowacka and F. Nava
Yep the computers are running the numbers and the humans do not know the errors, so we accept the results as fact without proper review.
In applying any of the above mentioned methods of seasonal adjustment, the user should be aware that the result of combining series which have been adjusted separately will usually be a little different from the direct adjustment of the combined series. For example, the quotient of seasonally adjusted unemployment divided by seasonally adjusted labor force will not be quite the same as when the unemployment rate is adjusted directly. Similarly, the sum of seasonally adjusted unemployment and seasonally adjusted employment will not quite match the directly adjusted labor force. Separate adjustment of components and summing of them to the total usually provides series that are easier to analyze; it is also generally preferable in cases where the relative weights among components with greatly different seasonal factors may shift radically. For other series, however, it may be better to adjust the total directly if high irregularity among the components makes a good adjustment of all components difficult.
Finally, it is worth noting that the availability of a fast, efficient procedure for making seasonal adjustment computations can easily lead to the processing of large numbers of series without allotting enough time to review the results. No standard procedure can take the place of careful review and evaluation by skilled analysts. A review of all results is strongly recommended. And it should also be remembered that, whenever one applies seasonal factors and analyzes seasonally adjusted data, seasonal adjustment is a process which estimates a set of not directly observable components (seasonal, trend-cycle, irregular) from the observed series and is, therefore, subject to error. Because of the complex nature of methods such as X-11 ARIMA, the precise statistical properties of these errors are not known.
How do you remove 7 million jobs from the equation and "seasonally adjusted" the numbers at the same time.
only until the lady starts to sing
Greenspan Says U.S. Faces ‘Typical Pause’ in Recovery (Update2)
By Simon Kennedy and Caroline Salas
July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. economic recovery is undergoing a “typical pause” that will be shaped by the performance of stock markets.
“While ordinarily we’re seeing the stock market driven by economic events, I think it’s more the reverse,” Greenspan said in an interview today on CNBC. “What we do know is stock prices are a leading indicator.”
Investors are questioning the strength of the global economic recovery with bond returns exceeding stock gains by the widest margin in nine years. U.S. data this week showed confidence among consumers sank more than forecast in June as they became distressed over the outlook for jobs and incomes.
“People don’t want to hire because they’re concerned they may have to let them go,” Greenspan said, calling it a “short- term fear factor.” Joblessness also won’t decline “until you get output-per-hours slowing down,” he said.
A Labor Department report tomorrow may show the jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent last month from 9.7 percent in May, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Unemployment reached a 26-year high of 10.1 percent in October.
Unlike in typical recoveries, small businesses are not proving an engine for growth, leaving the U.S. economy reliant on banks and wealthy individuals to drive the recovery, Greenspan said. He advised against raising the capital gains tax in the U.S.
Recovery Pace
While Greenspan didn’t specify what he meant by a “typical pause,” the U.S. economy expanded at an average pace of 2.5 percent in the three quarters after the 2001 recession, before slowing to an average of 0.9 percent in the following two quarters. After a recession ended in 1991, quarterly growth averaged 4.3 percent in 1992 before slumping to an average of 1.8 percent in the first nine months of 1993.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. in 2008 showed that banks need to hold more capital, according to Greenspan.
“We undercapitalized the system,” Greenspan said. “That there would be a lot of increased regulation is something which, from my point of view, is probably appropriate.”
Greenspan called the sovereign debt crisis in Europe “pretty bad” and said “competitive imbalances” may change the makeup of the euro zone.
“I don’t know where the end game is but something has got to give here,” he said. “One possibility is there are fewer members of the monetary union.”
You have to give Wall Street time to be on the right side of the trade before making it into a Global news story.
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
#34 War is good for business
#76 Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.
Lebanon grants permission for blockade-busting ship to Gaza
Aid Boat allowed to sail to Cyprus, not directly to Strip
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Another blockade-busting ship with activists and aid on board could be bound for Gaza within a few days after Lebanese authorities granted permission Monday for it to sail first to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said he had allowed the ship to sail but added that the state of war between Lebanon and Israel prevented the boat from heading directly to Gaza.
“Lebanon and Israel are in a state of war and no ship has ever sailed from Lebanon to Israel,” Aridi told Reuters.
“Now what the Cypriots will decide, I don’t know. Cyprus may not allow them to sail to Gaza,” Aridi said.
A Lebanese freighter which tried to deliver aid to Gaza late last year was intercepted and damaged by Israeli warships.
While the vessel would also need Cypriot authorization to depart for Gaza from its shores, organizers have said that they may simply change course before reaching the island and head straight toward the Palestinian territory.
There was no official comment from Cyprus on Monday.
The ship, originally named “Julia” but now dubbed “Naji al-Ali” after a well-known Palestinian cartoonist, is currently in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli for inspection.
In defiance of Israeli warnings to Lebanon, organizers are planning to transport aid along with dozens of Lebanese and foreign journalists to the Hamas-controlled territory.
Last week Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that the Lebanese government would be held responsible for any “violent and dangerous confrontation,” should the ship seek to breach Gaza’s blockade.
Israeli navy commandos raided an international flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31, killing nine pro-Palestinian activists. An international outcry over the operation pressured Israel to ease its three-year-old blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Israel imposed the blockade of Gaza after Hamas militants overran the territory three years ago. But the blockade did not achieve Israel’s aims of keeping weapons out of the territory, pressuring Gazans to turn on their Hamas rulers or winning the release of an Israeli soldier held by Hamas-linked militants for four years.
Israel has made clear that even though it has eased its land blockade of Gaza, it maintains a naval blockade and will not allow any ships to dock there for fear they could bring weapons to Hamas.
Nearly a week after the deadly commando raid, Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid vessel without meeting resistance, preventing it from busting the blockade. The Irish ship was carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and cement.
Israel’s United Nations ambassador, Gabriela Shalev, warned Friday that the attempt by the organizers to sail from Lebanon and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza could escalate tensions and affect peace and security in the region.
A second ship, part of the “Mariam” humanitarian mission, also plans to carry aid to Gaza in another attempt to break the four-year siege of Gaza with some 50 women-only activists on board, including 30 Lebanese.
The ship has not yet been given permission to sail.
The women have openly denied any ties to Israel’s enemy Hizbullah, and the party itself said on Friday that it was not backing the trip because it did not want to give Israel a pretext to attack the activists.
Neither group has announced their date of departure, citing security fears.
Whereas the Lebanese boats look certain to set sail soon, the departure of two Iranian aid ships for Gaza was delayed Monday.
ISNA news agency quoted Mohammad Javad Jafarian, head of the youth wing of Iranian Red Crescent, as saying that the sailing had been delayed and “no definite” date had been set for the departure of the ships to Gaza.
The Iranian Red Crescent had planned to send two aid ships earlier this month and last week even said that the boats were ready and awaiting the approval of the foreign ministry.The delay occurred as “the cargo had to be changed in accordance with the World Red Cross specifications and there has been some international lack of coordination,” Jafarian said without elaborating.
The Iranian Red Crescent has previously said it would send a total of three aid ships to Gaza, two of them carrying medicines and foodstuffs and Iranian relief workers. The fate of the third one is still unknown. – Agencies
News Link:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=116238#axzz0rXX3CCRO
Iran Backs Down again, ‘Indefinite’ Postponement of Ship to Gaza
Iran has backed down for the second time in two weeks on the attempt to launch two ships to Gaza, two days after the United States and Israel sent a dozen warships through the Suez Canal and towards a possible confrontation.
The American government also had called on Egypt not to allow the Iranian ships to enter the Suez Canal.
Iranian Red Crescent youth wing director Mohammed Javad Jafarian said “no definite” date has been set for departure of the ships to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Last week, Iran backed down from its threat to send “voluntary” marines for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to board the boats and defend them against any attempt by Israel to intercept them enrooted to Gaza.
Egypt on Saturday allowed 11 U.S. warships, led by the aircraft carrier USS Truman, and one Israeli ship to pass through the Suez Canal after it closed it to all other boats to ensure a safe and quiet passage for the armada.
It was the largest fleet of warships to sail through the Suez Canal in years, prompting speculation that they were preparing to challenge any Iranian attempt to reach Gaza. The maneuvers also may serve as a warning to Iran if not does cooperate with U.N. officials trying to inspect the Islamic Republic’s nuclear development program.
Two years ago, Iran tried to break Israel’s marine embargo on Gaza, but Israel diverted the ship to Egypt without incident. The boat supposedly was loaded with food and medicine.
The Iranian Students' News Agency reported that Jafarian said the ship that was scheduled to sail to Gaza this week “is humanitarian, in line with navigation international protocols, carries no weapon and it obeys navigation rules, so no military ship has the right to enter the Iranian ship illegally because any aggression is violation of navigation transparent rules.” (IsraelNationalNews.com)
News link: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/news.aspx/138192
USGS Projects in Afghanistan
A USAID-USGS PASA agreement was signed on September 3, 2004. This PASA initiates the first 6 months of a proposed USGS 5-year program in natural resources/hazards assessment for Afghanistan and is part of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Program.
http://afghanistan.cr.usgs.gov/
Project Publications
http://afghanistan.cr.usgs.gov/documents.php?cat=2
Spectroscopic remote sensing
Link:http://speclab.cr.usgs.gov/
USGS Digital splib04 Spectral Library
Link: http://speclab.cr.usgs.gov/spectral.lib04/spectral-lib04.html
WWIII will be an economic war
WWIII Link:
Emma Stone from Superbad?