pookapookapookapookapooka

...FREE LUNCH - ovo je link

btw... crowding in

Na tu vijest otiđe Isus odande u lađici na samotno mjesto da bude sam. Ali to sazna mnoštvo naroda i pođe za njim pješke iz gradova. Kad on izađe na kopno i vidje mnoštvo, smilova im se i iscjeli njihove bolesnike. Predvečer pristupiše k njemu njegovi učenici i rekoše: 'Mjesto je pusto, a doba već poodmaklo. Otpusti narod, neka ide u selada kupi sebi hrane!' Isus im odvrati: 'Ne treba da idu. Podajte im vi jesti!' Oni mu odvratiše: 'Imamo ovdje samo pet kruhova i dvije ribe.' On reče: 'Donesite ih ovamo!' Iodredi da narod posjeda po travi . Tada uze pet kruhova i dvije ribe, pogleda na nebo iizreče blagoslov. Zatim razlomi kruhove i dade ih svojim učenicima, a učenici ih dadoše narodu. Svi su jeli i nasitili se. Štoviše nakupili su od preotalih komada još dvanaest punih košarica. A broj sviju koji su jeli bio je oko pet tisuća muževa, bez žena i djece.' - Matej, 14, 13-21

...Moody's

'The manifesto calls for a renegotiation of the EU/IMF deal, burden-sharing by bank bond-holders, a lowering of the interest rate on the EU loans, and a longer time period to bring the national deficit down to 3%.
Mr Gilmore said: "We do have tough decisions to make in the years ahead, but we have to make the right tough decisions. We cannot put our country into cold storage, and say that nothing will happen for the next five years because there is no money.'


'The Labour Party today pledged to drive investment in the economy with €2.8 billion from the National Pension Reserve Fund.
The party's spokeswoman on finance, Joan Burton, said that if elected in the election, it would establish a new strategic investment bank to fund projects to enhance infrastructure and generate employment.'

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Mr Morales was due to address a parade to commemorate a colonial-era uprising in the mining city of Oruro.

But he and his team left the city to avoid a violent demonstration by miners throwing dynamite.

There have also been protests in other Bolivian cities over the shortage of sugar and other basic foodstuffs.

The completeness of the Ricardian victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.

But although the doctrine itself has remained unquestioned by orthodox economists up to a late date, its signal failure for purposes of scientific prediction has greatly impaired, in the course of time, the prestige of its practitioners. For professional economists, after Malthus, were apparently unmoved by the lack of correspondence between the results of their theory and the facts of observation;— a discrepancy which the ordinary man has not failed to observe, with the result of his growing unwillingness to accord to economists that measure of respect which he gives to other groups of scientists whose theoretical results are confirmed by observation when they are applied to the facts.

The celebrated optimism of traditional economic theory, which has led to economists being looked upon as Candides, who, having left this world for the cultivation of their gardens, teach that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds provided we will let well alone, is also to be traced, I think, to their having neglected to take account of the drag on prosperity which can be exercised by an insufficiency of effective demand. For there would obviously be a natural tendency towards the optimum employment of resources in a society which was functioning after the manner of the classical postulates. It may well be that the classical theory represents the way in which we should like our economy to behave. But to assume that it actually does so is to assume our difficulties away.

...The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

...Against Rigid Rules - Keynes' economic theory
By Elke Muchlinski

'There is no controversy about this point: the term uncertainty is the hard core of Keynes' economic analysis.'

(...)

'Hume's view that experience is the accumulation of subjective experience caused the problem of justifying objective knowledge.
This was the starting point for Kant's epistemology, a transcendental perspective. Knowledge is a result of an interaction of intuition and concept. In all of this, uncertainty still remains since intuition is just a prerequisite of knowledge, not a final point in justifying knowledge. An important conclusion of the Kantian philosophy is a different understanding of experience. Scientific methods do incorporate a non-observable systemic order independently of its supposed empiricist real order. That is to say, that any observation is to be seen as impregnated by theories. Consequently, the dualism of observation and theory broke down. The transcendental philosophy, say Kant's philosophy, works out the superior function of theory and a priori principle. Nevertheless all theories must lead back to experience, otherwise they would be called 'empty' or blind concepts. This transcedental approach emphasises experience without neglecting its limitations (Parsons 1992). The quintessence of it all is that any object is given by perception. It excludes the possibility of identifying the percieved object with this object itself, since there is no such correspondence. At this point, for Kant, language is not only a medium of communication, but also a constituent element of knowledge. Wittgenstein picked up on these ideas more precisely.
Is there any link to Keynes work? His economic theory does not build upon empiricism. Keynes' theory of knowledge implies uncertainty and the unsurmountable fragility of knowledge. He objected to Empiricism in The Treatise on Probability. Moreover, he explained probability from epistemological point of view. A probabilistic proposition represents both the percieved fact or event by an individual and a priori principle. Let us turn briefly back to Kant's philosophy: ' We are in possession of certain modes of a priori knowledge. (...) In what follow therefore, we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of all experience. (...) Thus we would say of a man who undermined the foundationsof his house, that he might have known a priorithat it would fall, that is, that he need not have waited for the experience of its actual falling' (Critique of Pure Reason, B3). Kant emphasised: 'though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience' (CPR, B1). Analogues to Kant, Keynes pointed out the limits of experience as a guide to decision, because 'experience can tell us what happened, but not what will happen' (1936). This provided Keynes' criticism addressed to the British empirical school: 'If our experience and our knowledge were complete, we should be beyond the need of the calculus of probability. And where our experience incomplete, we cannot hope to derive from it judgments of probability without the aid either of intuition or of some further a priori principle. Experience, as opposed to intuition, cannot possibly afford us a criterion by which to judge whether on given evidence the probabilities of two propositions are or are not equal' (1921, p. 94).

U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought



Droughts, Floods and Food

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 6, 2011

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t so much why they’re happening as why they’re happening now. And there’s little question that sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for popular rage.

So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of “extortion and pillaging.”

But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes don’t have much effect on how much people eat.

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Nińa — a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Nińa events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Nińa was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

As always, you can’t attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.

The usual suspects will, of course, go wild over suggestions that global warming has something to do with the food crisis; those who insist that Ben Bernanke has blood on his hands tend to be more or less the same people who insist that the scientific consensus on climate reflects a vast leftist conspiracy.

But the evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 7, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition.

'Franjo Kajfež, osim što je bio bliski suradnik prvog hrvatskog predsjednika Tuđmana, izumio je poznati lijek za smirenje Apaurin..'

Sternbach is credited with the discovery of chlordiazepoxide (Librium), diazepam (Valium)

Čime se hrani koala?
Kojem rodu pripada čudnovati kljunaš?
Kako provaliti u vinoteku?

...John Lewis Partnership

...The Co-operative Group

'In an average year, the basin absorbs about 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.
By contrast, the impact of the 2005 drought, spread over a number of years, was calculated as a release of five billion tonnes.
The new paper calculates the figure for 2010 as about eight billion tonnes, as much as the annual emissions of China and Russia combined; but this, the researchers acknowledge, is a first estimate.'

...GONE

So why hasn’t family income tracked rising GDP? It’s partly about price indexes, partly about plutocrats (i.e., rapidly rising incomes at the top). It would be nice if the story were cleaner, but that’s life.

more... Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal - Prices and Plutocrats


A lot of the difference goes away when you focus on mean rather than median income; this tells you that the gap between economic growth and median incomes has a lot to do with rising inequality. (...) Not that much of a mystery, then — but it remains striking how little of growth has trickled down to the typical family.

more... Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal - Economic Growth and Household Income

...Median household income
...Mean (statistical)

Da nije malo KASNO

In Shia and Sunni eschatology, the Mahdi (English: Guided One), also Mehdi (English: One of the Moon) is the prophesied redeemer of Islam who will stay on Earth for seven, nine or nineteen years (according to various interpretations) before the Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyamah / literally, the Day of Resurrection) and, alongside Jesus, will rid the world of wrongdoing, injustice and tyranny.

In Shia Islam, the belief in the Mahdi is a "powerful and central religious idea" and closely related to the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, whose return from occultation is deemed analogous with the coming of the Mahdi.

aktualno... Mahdist War