Via Kottke: Rules for Eating & Drinking Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Alex Balk: “Drink alcohol. Quite a bit. Mostly bourbon.” Sounds reasonable.
Rules for Eating & Drinking
Turtles
Via xkcd:
Everyone Loves Time Lapses
Today I discovered the work of Terje Sørgjerd, one of the most impressive visual artists I’ve ever seen. If you have a few minutes, these videos are mind blowing: The Mountain: The Aurora: The descriptions of each video on Terje’s Vimeo site are worth reading.
Shots From Bermuda
Many thanks to Jim for shooting a few of these:
Back of the Envelope Thoughts on Silver
I need to start this post with a disclaimer. I’m far from an expert on the precious metals markets. But I am long silver, and have been for over three years. I’ve been along for the roller coaster ride through 2008 and 2009, and (with hindsight) have made some mistakes as well as some good moves along the way. Writing about the markets is a fairly new trend for this blog, but I had fun writing about treasuries the other day, so why not delve into silver? And my recent traffic tells me that at least a few people are interested in this stuff. The following are some loose thoughts about what’s going on in the silver market. Oh, and
Pirates and the Deficit
Two quick things: Matt Miller points out some obvious hypocrisy. This is worth reading: Remember that great scene in the 1980 film classic, “The Shining,” when the wife comes upon the typewriter of the Jack Nicholson character, who’s supposed to have been working night and day for months on his novel? To her horror, she finds thousands of pages on which Jack has typed, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” formatted in countless, crazy ways. Suddenly his suspected madness becomes all too frighteningly real. Well, debt limit mania has driven me to a similar frenzied state. If my wife came across my manuscript it would read, “The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in
I Wasn’t Going to Post This
But it made me laugh. And then I realized it might make someone else laugh. Via Ezra Klein‘s Lunch Break:
Music I’ve Been Enjoying
I’ve been discovering a lot of great music lately, and thought I’d share a few album recommendations: Blakroc (2009): I’m not sure how I missed this one, but my friend Nirav just loaned it to me on vinyl a few weeks ago. It’s a pretty sweet hip-hop album recorded by The Black Keys featuring a ton of artists including Mos Def, Ludacris, RZA, and Jim Jones. Raw blues hip-hop fusion. Amazing. Old Crow Medecine Show – O.C.M.S. (2004): Everyone loves bluesgrass. Some people just don’t know it yet. These guys are a good place to start. Lupe Fiasco – Lasers (2011): It’s just solid. Not much else to say. The Strokes – Angles (2011): The Strokes are back with their first album
Additional Thoughts on US Debt and Treasury Shorting
To add to my prior posts on the S&P “Downgrade” and treasury shorting, here are a few additional thoughts and links: Via Ezra Klein, more on why the end of quantitative easing is bad for treasury prices: The dominant view among liberals is that the low, low yields on Treasurys reflect the market’s serene confidence that America will make good on its debts. But some of the investors and economists I spoke to while reporting out my piece on the debt ceiling disagreed. PIMCO’s Bill Gross and former-Reagan budget director David Stockman both think Treasurys look safer than they are because the central bank, as part of quantitative easing, is buying up so many of them. “There’s a terrible mispricing of
Well? Why Are You Short Treasuries?
In response to my last post on the S&P “downgrade,” Matt asks, “Well? Why are you short treasuries?” Fair question. A couple very simple reasons (with slightly detailed explanations). First off, this is not investment advice! Now that I really think it through, there are actually two and a half reasons I’m short treasuries. The first two reasons are based on my market outlook and expectations of monetary policy. I’ll start with these. 1.) Short term interest rates have essentially been at zero percent since December 2008. That’s more than two years, and is unprecedented. Given that we experienced an unprecedented recession (unprecedented at least in recent memory), sustained low interest rates were absolutely the correct policy. In fact, according to Paul Krugman’s